June 12: NLC urges Buhari to confer post-humous honour on Abiola

The Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) on Saturday called on President Muhammadu Buhari to bestow a post-humous award on the late Chief M.K.O. Abiola to put an end to the June 12 saga.
NLC Deputy President, Issa Aremu, made the call in Kaduna.
In a statement, Aremu said that Buhari should offer leadership and build a groundswell of national consensus to do the needful in this respect.
He said that Abiola deserved national and global honour as the unacknowledged winner of the June 12, 1993 presidential election.
The NLC chieftain said that Abiola and hundreds of others were victims of that era of impunity.
He said, “22 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.”
Aremu said that the distortion of Nigeria’s democratic aspiration started with the singular annulment of the June 12 1993 free and fair elections.
He said that 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.
“ 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,” he said.