Amid criticism of former President Olusegun Obasanjo, the Ohanaeze Ndigbo Youth Council Worldwide has also berated him over his comments on the nation’s recent elections.

Obasanjo during the Chinua Achebe leadership forum held at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, USA, described the 2023 general elections as a travesty.

Obasanjo advocated the appointment of new and credible leaders for the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) with short tenure to prevent corruption and re-establish trust.

He said, “As a matter of urgency, we must make sure the INEC chairperson and his or her staff are thoroughly vetted.”

The former President noted that “the vetting exercise should yield dispassionate, non-partisan actors with impeccable reputations.

“Nigeria must ensure the appointment of new credible INEC leadership at the federal, state, local government, and municipal—city, town, and village levels—with short tenures—to prevent undesirable political influence and corruption and re-establish trust in the electoral systems by its citizens.”

However, reacting in a statement in Kaduna on Monday, the National President of Ohanaeze Ndigbo Youth Council Worldwide, Mazi Okwu Nnabuike, accused the former president of laying the foundation for a flawed electoral system in the country.

Nnabuike said that the ex-leader actively institutionalised corruption in Nigeria, while also alleging that during the Obasanjo presidency, “results were announced even as voters were in queues voting across Nigeria. Results were written at government houses and politicians’ houses.”

The Ohanaeze youths added that “Go to Court was popularised under Obasanjo leadership, where all that mattered was for INEC to declare the president’s preferred candidate winner, and those crying were expected to go to court.

“Little wonder late President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua, a man with integrity, cried out that the election that brought him to power was deeply flawed. The said election was under Obasanjo’s presidency.

“A person who actively canvassed for a third term and was alleged to have brought truckloads of money in ghana-must-go to the National Assembly, a person who was reported to have twisted governors to build him a so-called presidential library on his farm, a person who, has no moral grounds to lecture anyone, let alone Nigerians, on leadership.”

Nnabuike wondered why Obasanjo did not initiate any meaningful electoral reform under his leadership, stressing that “if he had done that instead of pursuing an inordinate third-term agenda, we wouldn’t have been where we are today.

According to Nnabuike, “Nigerians have also not forgotten how the former president said openly, infamously, that even Jesus Christ cannot conduct a credible election in Nigeria. What has changed from 2010 when he made that statement and now?”

He called on the ex-president to stop his “now chronic habit of always disparaging all the presidents that have ruled the country after his tenure.”