ONE of the worst things about us Nigerians is our shamelessness. We celebrate it, we cultivate it, we encourage it. We expect others to descend to our ordinariness.
The world that we think would join in our embarrassment has in many words told us to deal with our issues. Nobody abandoned us.
On the contrary, we abandoned ourselves through decades of dedication to abundances of evil-doing – crimes.
Every election we hold is worse than the previous one. We defend it. We pour religion, ethnicity and social status into everything. We still blame the world for not intervening.
We cannot conduct elections. We destroy anything that is handed to us and play dumb.
BVAS that we were told was like the Titanic – indestructible – perished in one election. If we were sleeping, BVAS did not sleep.
How did BVAS work perfectly for the Senate and House of Representatives elections from accreditation to transmission, but failed in the presidential election, in the same polling units, on the same day, with the protocols that the same Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, established?
Agreed, machines could mal-function at anytime. Could that also explain the thumb-printing of ballot papers to favour certain candidates? Was that why the machines failed?
Police and other security agencies drew billions of possibly borrowed funds to amass at the polling units and did nothing about the intimidations that their presence was to stop.
Read also: INEC, Police dismiss alleged plot to rig guber election in Kebbi
Common criminals that should have been arrested on the spot and prosecuted were being begged not to execute their threats, chiefly, that anyone who did not vote for a certain candidate would not be allowed to vote.
No arrests were made on that ground.
Others pulled the processes to a halt by not following procedures that marred the outcomes, the results and turned up mutilated papers as results sheets.
Some results were cancelled, written all over that those important documents looked like scribblings from earliest years of kindergarten. We can explain them.
At the apex of different formations of the heists that the elections became were some of our best professors in various fields. We must acknowledge the few who resisted being part of the destruction of our country.
Professors are the leaders of our academic institutions that produce the youth who we claim are the leaders of tomorrow. A blighted tomorrow it seems.
These professors would return to their schools and possibly be chairs of committees against examination mal-practices. Is election rigging not a mal-practice?
Many are crawling out of their refugee to state that they were frightened into cooking up figures or they could have died.
There are suspicions that many of the officials were compromised to either manufacture the results or look away during infractions.
The guilty are many. They include those in post haste arrangements to suggest that nothing can be done about the election. They say the election were past and the President-elect was already being congratulated.
No seems concerned about the complaints that would compound the next elections if they are addressed. These problems are Nigerian. It would be up to Nigerians to solve.
These elections have worsened the trust deficit of governments, individuals, and institutions that again abused, breached and battered the trust people had that things could be different this time.
Yes, things were different; only that they were worse. The danger in words is that we presume that “different” could be only “good” in the hands of those managing a situation.
We should manage our situations which we created. If we are waiting for international organisations to intervene, they would not so long as our crude oil which so delights them that they named it sweet crude, is delivered promptly and at their fixed price.
Prayers are being offered for judges to reach the “right” decision, being that the election was rigged and could not stand. Our belief is that only prayers can stop the judges from not acting “wrongly”.
Will witnesses succumb to threats? In what shape will Nigeria survive the latest assault? There are no full answers.
Organised crimes like election rigging – in all their forms – would continue to thrive so long as they are not identified properly and dealt with for what they are. When we praise criminals as strategists, applaud their expertise and recommend it to others, what type of country do we want?
There is work to do to rescue our country from the perpetual opprobium of election rigging. We cannot be famed for rigging elections.
Finally…
SIR Friday Nwanozie Nwosu, my kinsman, brother, friend, APC’s National Welfare Secretary, a man who drapes his ways with fear of the Almighty, simplicity, a brilliant mind who makes no noise about his victories as a lawyer, passed on Thursday.
He was a great Ngwa man who made his points quietly, contested twice for tickets to run for governorship of Abia State in two different parties. He was denied on both instances.
I hope as I write this it helps me to accept he is gone, the first step in my healing. My condolences to his family and associates. May the Almighty rest FN.
DEATH called again at Sogunle, a rail-crossing in Ikeja, Lagos, killing an unconfirmed number of people, months after a train crush a lady to death at a rail crossing in Abuja.
Vehicles running into trains has been a feature of that crossing for over 10 years. In their haste, the vehicles are easily trapped by the magnetic field that a train generates as it moves.
There used to be rail police whose duty included blowing the alerts to keep traffic off rail tracks These accidents should be stopped.
More education on the working of trains and the Rail Police properly managing rail crossings, would save lives.
.Isiguzo is a major commentator on minor issues
