Nigeria: Revisiting the Abuja Peace Accord

At an event organized by the office of the National Security Adviser to the President and the Office of the Special Adviser to the President on Inter-Party Affairs with supports from the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and other foreign donor agencies in Abuja, which had the theme: "2015 General Elections Sensitization Workshop on Non-Violence", President Good Luck Jonathan identified negative political communication as one of the major causes of electoral violence in the country.

He also indentified "Winner takes all political mentality" and slow distribution of Permanent Voters Cards (PVC) by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) as some of the factors that may lead to electoral violence in this month's Presidential and National Assembly elections. While explaining the winner takes all political mentality, the President noted that, in an election where a winner scored about 52 percent to emerge victorious and the runner up scored about 48 percent, such election was very competitive. But, because of the believe and fear that the winner of the polls would take everything to himself, supporters and members of the party whose candidate came second would constitute themselves to creating problems for the winner of the election. This, according to him, is because they already know that, they would be nothing left for them in the new government, and as a result, they would have to wait for next election! In this type of scenario, they would be fomenting all kinds of trouble to make sure there is no peace in the land.

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