Election: why dissension sucks

In the last fifteen years, Nigeria has looked more like a failed state than anything else. Our democracy has faltered like a rickshaw racing among Ferraris. Our health system has killed our poor citizens at home and killed our rich people including one of our first ladies abroad. Our transportation system has given birth to […]

In the last fifteen years, Nigeria has looked more like a failed state than anything else.
Our democracy has faltered like a rickshaw racing among Ferraris. Our health system has killed our poor citizens at home and killed our rich people including one of our first ladies abroad. Our transportation system has given birth to an ancient rail system that has successfully returned us to the age of coal. Our education system has created an industry for educated illiterates, half-baked graduates, academic tourists and PhD holders that are as dumb as Forest Gump.
If you look critically at the way our army has prosecuted the war against insurgency in the country, you would agree without doubt that our military is a microcosm of our corrupt society. Its top brass would rather sell our arsenal to the enemy than defend our country. Our police would rather take money from the fleeing criminal than insist on the rule of law. Our jails are broken everyday with the full knowledge and even connivance of our warders and our onshore and off shore security is in the hands of pirates.
We are concomitantly a shameless people. We are running into the opposition not because it is offering us any serious alternatives but because of the likelihood that it would disgrace or jail those who are in power. So why are we behaving as if the Independent National Electoral Commission is the only culprit in the failure of our system? As at the time of his appointment, Professor Attahiru Jega was the Vice Chancellor of Bayero University, Kano and it seemed his Curriculum Vitae and his personal qualities stood him out among the several options available to President Jonathan which gave Nigerians refreshing hope that an electoral umpire who is a far cry from Professor Maurice Iwu was coming to teach our politician a lesson or two in free and fair polls. It was therefore safe to say that as INEC chairman Jega had the full compliments of impeccable credentials, but aren’t many of our people highly educated but poorly motivated?
Nigeria is a society where the law that declares that anything that can go wrong will go wrong continues to repeat itself, not because things are incorrigible but because the people lack the moral foundation for stemming wrong.
So when the 2015 elections were postponed last week by the INEC chairman Jega, it didn’t come to anyone as a surprise. We’re elections not postponed in 2011 despite all assurances that elections will take place as expected, all things being equal?  Jega was still hopeful that he could pull the election through even if the materials arrived late and as such he did not announce the postponement until about noon on that fateful day when it became obvious that it was practically impossible to conduct an election that day.
The elections had to be shifted. They were earlier scheduled to hold as follows: National Assembly Elections, Saturday, April 2; Presidential Elections, Saturday, April 9; and House of Assembly and Governorship Elections, Saturday, April 16 were thus rescheduled as follows: Saturday, April 9, Senate and House of Representatives Elections; Saturday, April 16, Presidential Elections; and Tuesday, April 26, State House of Assembly and Governorship Elections. Sensitive materials arrived; Nigerians went to the polls, yet the heavens did not fall.
Agreed, the natural thing would have been for Jega and his staff to learn from their mistakes of the past and develop a blueprint for the 2015 elections. But even though Jega had four years to prepare, he and a vast majority of his commissioners plunged the commission into a war of attrition that nearly consumed the entire electoral process. At a point many people believed that Jega had lost control of the commission and that it was on auto pilot. The feelers from the commission diminished Jega’s credibility and cast dark clouds on the promise that the 2015 election would be better than the one that preceded it.
The pall on the suspension of the election that would have taken place this week appeared to me like spitting into the sky. It sucks. The opposition had descended into a political delusion even though it knew that winning this election would have been as difficult as passing the camel through the proverbial eye of the needle. But instead of seeing the postponement as a blessing in disguise, the opposition is busy cascading into a deluge of invectives based on a result that it manufactured in its head alone. I am of the humble opinion that with the state of affairs in the country as at now, if the elections had been held, the results would have generated so much tension that lives would have been needlessly lost. I have every reason to believe based on information available to me which for brevity and secrecy I am not allowed to tell here, that apart from rabid political diehards, whose first impulse is to deify political leaders and create excuses for them in their minds, normal people with independent thought tend to set the bar higher for political leaders than we do for the man and woman at street level. And many of the political leaders as at last week did not meet that criteria for triumph and if the mix-up had been allowed to manifest, the surprise would have been alarming and obviously unbelievable. This is the simple reason why I support the extension of the election time table and I hope that all contending forces would use the period to get their acts together.