Ezekwesili: How to make 2015 polls successful

Ezekwesili, who presented a paper titled: 2015 Elections: How to Make Nigeria the Winner at the 12th Daily Trust Dialogue in Abuja, said the challenges were enormous for both the country and the political players as the elections approach. She said, “The stakes are considerably high for the politicians who are in a fight to […]

Ezekwesili, who presented a paper titled: 2015 Elections: How to Make Nigeria the Winner at the 12th Daily Trust Dialogue in Abuja, said the challenges were enormous for both the country and the political players as the elections approach. She said, “The stakes are considerably high for the politicians who are in a fight to finish mode with opponents across their fences. But the stakes are patently higher for the country Nigeria which finds itself currently brittle and weaker in the spectrum that measures capable states.”
She however said in order to make the polls a success story, the elections have to be actually conducted and concluded with results announced according to a minimum local and international standard of having been “free and fair.” Secondly, she said there should be no pre-election, election or post election violence or acts of destabilization that threaten the tenuous peace in the land with all segments of the country remaining together, choosing the path of compliance with the rule of law to seek redress of electoral conflicts and grievances, despite disagreements.
The third condition, she said, is for a clear winner to emerge from the electoral or judicial processes that follow with a national spread and mandate sufficient enough to make him a president of the entire Nigeria. She listed the fourth condition as being to ensure that the transition process from the present administration to a new one is appropriately conducted with the swearing of the new president and elected governors of states on May 29, 2015, as well as convening the 6th assembly and the newly elected senators and representatives from across the country.
she said the “entire Nigerian populace will, at the end of the electoral process, choose to remain citizens of Nigeria regardless of the pull by politicians to drag the populace into their never ending squabble to control power more than to offer service.” The former minister argued that the country could only count the 2015 elections as a win if it does not lead to the derailment of Nigeria’s fledgling democracy and the country’s destabilization.
She said, “The fear of these two ominous possibilities becoming reality was always common with every past election but it is considerably more accentuated with the 2015 elections. The reason is that it is the fruit of the dark seeds of the events leading up to and following the 2011 elections. The evidence is stark that our country is going into 2015 elections with monumental security, political, economic and social vulnerabilities so much so that pessimists predict political collapse of the entity called Nigeria.”
Also, the former minister called on Nigerians to demand that all candidates seeking for their votes should debate a number of pressing issues that would determine the path that the country would tread in the next four years. Such a debate would guide them in making free and intelligent choices of people to lead them, she said.
“The culture of debating and contesting ideas in healthy tolerance of dissension should have taken root immediately after our independence elections of 1959. We failed to learn that at the heart of a diverse society are differences that do not have to be life threatening if properly managed. It is now time for citizens of Nigeria to activate their own Offices – the Office of the Active Citizen – and to lead our journey toward becoming a country of diverse people who by choosing to live together become a nation by demanding that any who seek to lead us must convince us of how they plan to make us and not just Nigeria – the entity – the winner.
“According to Ibrahim Mohammed (2008), the survival of a nation depends on the good its leadership can bring to bear on the people of the nation. In his opinion, no nation is guaranteed continuous existence if her citizens wallow in abject poverty especially if such a nation is identified as having the potential human and material resources that guarantee greatness. She identified six “critical pillars for nation building” that Nigerians would want to engage candidates seeking their votes on. They include rule of law, territorial integrity, unity in diversity and good governance. Others are economic growth and development, social contract between citizens and state and social accountability for citizens.