My plan to defeat Jonathan and Buhari — Onovo, NCP presidential candidate

In this interview, the Presidential candidate of the National Conscience Party, NCP ,Mr. Martin Onovo maintains that there is no party that can defeat NCP in a free and fair election. Excerpts:

By Akoma Chinweoke & Achilike Anthony

For a country that shed military rule a decade and a half ago, would you say democracy has taken root in Nigeria?

We would say that democracy is not taking root in Nigeria. We would say that criminology has taken root in Nigeria. We say this because, several criminal acts are freely used with impunity in Nigerian politics. Acts like thuggery, rigging, forgery, perjury, etc. For democracy to take root, the two pillars of democracy must be in place.

The pillars are the ‘Rule of law’ and the Integrity of the ballot.Without one or both, it cannot be called a democracy. In the current Nigerian case, the Constitution and the Electoral act are the fundamental laws for elections in Nigeria. Both are commonly violated with impunity.

Currently, Gen. Buhari’s certificate issue is still unresolved. The associated perjury is also ignored. At the same time, Dr. Jonathan raised funds in violation of several election finance laws. Democracy cannot exist with lawlessness because democracy requires first, the ‘Rule of law’.

The process of coming to power by many of our rulers is criminal. So, mostly criminals find it easy to come to power. Alhaji Maitama Sule rightly pointed out that the actual process of coming to power involves rigging, election violence, political assassination, abuse of state power and bribing of judges and lawyers. Some judges have been previously indicted. So if you are doing all that, rigging, violence, assassination and bribery to get to power, then, you are a criminal. And the system of such government can be called a criminocracy. We must all reject and oppose any criminocratic acts and candidates.

Following endless controversy trailing the use of card readers and military personnel at election venues. Are you satisfied with the level of preparation by INEC ahead of the elections?

Card readers were used successfully for elections in Ghana. If the card-readers are used efficiently, they can improve the integrity of the elections. We think that the field tests conducted by INEC provide an excellent opportunity to identify all issues with the card-readers and fix them prior to the elections. We must ensure that only qualified and registered voters can vote. We must also ensure that no voter can vote more that once.

It has been widely reported that parties in power are cloning PVCs (another in the long list of criminal electoral practices). There are also public reports that same parties are buying up PVCs from registered voters.