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It appears that
the Independent National Election Commission (INEC) under the
leadership of Attahiru Jega, has quietly started an in house
investigation into the conduct of some of its employees who are
suspected of aiding the fraud in the Ekiti State governorship election
re-run.

According to
reports, the commission has set up a three-man panel to investigate, in
the first place, the conduct of Ayoka Adebayo, the resident Electoral
Commissioner in Ondo State at the time of the elections. INEC is
believed to also be investigating the conduct of other electoral
officers particularly in areas where elections results have been
overturned or cancelled. The body is reported to have started, what is
believed to be the first phase of a house cleaning exercise to ensure
it does not go into next year’s polls with officers of questionable
integrity.

INEC certainly has
its work cut out. Recent electoral verdicts in Ekiti, Osun, Ondo, Edo
and Anambra States are an indication of wide spread problems during the
last elections, and it is right that INEC is trying to do what it can
to weed out staff with tainted credibility.

We at NEXT commend
INEC for this quietly taken but ultimately critical decision. It is
good that INEC set a precedent as we limber up for elections next year.
It is proper that INEC staff found to have colluded with election
riggers be booted out and not be given another chance to steal people’s
votes. It is also commendable that INEC is undertaking this
housekeeping exercise without making a song and dance about it. Far too
many times, public institutions announce grand plans, which ultimately
fail to materialize.

However, INEC’s
actions alone cannot guarantee the end of rigging, so we are also
recommending that the Judicial Commission borrow a leaf from INEC and
look into punishing members of the bench who are found guilty of
colluding with riggers. Earlier election tribunals had mixed results
and in some cases appeared to have sided with riggers. It is important
that if any wrongdoing took place, it be sanctioned.

The only way to know for sure is if the Judicial Commission begins a house cleaning exercise just like INEC.

But again, even
that will not be enough to push the final nail in the coffin of
riggers. We at NEXT believe we must also find means of sanctioning
those who benefit from rigged elections. It is not enough to hold
electoral officers and members of the judiciary to account, the
politicians who get into office as a result of fraudulent elections
must also be penalised.

So far the
National Assembly has refused to criminalise rigging. There are no
provisions in the new Electoral Act or the new Constitution for
punishing the principal beneficiaries of rigged elections. In other
words, we do not have a mechanism for indicting those who are most
likely to initiate the process of rigging. We at NEXT believe that the
law should be crafted along the same lines as the law dealing with
theft where both thieves and receivers of stolen goods, get punished.

The National
Assembly is still in the process of making amendments to the
Constitution. It is not too late for it to do right by Nigeria by
ensuring that this class of cheats gets their just desserts. We
recommend a ban from elective office for five years, for first time
offenders and a life ban for repeat offenders. This should be in
addition to efforts made to recover any benefits, monetary and
otherwise, the person has enjoyed as a result of sitting in a public
office illegally.

As long as
beneficiaries can walk away from rigged elections with no penalty, they
will continue to use their immense resources to tempt not only poorly
paid civil servants and electoral officers, but young disenfranchised
youths who they turn into political thugs. Our only hope of dealing a
deadly blow to electoral fraud and rigging is if everyone who takes
part in rigging faces severe sanctions.

Imagine, for a
moment, that George W. Bush had been president when the Transportation
Security Administration decided to let Thanksgiving travellers choose
between exposing their nether regions to a body scanner or enduring a
private security massage: Democrats would have been outraged at yet
another Bush-era assault on civil liberties; Liberal pundits would have
outdone one another comparing the TSA to this or that police state; and
Republicans would have leaped to the Bush administration’s defense,
while accusing liberals of going soft on terrorism.

But Barack Obama is
our president instead, so the body-scanner debate played out rather
differently. True, some conservatives invoked 9/11 to defend the TSA,
and some liberals denounced the measures as an affront to American
liberties. Such ideological consistency, though, was the exception;
mostly, the Bush-era script was read in reverse.

It was the populist
right that raged against body scans, and the Republican Party that
moved briskly to exploit the furor. It was a Democratic administration
that labored to justify the intrusive procedures, and the liberal
commentariat that leaped to their defense.

This role reversal
is a case study in the awesome power of the partisan mindset. Up to a
point, American politics reflects abiding philosophical divisions. But
people who follow politics closely – whether voters, activists or
pundits – are often partisans first and ideologues second. Instead of
assessing every policy on the merits, we tend to reverse-engineer the
arguments required to justify whatever our own side happens to be
doing. Our ideological convictions may be real enough, but our deepest
conviction is often that the other guys can’t be trusted.

How potent is the
psychology of partisanship? Potent enough to influence not only policy
views, but our perception of broader realities as well.

A majority of
Democrats spent the late 1980s convinced that inflation had risen under
Ronald Reagan, when it had really dropped precipitously. In 1996, a
majority of Republicans claimed that the deficit had increased under
Bill Clinton, when it had steadily shrunk instead. Late in the Bush
presidency, Republicans were twice as likely as similarly situated
Democrats to tell pollsters that the economy was performing well. In
every case, the external facts mattered less than how the person being
polled felt about the party in power.

This tendency is
vividly illustrated by our national security debates. In the 1990s,
many Democrats embraced Clinton’s wars of choice in the Balkans and
accepted his encroachments on civil liberties after the Oklahoma City
bombing, while many Republicans tilted noninterventionist and
libertarian. If Al Gore had been president on 9/11, this pattern might
have persisted, with conservatives resisting the Patriot Act the way
they’ve rallied against the TSA’s Rapiscan technology, and Vice
President Joe Lieberman prodding his fellow Democrats in a more
Cheney-esque direction on detainee policy.

But because a
Republican was president instead, conservative partisans suppressed
their libertarian impulses and accepted the logic of an open-ended war
on terror, while Democratic partisans took turns accusing the Bush
administration of shredding the Constitution.

Now that a Democrat
is in the White House, the pendulum is swinging back. In 2006, Gallup
asked the public whether the government posed an “immediate threat” to
Americans. Only 21 percent of Republicans agreed, versus 57 percent of
Democrats. In 2010, they asked again. This time, 21 percent of
Democrats said yes, compared with 66 percent of Republicans.

In other words,
millions of liberals can live with indefinite detention for accused
terrorists and intimate body scans for everyone else, so long as a
Democrat is overseeing them. And millions of conservatives find wartime
security measures vastly more frightening when they’re pushed by Janet
“Big Sis” Napolitano (as the Drudge Report calls her) rather than a
Republican like Tom Ridge.

Is there anything
good to be said about the partisan mindset? On an individual level, no.
It corrupts the intellect and poisons the wells of human sympathy.
Honor belongs to the people who resist partisanship’s pull, instead of
rowing with it.

But for the country
as a whole, partisanship does have one modest virtue. It guarantees
that even when there’s an elite consensus behind whatever the ruling
party wants to do (whether it’s invading Iraq or passing Obamacare),
there will always be a reasonably passionate opposition as well. Given
how much authority is concentrated in Washington, especially in the
executive branch, even a hypocritical and inconsistent opposition is
better than no opposition at all.

At the very least,
the power of partisanship means that there will always be someone
around, when Americans are standing spread-eagled and exposed in the
glare of Rapiscan, to speak up and say “enough!”

© 2010 New York Times News Service

With so much stress
in a country like Nigeria today, many people easily get edgy, snapping
at others over trivial issues, heckling and biting and tearing.
Obviously, the emotional lives of many people are in the kind of
trouble that constantly looks for ways of expression.

If you want to
make matters worse when someone is “boiling,” advise that person to
seek help from a psychiatrist. Who would agree with you if, during the
imbroglio that results, you start delivering a lecture on how what you
said was not what you meant? Definitely, madness is enjoyable when it
involves at least two people who cooperate.

Teasing is one of
the wonderful ways that human beings use discourse in softening the
seriousness of everyday struggles. Men tease women and women tease men.
But more than just being a matter of laughing at the other, it is a
great way of laughing with the other.

In my Igbo culture,
teasing the opposite sex does not attract extreme censure form the
guardians of political correctness, even when viewed through the lens
of modern gender consciousness, it is easy to read the expressions as
offensive.

A woman could turn to a man and say: “Go and shave your beard; it makes you look like a monster!”

And the man, without any feeling of hurt, would tell her: “You are jealous of my beard!”

And the woman would deny it flatly: “How can? I don’t belong to the zoo.”

And the man, smiling, would give it back to her: “When you women start telling the truth, you will start growing beards.”

And the woman, in mock annoyance, would cry out: “The truth is that we don’t want it!”

And the man would fire back: “Oh, I forgot that you women actually have beards, but at the wrong places.”

And the woman would laugh and playfully hit him with her fists or with any harmless object she is holding.

And to consolidate
his victory in this debate, the man would add: “You women want us to be
like you; that’s just what you want.”

Where else could
one still find this kind of cross- gender humorous exchange than in an
African rural community where, in spite of the so-much advertised
mistreatment of women, there exists some mutual understanding that this
kind of banter feeds community life? Women freely joke about men’s
sexual lives and weaknesses, and men do so too. They do not see this
kind of talk as being morally contaminating to the extent that they
would no longer be able to talk later with their Maker.

It is not all about
the body and sex: it could also be a focus on food and the kitchen.
Although in modern feminist agitation, cooking for the family is
sometimes viewed as one area of domestic life where the metaphorical
and literal enslavement of women is enacted in the patriarchal context,
men in local Nigerian environment reconfigure the kitchen as
“cheating,” using this play on the sound of “kitchen” to suggest the
woman’s conspiratorial posture. Articulating “kitchen” as “cheating” is
an invitation to laugh at a serious fear about what a woman could do
with, and in, the kitchen where she presides over the stomach of the
family, or over the stomach of her man.

Local Nigerian men,
in teasing women as being in their “cheating” instead of “kitchen”
confess to the enormous power that women wield as those in charge of
food preparation, not only because a woman may choose to eat the
choicest part of the food in the kitchen before serving it, but also
because she decides what quantity and quality to serve the man. She can
also decide to snuff out the life of her man by dropping a little
dangerous something in the egusi soup she is going to serve him, and
there goes Papa Ngozi, twitching and twisting like a worm as he joins
his ancestors!

When men tease
women about “being in the cheating”, they are actually crying in their
laughter, crying in their souls about the danger they have brought upon
their lives by insisting that cooking for the family is a woman’s task.
Perhaps, women recognise this cry of despair in men’s deconstruction of
“kitchen” and so some of them try to intensify the fear in their
responses, for instance saying, “Yes, the kitchen is my office. That is
where I sign my signature before you can eat any thing!” Or, by saying:
“You can return to the kitchen to burn your beard if you like; that
would perhaps teach you what a barbecue is like!”

The laughter in the
verbal hide-and-seek remains an essential part of a gendered tenor in
social interaction. It gives men and women the opportunity to play with
words, with their gender differences, and with hopes and fears.
Essentially, that act of playing with words with the gendered other
announces that a society that cannot laugh at its differences and
conflicts has not even got enough capacity to manage them.

When President
Jonathan assumed the office 7 months ago, most Nigerians including this
writer were willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. But as the
saying goes, “show me your advisers, and I’ll tell you what kind of
leader you are.”

Take the
“Honorable” Minister finance for example, I sent him three email
messages on my idea to create over 100,000 jobs for Nigerians. He got
all the mail, and read them, as confirmed by my outlook. He did not
even have the courtesy to respond.

Twenty-five years
ago, I had sent a graduate research idea to President Buhari, through
the Nigerian embassy, to encourage Nigeria to create a sovereign wealth
fund, buy refineries and retail gas stations in the U.S. This was my
initial reason for contacting Mr. Aganga to congratulate him for
encouraging the Nigerian government to start a sovereign wealth fund.
But I was disappointed in his failure to even respond.

I sent similar
letters to the minister of information, Mrs. Akunyili, about my idea to
create up to $6 billion of internally generated funds for Nigeria
without borrowing, and up till today, I have yet to receive a response.
At least, when I send similar suggestions to U.S administrators,
including those at the White House, I usually get a response.

My doubts about
the competence of the people that the president surrounds himself with,
were confirmed when Mr. Aganga said a few months ago that Nigeria’s
unemployment rate was 19.7%. I searched everywhere to find out where he
got his numbers from and I am still looking.

My contact with
the Nigerian minister of power has not been that positive either, since
Mr. President is his own minister of power, I would have thought that
the ministry would be more responsive. In the six months since we we’ve
been talking to Mr. President about generating power, China has built
over 36,000 megawatts of power for its people. It is one thing to write
slogans on the pages of Facebook, but Nigerians need electricity and
jobs.

A few days ago,
Mr. Aganga stated that Mr. Atiku has poor knowledge of the economy. Out
of the over 130 comments on the pages of Next, 90% challenged Mr.
Aganga’s explanation of the state of Nigeria’s economy. While most did
not side with Mr. Atiku, they all concluded that Nigeria’s economy is
heading in the wrong direction. So instead of the Jonathan government
coming up with concrete facts and plans, they think it is better to
keep slinging mud at others who criticize their rudderless ship.

Mr. Aganga claimed
that the government spent $5.6 billion on NIPP, yet Nigerians are still
in darkness. Yesterday, the Presidential adviser on power, Prof. Nnaji
stated that Nigeria aims for 20,000 megawatts of power in the next 10
years yet it takes China less than six months to build 20,000
megawatts.

The question is,
why would it take Nigeria 10 years? I am still awaiting a response to
the email I sent to Prof Nnaji six weeks ago regarding information on
his road map and the procedure required to obtain a power purchase
agreement with the Nigerian government. These are some of the questions
Nigerians should be asking when they go to the polls in 90 days, Can
President Jonathan solve Nigeria’s power problem and create jobs for
Nigerians

The lesson is that
Nigerians are no longer as gullible as the politicians assume. If the
president thinks he can win the election by throwing numbers around
instead of coming up with concrete plans on how to fix the economy,
provide electricity and create jobs, he may be surprised that Nigerians
would rather support someone else instead of a leader who has
surrounded himself with yes men and women who can’t even respond to
suggestions from Nigerians.

Show me your advisers, and I’ll show you what kind of leader you are.

Toyin Dawodu is
the Managing partner of Capital Investment Group and founder of Nigeria
Let There be light, a movement to create meaningful change in Nigeria.

toyin@capvestgroup.com