Adéwálé Májà-Pearce

There is a doctored photo doing the rounds on social media that pretends to show Bọ́lá Ahmed Tinúbú, Nigeria’s president-elect, and Babájídé Sanwó-Olú, the re-elected Lagos State governor, on the back of a motorbike carrying a ballot box. It’s based on a real photo of two agbèrò, or hoodlums, who snatched a box from a polling booth during the state elections on 18 March. The caption is real, too: ‘Grab it! Snatch it! And run with it!’ Tinúbú instructed his inner circle at a meeting in London in early December, much to the amusement of those present, one of whom approvingly shouted ‘Jagaban!’ (‘warrior’), the title Tinúbú appears to treasure above his many others.

There is now strong evidence that the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) was in cahoots with the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) to ensure Bọ́lá Ahmed Tinúbú would be Nigeria’s next president come 29 May, the handover date. The Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS), which was supposed to upload the results in real time and so end once and for all the incessant rigging that has plagued Nigerian elections, failed to work in the 25 February presidential ballot but not the concurrent votes for the Senate and the House of Representatives.

Most of the results from Saturday’s presidential and national assembly elections in Nigeria are in and it seems that Bọ́lá Ahmed Tinúbú, of the ruling All Progressives Congress (if only!), has secured the necessary majority in 24 of the 36 states plus the Federal Capital Territory, Abuja, to become our next head of state. The general consensus among both Nigerians and the foreign observers who descend on the country every four years to monitor our progress since the end of military rule 24 years ago is that the voting was rigged.

Here in Lagos we are approaching the end of the so-called rainy season (as opposed to the so-called dry season). So-called because why include the word ‘season’ in the first place? Nobody says the ‘winter season’ or the ‘summer season’ but we’ve given up on our indigenous languages in favour of the English that colonised us and so rainy season it is.

On Thursday morning, I stood on my upstairs balcony in Surulere in Lagos and watched the smoke from a burning building. It turned out to be the house of the state governor’s mother. (The family house in another suburb was also torched.) Nearby, the headquarters of our House of Representatives member was spared the same fate only because it was next to a hospital, although all the windows were broken. It later transpired that politicians had been hoarding food – beans, noodles, sugar, salt, garri, rice, vegetable oil – meant for Covid-19 relief, some dating back months, in warehouses up and down the country. Nigerians of all ages were aghast. In some instances, even the soldiers sent to guard the warehouses – the police had made themselves scarce – assured the looters that they were there to keep the peace and not prevent them from carting off what was theirs anyway.