A group of protesters wants the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, to prosecute former deputy senate president, Ibrahim Mantu for admitting he helped rigged elections.
During a demonstration in front of INEC’s headquarters in Abuja, the group accused Mantu of subverting the freewill of Nigerians.
The protesters also asked the commission to revisit the need for an electoral offenses commission.
Mantu, who gained notoriety as a key leader of third term campaign of former President Olusegun Obasanjo confessed in an interview on a national television how his party has been rigging elections, using the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC.
“I don’t have to go and change election (results) but when you provide money, you give money to INEC boys that if they see any chance they should favor you, you provide money to the security (personnel); I tell you it’s not necessarily when I am contesting election but when my party sponsors a candidate, I will like that candidate to win election,” Mantu said.
He had helped to rig elections by providing financial inducements to officials involved in the conduct of the polls.
Senator Mantu, a former deputy senate president, however, said he is now ‘born again’ and Nigeria can get a free and fair election if people are ‘born again’ like him and refuse to engage in electoral malpractice.
“I am tired of leaving in poverty in the midst of plenty and I believe that we have the resources that people can live a decent life without being beggars to those who have.
“So, we need good governance and good governance can only be provided by good people; good people who are truly repentant, who are concerned about the well-being of the people,” said Mantu.
Mantu, fizzled out of public consciousness after he was defeated, in 2007, in the race for the Senate seat of Plateau Central by Satty Gogwim following his inglorious pursuit of the third term for President Obasanjo.
But he tried to use the illness of late President Umar Yar’Adua to launch himself back into the reckoning with a splinter Northern Elders Forum which campaigned that the late President Yar’Adua should be allowed to remain office despite his ill health.
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