2019 ELECTIONS : US To Disallow Any Nigerian Politician That Rigs The Election Entry

The United States Government has announced visa restrictions as the consequences of election interference and election related violence during the forthcoming 2019 general elections In Nigeria

A statement by the US Embassy in Nigeria said the conduct of the upcoming elections in Nigeria was important not only to Nigeria, but to the African continent, stressing that Americans would want to see a genuinely free, fair, transparent, and peaceful electoral process.

It noted thar citizens, and indeed candidates for any election, were bound by law and morality to abide by all the regulations guiding the exercise, including respecting the will of the people expressed in credibly-conducted elections, pointing out that the notion of getting candidates to specially commit to the peaceful conduct of an election and accept its outcome would sound superfluous in advanced democratic climes.

The US maintained that the situation in Nigeria was peculiar in so many ways, explaining why the eminent persons’ group, the National Peace Committee, NPC, headed by former military ruler, General Abdulsalami Abubakar, had found relevance at the outsets of major elections.

It recalled that theCommittee came into existence in 2015 in response to fears arising from open threats to lives and property by some political forces.

Those threats, the US noted, coupled with the Boko Haram insurgency and the prediction by a report of the United States Congress Foreign Relations Committee headed by John Negroponte that Nigeria could collapse in 2015, made the Abdulsalami Committee a welcome development. 

The Committee, it said, was able to, on two occasions, get the then presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, President Goodluck Jonathan and the main opposition candidate, General Muhammadu Buhari of the All Progressives Congress, APC, to sign an accord and embrace publicly to send positive signals for peace.

Nigeria was fortunate that, in spite of manifest evidences of a flawed process, Jonathan congratulated the winner, Buhari, and peacefully handed over power, which made peace and great relief to pervade the land.