The Director, Media and Publicity, Tinubu/Shettima Campaign, Bayo Onanuga has asked US President, Joe Biden, not to take seriously the open letter written by Chimamanda Adicihe where she berated the United States and British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak for congratulating President-elect Bola Tinubu.
In the letter titled ‘Nigeria’s Hollowed Democracy’ and published in The Atlantic, the author questioned why Americans keep congratulating the winner of Nigeria’s disastrous election in February. Adichie pointed out that following the passage of the 2022 Electoral Act in Nigeria, which gave legal backing to the vote-counting process, Nigerians trooped out to vote on the morning of February 25.
She writes: “Many Nigerians went out to vote holding in their hearts a new sense of trust. Cautious trust, but still trust.”
She says what followed was a breach of that trust, when on February 26 social media became flooded with evidence of voting irregularities: “numbers crossed out and rewritten; some originally written in black ink had been rewritten in blue, some blunderingly whited-out with Tipp-Ex.”
Reacting to her letter, Onanuga in a tweet posted on Friday morning, described her letter as a fiction written over the loss of her tribesman, Peter Obi.
“Dear President Joe Biden, please just trash the open letter by Chimamanda on Nigeria’s election once it gets to your desk. She wrote fiction, inspired by the monumental loss of her tribesman Peter Obi.”
While Chimamanda restated her support of Obi in her letter to the US president, the revered novelist made no mention of doing so based on ethnicity.
“I supported Peter Obi, the Labour Party candidate, and hoped he would win, as polls predicted, but I was prepared to accept any result, because we had been assured that technology would guard the sanctity of votes,” she said.
