The All Progressives Congress (APC) has put its propaganda machinery into overdrive. The Party is facing public relations disaster that the ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) will certainly not allow Nigerians to forget. In fairness to the PDP, it couldn’t have been any other way because the cloning of Permanent Voter Cards (PVCs), which is what the APC has been accused of doing, is a matter that can derail Nigeria’s democracy.
For all well-meaning Nigerians, the accusations leveled against the APC should give us serious cause for concern. We should be even more disturbed that a matter of this magnitude is receiving scant attention in the mainstream media. It is as if there’s a conspiracy of silence to hush up the matter and sweep it under the proverbial carpet.
To interrogate this issue properly, let us revisit the genesis of the saga. As reported by the Daily Independent, the Department of State Security (DSS) issued a statement which said the agency, “acted on a petition that alleged an ongoing cloning activities of INEC Permanent Voter Cards (PVCs) by some unscrupulous persons with intent to hack into INEC data base, corrupt it and replace them with their own data at No. 10 Bola Ajibola Street, off Community Avenue, Allen Avenue, Ikeja LGA, Lagos State.”
According to the news report, a part of the DSS statement read: “Consequently, the Service placed the premises which had no signpost under surveillance and was convinced that unwholesome activities were ongoing within.” Even a rudimentary understanding of law enforcement is enough to appreciate that a security agency is within its rights to act after establishing probable grounds that a crime is being committed. Yet, the APC, rather than showing contrition, is carrying on about the need to obtain court orders to search a building when all that is needed is a search warrant; and the media are being relatively silent about the matter.
National Publicity Secretary of the APC, Lai Mohammed, true to his antecedents, promptly issued a slew of statements, a part of one which reads: “If indeed they put the place under surveillance, would they not have been able to establish that it is an APC Data Centre? Even if they were not sure, what prevents them from obtaining a court order permitting them to enter and search the building…?” Whatever Lai Mohammed had hoped to achieve with that statement, he must be told that his rhetoric rings hollow.
Of greater importance, and to help us grasp the disturbing questions raised by the PVC cloning saga, imagine for a moment that it was the PDP, and not the APC, that was faced with a similar situation. Is it possible that the mainstream media, both print and electronic, would have been as reticent to place the issue in the public domain? If past experience is anything to go by, this is unlikely. If the PDP were to be in APC’s muddy shoes where the PVC cloning accusation is concerned, the media would have torn the PDP to shreds.
So why is the media being soft on APC? Is it possible that a large section of the media have been compromised in favour of the APC? What does this say about the much-vaunted independence and virility of Nigeria’s free press? These questions are necessary as we seek to understand why the media, which should be in the forefront of asking the APC pertinent questions at this time, is content to merely regurgitate statements issued by the now tiresome Lai Mohammed.
To be clear, everything Lai Mohammed says tends to be what can be expected of him in his role as APC’s version of the Nazi propagandist Josef Goebbels. However, the matter at stake is weightier than Lai Mohammed’s tedious statements. For instance, the shocking news by the DSS that electronic records revealed how one individual engaged in multiple registrations should spur the media to dig further into the issue rather than serving to amplify Lai Mohammed’s rants.
Specifically, the DSS said: “On 22nd November, 2014, a search operation was executed at the above address where a Search Warrant obtained from the Court was executed. The search was carried out in the presence of one Onuchukwu Chika Augustine and twenty four (24) others, and the following items were recovered: One server, Four hard drives, One external hard drive, One HP Laptop, One Server switch, Four flash drives, One Samsung tablet, One Apple computer system without CPU and thirty one Ghana-must-go bags containing hard copies of already captured data.”
Another relevant portion of the DSS statement reads: “Exploitation of some of the recovered items has revealed that one particular individual had his data captured eighteen times with different names and addresses but yet the same photograph.”
This damning piece of information has left the APC stunned and Lai Mohammed has been reduced to issuing statements where he quickly jumps to Boko Haram rather than address the substantive issues. But the APC has been caught in the act of multiple registrations and cloning PVCs and Nigerians must demand that the party and the perpetrators of these criminal deeds must be brought to book. In this regard, the media cannot fold its arms and pretend nothing has happened.
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