Nigerians woke up to the saddening, anger-inducing and disappointing news that the much anticipated elections has been shifted by an additional one week to 23rd February. Citing weather and logistic challenges, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) chairman, Prof. Mahmood Yakubu, mentioned in a statement in the early hours of Saturday, 16th February without much of regret or apology to Nigerians.
Even before the announcement, rumour has been rife about a meeting by INEC before the press release where some National Commissioners of the body were pushing for staggered elections. This would have only been possible if states which already had their election materials handy could proceed to the polls while others which had challenges with election materials supply would be conducted later. Of course, this would have led to a lot of confusion and crisis during or post-election.
In all, the development largely is not even merely exposing the incompetence, corruption, non-preparedness of INEC and its officials for the elections, it has also exposed the damning mediocrity resplendent in our institutions and our love for fire brigade approach to planning and execution.
Before the shocking announcement which not only left a bad taste in the mouth of those who previously spoke about the preparedness of INEC about the elections in high spirit, there were already feelers and suspicion from the general public about INEC messing up the one job they had, as a number of INEC’s offices got burnt. INEC lost crucial equipment such as Smart Card Readers due to these sabotaging events.
Relatively, the National Youth Service Corp Members (NYSC) and some other citizens who attended trainings as INEC Ad-hoc staff were already complaining about their names mysteriously missing from mobilization lists which were supposed to assign them to designated polling units. Eyewitness accounts riddled social media of the shoddy preparedness for the polls also revealed that not only were Ad-hoc made to sleep overnight in deplorable conditions, but some politicians and/or INEC officials colluded to swap names of trained Ad-hoc staff with that of their cronies or ghost workers. The goal of course is to pocket the allowances of these ghost workers.
INEC itself had tales to tell; its chairman did so rather subtly at a briefing with stakeholders later on Saturday, without naming the saboteurs. Some insiders have signaled allegations of internal sabotage from within the top ranks of INEC at the national level all the way to the local government offices of INEC. Some also pointed accusing fingers at the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) and the Nigerian Air Force for adding to the confusion which instigated the misdirection and mismanagement of election supply materials.
Such horrid turn of events as these is both shocking and not shocking because that has been the Nigerian reality which some of us as citizens have either condoned or perpetrated ourselves.
We may ask then: what is the role of the Nigerian in the perpetuity of the dilapidated state of our institutions? Have we been more readily disposed to contributing in our own little way to propagating mediocrity, sabotage, fraud and non-patriotic acts? What can we do or to what extent can we reshape these ugly trends, as followers, if our leaders continue to show bad example? In a system and country where the whole of the population seeks and pursues and struggles to plunder the meager national resource opportunistically, how much more rotten can things go?
Valuing the opportunity cost and the economic loss of this postponement is quite humongous. Nigerians travelled far and wide, even from abroad, to their respective polling areas just so that they could exercise their suffrage. Now most of them are stuck for one more week. Businesses and companies will have to remain closed or work at partial capacity because of the confusion caused by this postponement.
We can only realize how costly sabotage, mediocrity and our fire brigade approach to things are to the economy and our lives if only we evaluate and digest the full extent of the accompanying economic losses.
Featured image source: The Guardian Nigeria
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