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Advocacy and
pressure groups, newspaper columns and editorials, politicians and
lawyers, in fact Nigerians in general, high and low all have had a
convergence of opinion that everything must be done to give the country
free and fair elections, no matter what it takes in terms of effort; no
matter the sacrifice in terms of commitment.

Last week the
federal government announced with a tone that had echoes of that old
military alacrity and immediate effect that students in the country at
primary and secondary levels are to stay home for a full month to aid
the completion of a new – or updated – voters’ register.

It goes without
saying that this announcement was another bungled affair. Depriving
children of one month of education isn’t something that you announce
with fiat and for the Jonathan administration to disregard the
feelings, consequences and implications – financial, social, legal and
constitutional – for our federal system and the millions of parents and
children across the country, only goes to underscore the amateurish
hands that guide it.

Of course we are
aware that the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), has a
major task ahead of it to buck the trend of past elections and
efficiently manage the logistics, planning and implementation to
produce a contest that is free and fair in the scant three months it
has left.

The current
chairman of INEC came into office to clean up a mess he had no part in
creating. Nigeria spent 2010 trying to avoid a constitutional crisis
forced upon us by the selfishness of a cabal intent on keeping one man
in office so much that we could not focus on the important task of
equipping our electoral commission to organise elections worth having.
Seen simply in this context, it is not difficult to understand the
imperative that has driven the decision to extend school holidays by a
month.

It is indeed
possible that one extra week instead of four could be all that is
necessary to complete an exercise that we have known for well nigh two
years now, was vital for clean elections. The late President Yar’Adua
was dogged by the spectre of the rigged election that brought him to
power in 2007. His inaugural promise then was to reform our electoral
system. He never made it, dogged as he was by the ill health that
should, all things considered, have made him ineligible for the
presidency that he ‘won’. It is an object lesson that what is done
improperly can never be made whole. So too with democracy.

That now is the problem with this arbitrarily decreed closure of schools.

There is the
argument that it is impossible to use many other alternatives, such as
places of worship, to conduct the voter registration exercise. There
are barely 1, 000 post offices, less than 20000 eateries and less than
1000 local council offices we are informed. Of the 120, 000 locations
slated for voter registration, 85% of them are schools. There is no way
that the exercise can properly function if these schools are in
session. Common sense should have dictated then that the programme be
scheduled for when the schools were on holiday. Even with the chaos
that has accompanied our chequered path to this election there surely
should have been someone thinking of this. We have been down this road
before.

That this did not
happen is only symptomatic of the adhoc behaviour that substitutes for
planning in the PDP administration that has been in government for the
last twelve years. Add to that the abysmal handling of education at all
levels and it is clear why the political leadership can see nothing
untoward in making school children and their parents pay the price for
‘credible elections’, and on top of that imagine that Nigerians would
‘just take it’.