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Trash Chimamanda Adichie’s Letter, Onanuga Tells Biden

Bayo Onanuga, an aide to President-elect Bola Tinubu, has urged US President Joe Biden to trash a letter written to him by an award-winning novelist, Chimamanda Adichie.

In the letter, Adichie questioned the US over its endorsement of the President-elect whom she claims emerged from an unlawful process.

In a letter, Adichie expressed displeasure at the performance of the Independent National Electoral Commission, saying officials of the electoral body “arrived hours late, or without basic election materials” on the day of the presidential election.

She said there were reports of violence, of a shooting at a polling unit, and of political operatives stealing or destroying ballot boxes.

Adichie, who authored Half of a Yellow Sun, lamented that a policeman stood idly by as a spokesperson for the ruling All Progressives Congress “threatened members of a particular ethnic group who he believed would vote for the opposition”.

She said the promise to upload the results of the presidential election in real-time was reneged by INEC despite the commission’s Chairman, Prof Mahmood Yakubu giving the assurance while speaking at Chatham House in London.

“No one was surprised when, by the morning of the 26th, social media became flooded with evidence of irregularities. Result sheets were now slowly being uploaded on the INEC portal, and could be viewed by the public. Voters compared their cellphone photos with the uploaded photos and saw alterations: numbers crossed out and rewritten; some originally written in black ink had been rewritten in blue, some blunderingly whited-out with Tipp-Ex. The election had been not only rigged, but done in such a shoddy, shabby manner that it insulted the intelligence of Nigerians,” she said.

Reacting, Onanuga wrote, “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.”

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