Magnus Ngei Abe, 58, is a Nigerian politician who served as a Senator for the Rivers South East Senatorial District of Rivers State. He was first elected to the Nigerian Senate in the April 2011 general elections and again in a rerun poll in December 2016. In the 2015 general elections, he lost a return bid to Senator Olaka Nwogu. Abe was the gubernatorial candidate of the Social Democratic Party in the just concluded general elections. In this television interview, Abe condemned the intimidation and attack of opposition political parties by the ruling PDP in Rivers State, among other issues. Excerpts:
What can you say about the brouhaha going on in Rivers State now, as it concerns access to election result materials?
As leaders in this country it is still our responsibility to guard our democracy and to ensure that as much as possible, whatever issue that we may have, can be handled through constitutional and legal means so that we don’t plunge our country, communities into needless mayhem. For that reason I have been very controlled in my response to post election matters. What is going on in Rivers State is totally uncalled for, and my concern in the way things are done in this country is that we always have this tendency to look at what is happening in any part of Nigeria as a problem for that part of Nigeria. We fail to realise that these problems are Nigerian problems. When kidnapping started in this country in Delta State, I remember going round the country to say that the issue of kidnapping and violence in the Niger Delta was a Nigerian problem, and not a Niger Delta problem. We failed to heed to that, and today it has become the norm in every part of this country. I want to use this opportunity to say to Nigerians that everybody should take an interest in what is going on in Rivers State, it is not a Rivers State problem, or Niger Delta problem, but a Nigerian problem. If we continue to allow people to behave in ways that we know are unacceptable, contrary to our laws, against public decency, ultimately those things will come back to haunt us in the very place that we think that we are across the country.
As a major player in the March 18 election, are you also challenging the result of that election?
We are approaching the court when we see that things don’t go well, with violence, intimidation, open rigging that went on in Rivers State, which are the constitutional rights of the parties and the candidates. It is not just a constitutional right, it is a moral burden, for those who witnessed what happened to be able to approach the court, which is a way of going before the public to say what happened. I believe that it is part of the constitutional process and everything should be done as part of that process to allow for those who feel aggrieved to challenge the process legally. I want to repeat, that those who make peaceful change impossible will make violence inevitable as an option for those who may feel excluded, disenfranchised or humiliated in one way or the other by the things that were done to them. If they have no peaceful and legal means of expressing their disaffection, they are going to do so in ways that may not have been planned for. It is in the interest of the entire system for us to make it possible for those who want to question what happened in their different constituencies to be able to do so.
The SDP in Rivers State has written to the Independent National Electoral Commission. We set up a committee to review what happened, and to have actual facts and data about what happened in each polling unit. We have received that report and we have looked at it critically, and we are satisfied that there is no basis in which any reasonable group of people will say that what happened in Rivers on March 18 in any way reflected the expectations of the electoral act or the wishes of the Rivers people, as regards the events in contention. It is the constitutional right of everyone who feels this way to go before the appropriate authorities to express his or her views. When people have declared figures that are not backed by what was uploaded on the portal and have spent almost two weeks extra, uploading figures and result sheets, that were not part of the original declaration, and we still have a situation where the books cannot balance. You spent all this time cooking figures and when you realised that the figures would not tarry, you now physically go and prevent others from accessing those figures through the basis of which your magic was made and calculated. The truth of the matter is that the figures in Rivers’ election will never tarry because that is not what happened on the field. Preventing people physically from having access to it is just another strategy to conclude what has already started.
“The truth of the matter is that the figures in Rivers’ election will never tarry because that is not what happened on the field. Preventing people physically from having access to it is just another strategy to conclude what has already started”
Are you, as the SDP candidate and the party going to the tribunal?
I have said that we have concluded our processes and we have asked the Independent National Electoral Commission to allow us access to those materials so that we can put up our case in line with what we have. We are doing that and with or without that, we are still going to approach the court with what we have, as we saw it on March 18. I said before the election that everybody in Nigeria knew that the Rivers State election would be manipulated, and would be different from every other election in Nigeria. I said so, because the election itself is not an event, but a process. When you see a process that from the beginning is already skewed to produce a desired result, you already know that the process would not be straight forward. It is only in Rivers State that the opposition parties were not allowed to campaign. Executive Orders were issued in Rivers State prohibiting opposition parties from campaigning, using public facilities from even moving around. They were using local government chairmen as chief executives, security officers to disrupt rallies and gatherings of the members of the opposition parties. It was only in Rivers that people were prevented from coming out to hear the alternatives that other people had to present. So, all the signs that the Rivers State election would not go the way of other elections in the country were present even before the election. When the Rivers State council of traditional rulers, the highest body of traditional rulers in the state, met and formally adopted a single candidate on the orders of the government, in an election in which many Rivers sons and daughters were contesting, it should have been clear to everybody what would happen in Rivers State would not be acceptable at the end of the day. It is not surprising what played out. Again, on Wednesday, the Governor of Rivers State was in Gokana saying that Senator Abe was rejected by his people and that the Gokana people didn’t vote for Senator Abe. If the Governor can allow elections to be held in his community, he will not get the kind of result that he claimed he had. So if he wants to know who is accepted or not by the Rivers people, the proper thing to do is to respect the wishes of Rivers people, create an environment for them to come out peacefully, without coercion, without being flogged, without people standing at the polling unit to demand that if you are not voting for a particular party you should go back. Let the people of the state have the opportunity to say what they want peacefully without harassment, violence and all sorts of undue force. If we are able to do that then everyone should be able to say if I was accepted or not. I am very proud to say that I can stand before Nigerians to say that I did not win that election. Because if one could come out and do all these and say that he won, and people would jubilate over that kind of attitude, we are setting a very wrong foundation for the future of our country and the lives of our children. We will go to court when we have the necessary support from INEC to challenge what happened on March 18.
Are you satisfied with the fact that you didn’t win the election?
What I am saying is that there was no election in Rivers State on March 18. What happened in Rivers State cannot be described as an election.
Are you going to court to ask that the election be cancelled?
If you take a look at what was uploaded at INEC portal, you can take out up to 150,000 votes that the PDP claimed to get because it is not backed by any reality. If you look at the forms based on which they are calculating the votes, some are not legible because they have been totally mutilated.
