INEC frustrates Nigerians with incompetence
Incompetence becomes INEC
Many Nigerian Bloggers have already reported on the elections that took place in Nigeria yesterday and I am not going to add much to that.
However, going to the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) website, it would appear the time they should have spent sorting out their logistics was probably expended in the politics of disenfranchisement of Nigerians.
In all the time that they had to prepare for the elections, how is it that on election day some polling stations were only opening up 6 hours late or not at all? BBC.
Then the President whose total 11 and a half years in office represents a failure that history would most assuredly record has the temerity to suggest that the polling had gone relatively well.
Time and again, the ruling parties have frustrated Nigerians in order to obscure and manipulate the electoral will of the people and usually with success.
Indeed there are issues of safety and security for the precious votes of Nigerians and the polling officials who need to be able to do their work without fear or favour.
Trying us by trying
Nigerians have been longsuffering if not supinely docile to accept half-measures, incompetence and shoddy planning as sufficient even that the mentality of low expectations is translated into one phrase - They tried.
We should stop trying and start doing and from what happened yesterday for something so critical to the survival and future of Nigeria to be handled with such confusion and levity is a disgrace.
So when INEC announces that the law makers and journalists were happy with INEC's facilities and level of preparedness, I read that with an overdose of healthy skepticism - the use of the phrase, selected journalists is already a giveaway, sycophantic praise-singers who parrot the desired propaganda.
This entourage visited the INEC headquarters which had over 100 gun-totting mobile policemen - only in Nigeria can legally armed law enforcement officers be called gun totting - a phrase usually associated with militias, gangsters or a force under unruly or ill-disciplined command.
Proper investigative research required
In the end, the entourage was awe-stricken; read - easily impressed, but having a Central Depot does not a national election make, somehow, the entourage should have been visiting locations closer to the polling stations and I doubt if the sycophantic journalists would have had the conscience to relay what they saw.
This obviously makes the visit and views of two former heads of state in the persons of Dr. Yakubu Gowon (1966-1975) and General Muhammadu Buhari (1983-1985) rather immaterial as they pandered to the window-dressing in the centre rather than a proper research of the facts in the regions.
In the circumstances we are saddled with this atrocious service and might have to condone it for now, but if for once we believe that INEC's independence in conducting the elections as free and fair then it would definitely be time for Nigerians to rise and claim their country back from the petty tyrants who have committed this great country to a cabal of corrupt politicians.
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