The immediate past chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), Attahiru Jega on Wednesday said that the prediction of US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) on the disintegration of Nigeria will come to pass, given the way events are unfolding in the country.
The former University lecturer who made the declaration in Abuja on Wednesday while speaking at Tell Magazine’s 20 years of democracy conference, said Nigeria has witnessed some “reversals” in the progress it made during the 2015 elections.
According to him, more work needed to be done to protect the integrity of the country’s electoral process before 2023.
Jega said, “The CIA thought that 2015 was the do or die period for Nigeria, that there would not be a Nigeria in the way you know after the 2015 general election – that has come to pass, but I think if we do not take care, a lot of these predictions will come to pass that is why we need to do quite a lot, much more than we have ever done in order to protect the integrity of the electoral process before 2023.”
He also noted that the country’s electorate has lost confidence in the electoral process.
He continued, “The clearest evidence of this loss of trust and confidence is declining voter turnout in elections since 1999.”
“For example, people have argued that in 2015 the generalised insecurity was a result of the activities of Boko Haram have been responsible for the low voter turnout regardless of the improvement in the electoral process.
“The postponement of elections both in 2015 and 2019 may be some explanations as to why there was voter turnout.”
It will be recalled that the Central Intelligence Agency, CIA, the espionage arm of the United States’ intelligence apparatchik, released a report in 2006, in which it predicted that Nigeria may disintegrate before 2015.
According to the agency, Nigeria as a corporate entity was likely to splinter along tribal and sectarian lines by 2015 if some of the inherent fault lines were not properly managed and controlled.
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