How does Wike plan to ‘deliver’ Rivers and the FCT? - Punch Newspapers

Nyesom Wike has made a remarkable promise ahead of Nigeria’s 2027 presidential election. The Minister of the Federal Capital Territory says that if President Bola Tinubu does not win both Rivers State and the FCT, he will resign as minister the following day. “By January 17, 2027, I will announce my resignation as FCT Minister should the President lose in Rivers State and the FCT,” he said recently. Politicians regularly boast about delivering states, constituencies and polling units to their candidates. Usually, we understand what they mean: campaign vigorously, mobilise supporters, persuade undecided voters and get your people to the polling stations. But when Wike speaks so confidently about delivering Rivers State, what happened in Rivers in 2023 makes me wonder what exactly Wike means by “deliver.” Wike was governor of Rivers State when the presidential election was held on February 25, 2023. Although he belonged to the Peoples Democratic Party, he opposed his own party’s presidential candidate, Atiku Abubakar, and supported Bola Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress. Tinubu was eventually declared the winner of Rivers State with 231,591 votes, while Peter Obi of the Labour Party received 175,071 and Atiku received 88,468. Rivers had been a PDP stronghold since the return to democracy in 1999. Indeed, the PDP still performed extraordinarily well in the other elections, winning the governorship, all three Senate seats and 12 of the state’s 13 House of Representatives seats. Tony Okocha, who headed an important arm of Tinubu’s campaign organisation in Rivers, later described how weak the APC machinery in the state had been. He pointed out that Wike’s PDP won 32 state Assembly seats, 12 of 13 House seats, all three Senate seats and the governorship. “Why didn’t PDP win the presidential election?” he asked. His explanation was Wike. According to Okocha, Wike instructed his political structure to work with the APC presidential campaign and provided enormous material and financial support. “Without Wike’s support, huge support, material and financial, Peter Obi would have swept Rivers in that election,” he said, estimating Wike’s contribution to Tinubu’s officially declared victory at “70 per cent, if not more.” On Okocha’s account alone, Wike could simply be credited with using his political structure effectively for Tinubu. But what the BBC and PREMIUM TIMES later found raises a different question. The BBC examined result sheets from more than 6,000 polling stations in Rivers State and concluded that Peter Obi, not Tinubu, received the most votes – and by a wide margin. The BBC found that Tinubu’s officially declared Rivers total was more than 106,000 votes higher than the total it derived from the polling-station sheets it examined. Obi’s officially declared vote moved in the opposite direction: it was more than 50,000 lower than the BBC’s tally.See more Punch stories on Google.Add Punch on Google Obio/Akpor, Wike’s own local government area, was particularly striking. INEC announced 80,239 votes for Tinubu and only 3,829 for Obi. But when the BBC added the polling station result sheets it obtained, it found 17,293 for Tinubu and 74,033 for Obi. Those are not small discrepancies that a few missing polling units can easily explain. PREMIUM TIMES later conducted a separate investigation. It reviewed the presidential result sheets uploaded to INEC’s IReV portal for 1,116 of Obio/Akpor’s 1,211 polling units, representing more than 94 per cent of the polling units in the local government area. It counted 17,158 votes for Tinubu and 73,311 for Obi and found result sheets containing apparent alterations and mutilations. Before the Obio/Akpor result was added, Obi was leading. With results from 21 of Rivers State’s 23 local government areas already declared, he had 169,414 votes while Tinubu had 148,979. Obi was ahead by more than 20,000 votes. Then came the officially announced Obio/Akpor result of 80,239 for Tinubu against 3,829 for Obi, which overturned the lead. Then there was the problem with IReV on election day. The presidential and National Assembly elections took place on the same day, using the same BVAS technology and INEC Results Viewing Portal. Yet the Senate and House of Representatives result sheets could be uploaded while the presidential results encountered what INEC described as a “technical glitch”. Ondo air crash: APC chieftain backs Tinubu’s call for probe Ondo air crash: Diri condoles with Tinubu, NAF, victims’ families Ondo crash: FG won’t abandon bereaved families, says Shettima INEC subsequently acknowledged that distinction but offered an explanation. Its technical experts said an unexpected configuration problem occurred in mapping presidential results to polling units, producing internal server errors. A technical failure on its own, of course, does not prove that anybody deliberately manipulated the election. But why did the problem affect the presidential election when the three elections were conducted simultaneously? That question becomes more troubling when placed beside what the BBC found in Rivers, what Premium Times independently found in Obio/Akpor, and the apparent alterations visible on some result sheets uploaded to INEC’s own portal. That is why Wike’s latest promise should worry any lover of transparent democracy. He is not merely predicting that Tinubu will win Rivers in 2027. He is staking his ministerial position on it before the voters have cast their ballots. Curiously, Tinubu did not win up to 25 per cent of the votes in the FCT in 2023. After the 2023 election, Muhammad Badaru Abubakar, then governor of Jigawa State and a prominent APC leader, who was eventually appointed Nigeria’s Minister of Defence, made a comment that raised eyebrows. At a reception for then President-elect Bola Tinubu in Rivers State in May 2023, Badaru publicly commended Wike for delivering Rivers State to Tinubu. He said, inter alia: “When he (Wike) said he would deliver Rivers State to APC, I started wondering how. APC has never met 25 per cent in Rivers. How can this man pull this magic?” Badaru said he and other APC chieftains were surprised when Wike delivered on his promise. A politician may understandably be confident in his organisation and popularity. But voters ultimately decide an election, not governors, ministers or political godfathers. That level of confidence makes me curious, especially after what the BBC and PREMIUM TIMES found about the 2023 Rivers results. Because no court of law has said so, none of this proves that Wike personally altered any election result. Wike himself rejects claims that Obi won Rivers and recently challenged Obi’s supporters to produce the result sheets showing that he did. But that challenge has a problem. The BBC and Premium Times did not manufacture their figures from social media posts or opposition-party press releases. They examined polling-unit result sheets published on INEC’s own IReV portal. Forget for a minute whether you support Wike, Tinubu or Obi. There are questions that still need answers. How did figures recorded at polling units become substantially different figures at the point of official declaration? Who changed them, if they were changed, at what stage did the changes occur, and why have those discrepancies never been convincingly explained? Now we are approaching another presidential election. Nigeria cannot afford another election in which technology works for other contests but suddenly develops problems when presidential results are being transmitted. Nigerians should not have to depend on journalists months later to reconstruct thousands of polling-unit results to determine whether announced figures correspond with the votes recorded. Wike may indeed have enough political support to persuade the people of Rivers State and the FCT to vote for Tinubu in 2027. If he does, let the polling-unit results show it. He should be able to point to those results afterward and say: there is the evidence. That is what “delivering” a state should mean in a democracy: persuading enough citizens to vote for your candidate. It should never mean that any politician, however powerful, can determine beforehand what the result of millions of individual choices will be. So when Wike says he will resign if Tinubu does not win Rivers and the FCT, Nigerians should remember 2023 and ask a legitimate question: Mr Wike, exactly how do you intend to deliver them? X: @BrandAzuka Azuka Onwuka

All rights reserved. This material, and other digital content on this website, may not be reproduced, published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed in whole or in part without prior express written permission from PUNCH.

Stay informed and ahead of the curve! Follow The Punch Newspaper on WhatsApp for real-time updates, breaking news, and exclusive content. Don't miss a headline – join now!

Stay in the know—fast. Get instant alerts, breaking headlines, and exclusive stories with the Punch News App. Download now and never miss a beat.