It is Election Day evening and results are trickling in. Oga is glued to the NTA station, with cell phone and telephones ringing endlessly. As planned, Oga must win but he wants to be sure that his rigging plans were not busted and that his victory is announced on Television. Sycophants and praise singers file in congratulatory messages and staff is busy paying off thugs, electoral officers and Police officers for jobs well executed. Majority in the electorate are shafted, angry but helpless, knowing that they have been defrauded. Oga has bought his way into office with money or with your relation’s blood and not through legitimate votes of the people.

Oga may be the Governor or lawmaker representing you. Several of our current leaders and lawmakers have rigged elections for themselves or colleagues. Some are planning to rig forthcoming Election 2003 even as you read. Rigging of electoral votes has become one of Nigeria’s most ugly cultures of corruption. Only you can say NO to rigging: secure and make sure your vote is accounted for. There are only few things you must know and do that are given below.

In any typical Nigeria Police Crime Report, contraventions against sections relating to "assault", "obtaining under false pretences" and "stealing" (stated in decreasing order of incidence) constitute overwhelming statistical majority of Incident reports. Therefore, there are statistical deductions showing that these crimes must strongly reflect in the spectrum of the Nigeria society. They reflect strongly in both our political and economic arena. They reflect in all Nigeria elections through a continuously improving art of electoral votes rigging.

In Nigeria, the art of rigging electoral votes for political gains is primarily practiced along the grains of above criminal classifications. Politicians rig electoral votes by stealing or fraudulently obtaining votes under false pretences, deliberate disenfranchisement of eligible voters, inflation of ballot boxes, counterfeiting of electoral materials, post-counting falsification of election results, and other corrupt practices. Exercises in rigging are often occasioned by various degrees and forms of hooliganism or violence that may result in bodily harm or death of persons.

One expects that the INEC and our law enforcement agencies would have profiled and studied dynamics of rigging toward creating eradication strategies. But, that is being over ambitious in expectations, hence, the rigging culture has neither abated nor has it been destroyed. Today, most political parties and politicians are perfecting even more sophisticated and elaborate rigging schemes as part of strategies for election – budgeting immense resources and rehearsing routines without taking anything, not even the advantageous factor of incumbency, for granted.

Artfully, rigging has become an inevitable political strategy for wining elections. We all know it is commonly practiced but strangely have refused to rise up against it. Rigging, despite being made a groundwork political strategy, cannot be effectively executed without the conscious involvement of our law enforcement agencies. Therefore, it is best executed only within an unscrupulous partnership between politicians and law enforcement agents. Politicians sit to draw blueprints for rigging and in so doing must co-opt their willing accomplices for the execution of such blueprints through carefully doctored and implemented Operational Orders.

Today’s PDP government re-election bid in the Akwa Ibom State roundly fits the profile above and it is this writer’s well-informed deduction, viewpoint and prediction, buttressed by prevailing and widespread information from the grapevine, that massive and elaborate rigging schemes are being planned against the Akwa Ibom Election 2003. It is within our civic duties and dictates of righteousness to blow the whistle when and where necessary. I blow. And here is the message: a ravenous appetite for rigging has formed in Akwa Ibom State – the more elaborate and costly the more emboldened perpetrators in ruling party have become. It is common knowledge that this administration’s horrible record and squander mania is provoking the wrath of the Akwa Ibom electorate. Commonsense predict also that its only recourse to sustenance of political power is through the ignoble art of rigging of electoral votes.

Below is a review of what steps may be taken to prevent envisaged massive and elaborate rigging. In the Akwa Ibom State and throughout Nigeria, all who are visionary must anticipate possible continuous attempts at the hijacking of our democratic destiny through rigging of elections. Our only solution is in positioning to stop such hijackers while identifying and supporting wholeheartedly the one candidate who shall best serve the grassroots within a well-engineered and well-executed paradigm or generation shift that departs radically from status quo. That candidate is not of the present PDP government in the Akwa Ibom State. But, there is the one!