Capital invasion: US runs outdated electoral processes – ADP Chairman, Sani

The National Chairman of the Action Democratic Party, ADP, Engr. Yabagi Yusuf Sani has described the “invasion, attendant vandalism and death of five, at the Capitol Building, the parliament of the USA in Washington DC”, as a historic event ‘that will be recounted by several generations through centuries to come.”

In a press statement in Abuja on Tuesday, Sani described the incident as, “shocking and unimaginable, saying: “its multidimensional impact and lessons” are also of such significance and far-reaching “that humanity, especially the free world, cannot overlook or brush it away in a haste.”

According to him, the first import of the Capitol building invasion is that it might well have alerted the Americans to the imperative of reviewing the country’s “clearly cumbersome, outmoded electoral processes”, that can easily be manipulated to subvert the wish of majority of the electors.

He described the Electoral College as one of such “unique and susceptible features in the US election system that ought to have been long discarded as unwieldy, spurious and undemocratic”.

He noted that for example, that while in 2016, majority of Africans and the world thought Hilary Clinton “roundly won the popular votes” with a wide margin of over three million ballots, she and the voters’ fate hung on the electoral collegians who, “to most of us, curiously gave the victory to Donald Trump,” adding that, “any wonder that in 2020, Mr. Trump had again resorted to debauchery, demagoguery, blackmail and classical Nazi-Goebelian propaganda style with a view to wresting an underserved victory”.

On the way out of the ensuing political and moral quagmire as well as, mending the badly dented diplomatic stature and integrity of America on the global stage, Engr. Sani called on the entire political class of the USA to stay awake to the reality of the “Trump calamity” by closing ranks regardless of partisan differences in the superior interest of the survival of democracy, security and unity of their country and indeed, by extension, in a large segment of the world that ” has always looked up to the USA”.

While commending the US Vice President, Mike Pence and House Leader, Nancy Pelosi for the “mature and exemplary leadership they demonstrated in the wake of the “jolting and unexpected” incident, the ADP National Chairman called for a “thorough and painstaking but yet, quick investigation at the end of which all those found culpable no matter who they are, must be made to face justice.”

However, the ADP Presidential flag bearer in the 2019 Nigerian elections, stressed for “extreme caution in dealing with the Trump debacle” because of the visibly existing and combustible polarizations along race, political parties and faith among other “sensitive fault-lines instigated and ballooned by Trump’s Presidency as a cardinal state policy”.

Engr. Yabagi called on all democratic nations of the world to borrow from the American experience by always being vigilant against leaders “whose blind political ambitions could drive them into pulling down the roof of democracy or eroding the foundation on which the entire society is erected.”

He observed that, if all those who ought to know had been vigilant and alive to their salient duties to the USA, without allowing the encumbrances of partisan bigotry to becloud their judgement, Americans should have long got united against a Donald Trump, “an egocentric megalomaniac who cannot be bothered with what becomes of the country for as long as his narrow objectives were achieved.”

On the likely repercussions on Nigeria, the ADP leader stressed the need for the strengthening of democratic institutions especially those responsible for the conduct of elections and law enforcement, “to forestall likelihood of the USA scenario occurring in our country in 2023 or, at any other time in the future.”

He observed that but for the vibrant intuitions in place in the USA, Mr. Trump would have, “succeeded in wreaking more damaging havoc” adding, given the tenuous situation in most Third World countries, Nigeria inclusive, the outcome would be grave and catastrophic “with a desperate and dangerous power monger in the cast of outgoing American President, such as we saw in Ivory Coast under Laurent Gbagbo or the Gambia under Yahya Jammeh”.