Coalition Advised To Adopt Mock Voting To Choose Presidential Candidate

A human rights lawyer and chieftain of the Nigeria Democratic Congress, Mr Nnadume Offorkansi, has called on opposition political parties rooting for a consensus presidential candidate during the 2027 election to allow the electorate to determine the most acceptable candidate through a referendum.

Offorkansi, who spoke in Enugu during a live radio programme hosted by the Dream FM, said any opposition coalition without the active participation of the generality of Nigerians is suspicious.
He said, “The best way opposition parties could arrive at a widely accepted presidential candidate to challenge incumbent President Bola Tinubu is to conduct opinion polls among the electorate to determine the most acceptable choice. If they are genuinely sincere, they should seek the opinion of Nigerians. They can do this through the media house. If it can’t be done through the social media, press men can go to streets to aggregate opinions of the people. They should record the voices of respondents. Determining who should lead the opposition merger does not require rocket science. Let the decision be thrown to ordinary Nigerians.”

He said any other method would not yield the desired result because some of the opposition candidates would not agree to step down. He mentioned the candidate of ADC, Atiku Abubakar, whom he said had refused to obey rotational principle of the country.

He recalled how some interests did not want Mr Peter Obi to join the Africa Democratic Party because “the leader, David Mark, is a right hand man of Atiku Abubakar”.

Quoting him, “We left Labour Party to ADC. At ADC, everybody was sceptical about the ambition of Atiku. We saw a situation where people were saying if Obi was not afraid, let him go to the primaries. We can recall that Atiku has won all primaries he went into, except the one he lost to former President Muhammadu Buhari. Atiku would always dollarize the primaries and get what he wanted. But primaries don’t translate to mass acceptance.

“That was when I started seeing the hand of Esau and the voice of Jacob. Immediately the issue of primaries came up, they knew what they were driving at. They want to get what they couldn’t get from the door through the window. This time, it may be that what they couldn’t get through the ADC is what they now want to get through this coalition.”

He, however, said whether the coalition worked out or not, the ruling APC can still be defeated. “If we guard our votes during the election, and INEC operatives play according to the rules, the incumbent will be very easy to remove, after all, it was done in Abia State. The people of Abia made their choice. Today the story is different. I don’t see the opposition as going to work. What they are working for is who they will box in. They will use it as a trump card to say that at the coalition, we were all there. The best option is to throw the referendum back to the people for mock voting.”

He said Obi stands a better chance to win and move the country forward. “Peter Obi has kept telling people to go and verify his records. No other candidate has said such. Coalition is fine, but let it not be where they want to box someone in. Any coalition that does not spring from the masses is suspicion.”