Point One

After the false start of the upper weekend, Nigeria finally made it to the poll last Saturday as citizens got to cast their ballots, hopefully in full accordance with their electoral wishes. Done now with the voting, we face the harder part: awaiting the declaration of outcomes by the umpire. Waiting on the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) to declare results for various constituencies involved in the poll is typically a nerve-wracking game of suspense. But appreciating the scope and design of the activity at play should help in understanding why the wait, and perhaps how to. The elections last Saturday were the national elections. The state elections, for governorships and state houses of assembly seats, are scheduled to hold a fortnight from now. Polling units nationwide where voters expectedly cast their ballots and from which vote counts are being pooled number 119, 973, with some of these further decentralised into 57, 023 voting points. There are 91 political ...

Elections are about the most complex and intricately woven multi-faceted but concerted venture that could be undertaken by highly fallible humans. What people get to see as polling day proceedings are a tidy convergence of multiple strands of assignments that had been worked into a schedule motif by sundry players in the poll project – most especially the election management body, which is the lead player and anchor of the project. When any single strand of those lines of responsibilities falls short on expectation, however, the election project gets endangered to the extent of the centrality of that particular activity to the whole project.   This scenario is all the more complicated in our clime where elections are like an all-out war that takes no hostages. Owing to avowed security dictates, scheduled days of election are effectively ‘paralysis days’ as pertains to all other human engagements. In other words, no other serious activity ever gets fixed for days...