The Human Rights Writers Association of Nigeria (HURIWA) has condemned the rigging and buying of votes in the Edo and Ondo states gubernatorial polls.
Speaking in a statement on Sunday, a day after the Ondo election, the rights group said the reported widespread bribery of police operatives in some areas in the case of Ondo is a threat to democracy
HURIWA berated the police for looking the other way while the ruling party had a field day inducing voters.
In the statement endorsed by the National Coordinator, Comrade Emmanuel Onwubiko, HURIWA urged Nigerians to deliberately become true lovers and promoters of democracy by resisting the temptation to sell their conscience.
The group argued that any electoral victory procured and manipulated to favour the so-called winners would delegitimize those state governments and inevitably reduce their people to mere political slaves whose votes were procured with mere peanuts.
The statement read in part, “What happens after politicians buy their ways into the offices of governors, is that the people of those states are no longer in the overall development calculations of those political office holders since it would be assumed that even when only a fraction of the population of the state actually voted and even then, amongst those who voted, those who mortgaged their consciences and picked up bribes for them to cast their votes would be less than half of those who voted.
“The danger is that those politicians who bought their ways into offices would concentrate on recouping and recovering every investment that went into their electoral robberies and then would also want to make multiple profits from their illicit political investment”.
“We must take immediate steps to conscientize Nigerians to avoid selling their votes because that is a direct invitation of thievery into the political governance of their states and the Country at large.
“Civil society, Religious, traditional leaders must devote good enough time to coach their people about the need to vote according to their consciences and not to accept any forms of bribes whether during campaigns or the actual voting exercises.”
“HURIWA also condemns politicians in public offices both at the national and sub-national levels that churn out economic policies to weaponize poverty which is a plot to expose Nigerians to political corruption during campaigns and elections.
“Nigerians must know that when they sell their votes, then their dignity as human persons is also abused and discarded.
“What does it profit potential voters to accept bribes during elections and to bring in political robbers who would destroy their states and loot their precious commonwealth and then take their states back to the primitive era?”
