A top Nigerian lawyer and professor, Yemi Oke has penned down an open letter to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and US President Joe Biden on Nigerian elections, faulting popular Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Adichie’s stand on the February 25 presidential polls.
In the letter dated Sunday April 9, Mr Oke said Ms Adichie’s letter to Joe Biden is “seditious” and a “case of extraterritorial ethnocentric politicking of a non-resident Nigerian-American.” Mr Oke added that “Chimamanda’s letter is most unbecoming” and she went below expectations to pen-down a “seditious letter against the Government and people of Nigeria.”
The academic said he found it “most bewildering” that Ms Adichie, a “privileged Nigerian-born writer, has decided to paint her country of origin black.”
“Chimamanda’s letter was against entire Nigeria’s Democracy that was fought and procured with patriotic bloods and undeterred resolve of democrats, chief among them being Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu,” he said.
Ms Adichie, the internationally acclaimed Nigerian novelist and essayist, wrote a piece titled “Nigeria’s hollow democracy” published in the latest edition of The Atlantic magazine on April 6.
Ms Adichie, 45, had said in her open letter to Mr Biden that the process of the Nigerian presidential poll was imperilled by “deliberate manipulation” and the “electoral commission ignored so many glaring red flags in its rush to announce a winner.”
Before the elections, Ms Adichie publicly declared support for Peter Obi, the candidate of the Labour Party, and hoped he would win “as many polls had predicted.”
Mr Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress was declared winner of the presidential elections by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC).
Ms Adichie believes Mr Tinubu could not have won the election if “results had been uploaded in real-time to the INEC portal. Mr Tinubu of the APC polled a total of 8,794,726 votes to defeat his closest challenger, Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) who scored a total of 6,984,520 votes. The Labour Party (LP) candidate, Peter Obi came third with a total of 6,101,533 votes.
Ms Adichie also alleged in her piece that: “Many believe that the INEC Chair has been “compromised” but there is no evidence of the astronomical US-dollar amounts he is rumoured to have received from the President-elect.”
“It was surprising to see the U.S. State Department congratulates Bola Tinubu on his victory while rage is brewing, especially among young people in Nigeria,” the novelist said, adding that “American intelligence surely cannot be so inept. A little homework and they would know what is manifestly obvious to me and so many others,” she said.
“Ludicrous claims”
In his letter, Mr Oke said: “Chimamanda’s claims and assertions on the recently concluded Presidential elections in Nigeria is not only ludicrous, it is also illogical, baseless and depicts ignoble ranting of an uninformed mind about legal and judicial processes or procedures.”
It is unimaginable that someone who did not participate or vote in an election would make categorical statements about an election she did not witness,” Mr Oke said.
The academic added that Ms Adichie represents recent generations of Nigerian intelligentsias in the diaspora.
Her lonely voice on the election of President-Elect Bola Ahmed Tinubu is, at best, a muted trumpet which is audible to no one except herself and her co-travelers,” he noted.