The Nigeria Labour Congress on Saturday called on President Muhammadu Buhari to bestow a posthumous award on the late Chief MKO Abiola to put an end to the June 12 saga.
The deputy president of NLC, Issa Aremu, made the call in a statement on Saturday in Kaduna.
In the statement, Mr. Aremu said Mr. Buhari should offer leadership and build on a groundswell of national consensus to do the needful in this respect.
He said Mr. Abiola deserved national and global honour as the unacknowledged winner of the June 12, 1993 presidential election.
The NLC chieftain said Mr. Abiola and hundreds of others were victims of an era of impunity.
He said, “Twenty-two years after, the June 12 spectre repeatedly hunts Nigeria’s democratic process. It’s time we exorcised it. Given the free and fair election that led to his emergence in March this year, President Muhammadu Buhari is the best positioned Nigerian leader in recent times to rightly name, shame and damn the criminal annulment of the 1993 presidential election results adjudged to be the most free and fair.”
Mr. Aremu said the distortion of Nigeria’s democratic aspiration started with the singular annulment of the June 12 1993 free and fair elections.
He said since the shameful events of 1993, election riggers had perfected the art.
“The violations of peoples’ mandates through varying subterfuge that included ballot snatching, alteration of electoral rules and falsifications of election results as we witnessed in particular in the 2003 and 2007 elections,” he said. “The same impunity sadly snowballed to civil society and trade union organisations. Let’s close the chapter of June 12 by dignifying its victims as a matter of legitimate right not favour.
“Labour commends the outgoing INEC Chairman, Prof. Attahiru Jega, for standing firm and truly independent in upholding the mandate of Nigerians during the 2015 presidential elections and by doing so raising high the banner of Africa as democracy destination. If some of his predecessors had stood firm, Nigeria’s democratic mileage would have been far more remarkable.”
(NAN)
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