Wole Soyinka, the winner of the Nobel Prize, claimed on Wednesday that there was a plot to rig the 2023 presidential election.
“History was about to repeat itself, some people were determined to take us back to those days,” Soyinka remarked, alluding to the 1993 election that deposed former military dictator Ibrahim Babangida (retd.).
The declaration of Bola Tinubu as President was made by the Independent National Electoral Commission.
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After receiving 8,794,726 votes, Tinubu, a former governor of Lagos State, was proclaimed the victor of the 2023 presidential contest.
“I am alleging that there was a conspiracy from the very beginning before the election to make sure the elections did not take place or that even if the voting did take place, that everything be reverted to what happened under Babangida,” said the Nigerian playwright in an appearance on Channels Television on Wednesday.
“When we all awoke to find that the results had been abruptly annulled, despite the fact that they had been calculated and were in the possession of international entities, such as monitoring embassies and other entities,”
According to him, it was no longer an individual competition but rather one between democracy and the so-called interim political party.
I don’t hesitate or question which side of the barrier I should be on when there is a binary like that.
In response to a remark made by Datti Baba-Ahmed, the Labour Party’s vice presidential candidate in the 2023 election, Soyinka called it “a disgraceful interview.”
Former member of the House of Representatives Baba-Ahmed has requested that Justice Kayode Ariwoola, the Chief Justice of Nigeria, not appoint Tinubu as the nation’s legitimately elected president.
Baba-Ahmed’s remark was deemed “disgraceful and menacing” by Soyinka.
“I saw that interview by Datti—that shameful and threatening interview—as the ultimate signal because here was someone advocating for the destruction of a system that allowed him to become a governor in the first place,” Soyinka continued.
In October 2023, the PDP’s Atiku Abubakar and the Liberal Party’s Peter Obi had their suits against Tinubu’s declaration as the winner of the presidential election on February 25th dismissed by the Supreme Court.
The opposition’s petitions regarding allegations of fraud, election law violations, and Tinubu’s ineligibility to run for president were dismissed by a panel of seven judges as unjustified.
The court rejected Atiku and the PDP’s appeals on the grounds of qualifications, breaking the Electoral Act, the 25% of votes cast in the Federal Capital Territory, and electoral malpractices.