The 2019 General Elections have come and gone but the scary dark shadows cast over the country will take forever to disappear, at least in the world of victims of elections violence and its attendant loss of lives and properties.
Never in the recent history of party politics and elections had Nigerians and international community witnessed elections of sorrow, tears, blood and death as well as the destruction of properties belonging to political opponents and the state like happened in the past one month in Nigeria.
At the last count, elections- related cases of assassinations, maiming, kidnappings, burning of individuals and Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) offices across the nation have risen to an alarming proportions.
Many who have got one thing or the other to do with the General Elections- INEC officials, ad hoc staff mainly Youth Corpers, security agencies, journalists, observers and electorates have either been killed or wounded in the process of participating in the elections.
The nation and her citizens have witnessed an unhindered marauding of political thugs who have unleashed mayhem on innocent electorates and INEC officials. The rampaging thugs have burnt ballot papers and snatching ballot boxes across the country.
This is a sad commentary to our democracy which some of us fought for in the late 1980s and early 1990s even as many paid with their lives during the military junta.
But it goes without saying that the present spate of political assassinations and destruction of lives and properties is occasioned by the inordinate ambitions of the political class and their collaborators in other spheres. The politicians are becoming too desperate to get to power at all cost even if it will take spilling of blood.
It cuts across political parties, creed and ethnic group. They are vicious and deadly in their quest to acquire power or cling to it.
Their bloated ego, greed and acquisition of wealth have fuelled their determination to do whatever they can to win an elections.
And for the the above reasons our nation is violently assaulted as sorrow, tears and blood of innocent people soak the land so that politicians will realise their ambitions. The politics like the practiced by late Alhaji Waziri Ibrahim of Great Nigerian People’s Party (GNPP) and of recent President Goodluck Ebele Azikiwe Jonathan is no longer fashionable in Nigeria of today. Real terrible.
Where are we going with this type of politicking. Like the Holy Bible puts it: “What will it profit a man to gain the whole world but loose his soul in hell fire”.
Ikedi Ohakim, Governorship candidate of the Accord Party in Imo state
