Preliminary situation reports of violence from the two states of Kogi and Bayelsa States, where governorship and Senatorial elections held saturday were nothing more than a huge disappointment.
It is commonplace that elections in Nigeria are like war and this has been the situation from time immemorial. But with some of the recent efforts put into certain reforms geared towards improving the process, especially attitudinal, expectations were that things would have improved and that some of the electoral misgivings would have been put in the past.
Sadly, the 2019 general election was in its entirety a shadow of the ugly past, yet, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) gave excuses why some of the identified lapses were almost inevitable. It went on to promise a degree of improvement.
But reports, yesterday, from Kogi and Bayelsa States were utterly disappointing and a pointer to the fact that the nation’s electoral process may have been doomed for good. Elections in this part of the world cannot always be war otherwise Nigeria is simply still far away from the much sought after civilisation.
