Peter Obi has told an audience of Nigerians in Washington DC that election manipulation in Nigeria persisted largely because voters abandoned their polling units after casting their ballots rather than remaining to monitor the counting process, saying that citizens who went home or to church after voting while allowing their results to be altered were as responsible for the problem as the politicians who exploited their absence.
The Nigeria Democratic Congress presidential candidate made the remarks in a video widely circulated on social media, speaking candidly about the structural conditions that had made vote manipulation a recurring feature of Nigerian elections and what ordinary citizens could do to change that dynamic without waiting for politicians or institutions to lead the way.
He said the act of voting and immediately leaving was self-defeating, arguing that the count was where elections were actually decided and that a voter who was not present to witness and challenge that process had effectively surrendered the value of their participation. He said voters needed to stay at their units, insist that votes be counted on the spot, and refuse to leave until the results were documented and publicly announced, saying this simple discipline would make the kind of manipulation that routinely occurred in Nigerian elections almost impossible to execute.
Obi used the session to reiterate his longstanding position that Nigeria’s fundamental problem was leadership rather than resources, saying the country was more richly endowed than the United States yet produced radically worse outcomes for its citizens because of the quality of those who had been allowed to govern it. He said once citizens understood that leadership was the variable they needed to change, they would invest the effort required to defend their votes because they would understand that their ballot was the mechanism through which they could compel that change.
On governance, Obi pledged that if given the opportunity to lead, he would adopt a comprehensive dialogue approach to addressing the range of agitations across the country, saying engaging those with grievances was the only way to understand what was driving those grievances and find solutions that would hold. He repeated his call for the release of IPOB leader Nnamdi Kanu, saying there was no justification for continued detention of someone for statements made during radio broadcasts, and that public figures routinely endured worse without legal consequence.
