President Good Luck Jonathan congratulates the president elect Mr. Muhamed Buhari for winning the historic vote in the Nigerian history for the first time since independence from Britain in 1960.
Nigeria’s election winner, Muhammadu Buhari, congratulated the outgoing president, Goodluck Jonathan, for peacefully relinquishing power on Wednesday, a day after becoming the first Nigerian politician to unseat a sitting leader at the ballot box. In conceding step, Jonathan phoned Buhari to congratulate him and issued a statement urging his supporters to accept the result, a signal of deepening democracy in Africa’s most populous nation that few had expected.
In acknowledging the call from now the former President Jonathan, Mr. Buhari said “President Jonathan was a worthy opponent and I extend the hand of fellowship to him,” Buhari told journalists and supporters. “We have proven to the world that we are people who have embraced democracy. We have put one-party state behind us.”
There is no doubt that Nigeria joins another club of African democracy like Zambia, Malawi, Senegal, Kenya and South Africa, indeed, the result, which followed a uniquely competitive, expensive and at times vicious campaign, was hailed by analysts as a milestone for multiparty democracy on the continent.
Unlike President Jonathan, for one thing, Kagame does not like free elections, and he has avoided or emasculated them assiduously. We all know what happened in 2010 when Victoire Ingabire, who had spent the past 16 years in the Netherlands, but who immediately upon her return to Rwanda in January was regarded as the leading opposition figure, though her United Democratic Forces hadn’t been able to register as an official party. The Kagame regime arrested her on April 21, and charged her with “association with a terrorist group; propagating genocide ideology; negationism and ethnic divisionism.
Kagame did not arrest Madam Ingabire because of the crimes she committed but a fear for a free and fair election in a country he thinks belongs to him and his family, by incarcerating madam Ingabire this helped Kagame once again to avoid any meaningful electoral contest. In 2003 and 2010 Rwanda’s election years, opposition parties, candidates, and media not only weren’t welcomed, they were wound up, harassed, shut-down, arrested, exiled, and disappeared.
In 2002, Kagame’s former President and RPF ally Pasteur Bizimungu, was arrested and charged with “divisionism,” President Bizimungu had wanted to provide political choices other than the one-party Kagame dictatorship. In 2003, former Prime Minister Faustin Twagiramungu was permitted onto the presidential ballot but prevented from campaigning, and his Democratic Republic Movement (MDR) banned altogether; he and his MDR were also accused of “divisionism.”
The official presidential vote in all election years reported more than 94% for Kagame. In a country whose population has suffered from genocide of 1994, and Kagame’s intimidation and repression of Rwanda’s civil society, and his election-rigging, could have produced a result like this.
When all serious political challengers were jailed or driven from the country,” President Kagame also continues to abuse his judicial institutions to “trump-up political thought-crimes “ against his political opponents like Bernard Ntaganda, Deo Muashayid just to mention a few arising from the ‘crime’ of publicly objecting to the Kagame military dictatorship and Kagame’s version of Rwandan genocide history, in 1994.
Indeed, the allegation of “genocide denial” has been an important instrument of Kagame’s rule, with potentially rival politicians, or in fact any Kagame target, so accused and pushed out of the way. Kagame has gone too far in abusing Rwandan institutions to achieve his political interest, he is now abusing many Rwandans claiming that they love him and want him stay for more than his constitutional mandate.
We call upon the Rwandan President to respect the Rwandan constitution particularly Article 101 and, stop abusing his own people by fronting them to demand what in fact Kagame wants to tell the Public and the International community, let the President stick to his undertakings and word, when he said that he will never seek another term. “ Invugo ibe Ingiro” or risks Rwandan resistance by all means necessary to stop him from Constitutional coup.
Jacqueline Umurungi