For the first time this year, the United States government is commenting openly about its disappointment with how certain 2007 election petitions are being settled in Nigeria without attention being paid to what it described as criminal activity during the polls.
In its current World Annual Report of Human Rights for 2007 released yesterday in Washington DC, the U.S. government submitted that in Nigeria "the government's human rights record remained poor, and government officials at all levels continued to commit serious abuses."
The greatest threat to liberty is "the abridgement of citizens' right to change their government, " according to the report presented to the press by Jonathan Farrar, Acting Assistant Secretary of the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labour at the State Department, the equivalent of Nigeria's Foreign Affairs Ministry.
According to the U.S. report: "Although it was widely accepted that the 2007 elections were fraudulent, most of the tribunals overturned elections based on technicalities such as not having the party logo on the ballot or not having the party name listed, rather than for criminal activity related to the elections."
The report noted that after the flawed 2007 polls, tribunals received over 1,250 legal motions filed across the country to overturn the results of individual elections for all levels of government posts, including the Presidency.
Even over a week after the tribunals, people are still complaining over the results of the tribunal. The article, unlike some other ones, cites legitimate reasons for complaint, particularly in the full article. The elections were mainly overturned because of technicalies rather than large problems, denoting the desensitization of nigerian towards these large problems.
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1 comment:
Here is an interesting article on Atiku...
http://www.damagecontrol101.com/
"Solid reputations take years to be won, but they can be lost virtually overnight. The political landscape is littered with the (figurative) bodies of those who have been implicated but later exonerated in scandal. The same is true in Africa as it is here in the States. And this is precisely what happened to former Nigerian Vice President Atiku Abubakar, who is seeking his nation's presidency (full disclosure: Atiku's Washington-based attorney is a client, and I have provided counsel on his issues. Two of my colleagues have met directly with the Vice President). Mr. Abubakar was implicated in the bribery scandal that led to the indictment of Rep. William Jefferson (D-LA), but on close examination of the evidence it turns out, well, there is no evidence that he was involved at all."
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