Public Affairs Analyst

One eyewitness is of more weight than 10 hearsays    – Plautus I was an accredited observer in the September 22, 2018 governorship election in Osun State. I was part of the Nigeria Women Trust Fund team of Independent National Electoral Commission-accredited poll watchers.   The NWTF set the pace by deploying an all-female 63 observers (two exceptions being myself and Mustapha Yahaya, the Executive Director of Democratic Action Group, Kano). The aim was to conduct gender-focused election observation. We arrived Osogbo, the Osun State capital on Thursday, September 20, 2018. The same day, we trained the observers. We equally spared time to attend the INEC Observer Briefing. A day before the election, we had a pre-election observation trip across the three senatorial districts of the state and addressed a press conference on our observation the same day. The NWTF observers were stationary in the Polling Units they were deployed from the opening to closing of polls. Ho...

“When it comes to fighting corruption in the National Assembly and the Judiciary and in the larger Nigerian sectors, the President uses insecticide, but when it comes to fighting corruption within the Presidency, they use deodorants.” – Senator Shehu Sani in January 2017. President Muhammadu Buhari campaigned on a three-point agenda in the lead-up to the 2015 general election. He promised to fight insecurity, revamp the economy and tackle corruption. On these, while he may have recorded some baby-step successes, his performance has been anything but sterling.   In all honesty, we cannot in good conscience claim to be more secure now than we were before Buhari came to power on May 29, 2015. While he’s been able to contain the Boko Haram insurgency in the North-East, banditry, herdsmen killings and kidnapping have soared. The economy is still on tenterhooks with Nigeria currently ranked as the country with the highest number of poor people in the world while the anti-corruptio...

“The card reader is not in danger of being discarded. It is a sine qua non for credible elections. We appeal to the National Assembly to reconvene as soon as possible to consider and approve the necessary corrections to the amended Electoral Act” –Garba Shehu, Senior Special Assistant to President Muhammadu Buhari on Media and Publicity in a press statement   on Sunday, September 9, 2018 Since President Muhammadu Buhari’s decision to withhold assent for the third time on the Electoral Act Amendment Bill 2018 was made public on Monday, September 3, 2018, a lot of motives have been read into his action. Critics believe that the President does not want credible elections in 2019. They claim that the President is afraid of allowing the law to recognise the use of Smart Card Reader for voter accreditation.   Not even the explanation of clerical errors, inelegant drafting and cross-referencing issues in the bill as advanced by the President’s aide on legislative matters (Senat...

It’s 163 days to February 16 commencement date for the two legged 2019 general election. With barely five months to the sixth general election in this Fourth Republic, the funding for the election is yet to be approved by the National Assembly while the long awaited presidential assent to the proposed Electoral Amendment Bill 2018 has for the second time this year been withheld by President Muhammadu Buhari over what he called clerical and drafting errors. I am very unhappy with the aforementioned development as they threatened the success and credibility of the planned 2019 elections. As things stand now, it is becoming very likely that next year elections may be postponed. Even then, all elections have to be concluded at least 30 days to the expiration of the term of the current holders of office according to 1999 Constitution of Nigeria, as amended in 2018. How did we get to this sorry pass? How come the election budget of the Independent National Electoral Commission was not ...