Icheoku joins millions of well meaning Nigerian democracy enthusiasts in condemning the cancellation of today's scheduled parliamentary election. The reason given is both inadequate and insufficient to prevent voting by Nigerians as it is not such humongous intervening act as would cause an election to be cancelled. Such act envisaged include major earthquake, tsunami as witnessed in Japan, military coup de'tat or such other act of God as would make it impossible but not impracticable to conduct the election.
If due to some logistical nightmare, INEC could not conduct elections in certain parts of the country, they should have conducted it in those areas where it is feasible and then reschedule those impossible areas at a later future date; but to cancel the entire election is an affront on Nigerians and their desire for real democracy in Nigeria. Professor Jega had all these months to carry out test-runs on conducting the election and despite the billions which his INEC is awashed with to enable him conduct a free and fair election, he failed to pull it off as scheduled. Icheoku's verdict, Professor Attahiru Jega has failed to provide the required leadership that will guarantee Nigerians fair elections and therefore should consider resigning now as he had threatened in the past. Icheoku aligns itself with the Conference of Nigerian Political Parties in calling the postponement or cancellation of today's election "an unwarranted false start" by Jega's INEC.
Icheoku asks, if election materials could not be delivered since these past days, what is the guarantee that a weekend will now make any difference and that they will be ready as promised on Monday? What happens to those ballots already cast? What happens to the now leaked ballot samples which some unscrupulous politicians will now print and with them rig the elections? There are simply too many questions for Jega's INEC to answer and Icheoku says, this weekend alone will not make any difference. Such a catastrophic failure in logistics requires more than a weekend's patch-work to fix, so INEC would have postponed the entire exercise for one week or two to properly get its acts together. The implication is that this election is now tainted and any result coming out of the deferred process will be questionable with eventual losers claiming they would have won and vice versa.
Icheoku says no explanation is good enough since INEC did not suddenly realize they had insufficient time to prepare and conduct the election yet they undertook it anyway. Icheoku had warned about it while advocating for an extended time to conduct a proper election but no one listened only for this shoddiness at the eleventh hour. A credible electoral body worth its paycheck would have conducted trial runs on its logistics and even conducted mock elections to see the lapses that need to be fixed and since fixed it instead of waiting for the real thing to deliver this shocker of election postponement. Icheoku says, not in our name and we condemn INEC's action and hereby call on Professor Jega to resign for gross incompetence. Jega should have soldiered on under the circumstances but rather he chose to drop the ball on Nigerians, the easy way out. Jega should not be allowed to explain himself out of this displayed incompetence, not after the billions that he requested and got for this exercise! Nigerians had hope that he was the man for the job, but not anymore. What a pity!
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