Nigeria Content Online

How can somebody die in the middle of a service of all places?

I was ministering
at a service at Christian Video Network, Lagos. Suddenly, I observed
that a lady in the second row was fidgety. She seemed very
uncomfortable. Then, she got up and rushed out.

Soon after, someone
came in, spoke to some women, who also rushed out. The service
continued but some thirty minutes later, someone came in again. This
time, she walked up to me and interrupted the service. “We seem to have
a crisis on our hands,” she said. “Mrs. Osanyinjobi had an asthma
attack. We’ve done all we can to help her. I am afraid the woman is
dead.”

Dead on arrival

Dead? I could not
believe it. How can somebody die in the middle of a service of all
places? What kind of embarrassment was this? The whole church
practically moved to the room where she was. There I met the ladies who
had apparently spent the last thirty minutes trying to revive her and
were now resigned to the inevitable.

I knelt down beside
this woman’s lifeless body and started to pray. “Father, she will not
die but live to declare the works of the Lord in the land of the
living. You are the Lord that heals. You took our infirmities and
carried away our sicknesses. By your stripes we are healed. You are the
Sun of righteousness. Arise with healing in your wings. You are the
balm of Gilead. Healing is the children’s bread.”

I went on and on
and on, praying every scripture I could think of. After a while, I
became exhausted. I did not know what else to say or to pray. I was
young in ministry, and could not handle this kind of crisis. So I
stopped praying and cried to the Lord in my heart. “Father,” I cried,
“I need help. I don’t even know what to pray any more. I don’t know
what other scriptures to claim.”

Jehovah-Shammah

And then something
happened. It was something magical; something glorious. The Lord spoke.
I heard him as clear as a bell. “Femi,” he said. “Pray in tongues.”

That solved the
problem. Immediately, I calmed down. I realised I was not alone. The
Lord was there. So I switched to praying in tongues. I prayed and
prayed and prayed. And just as suddenly, something happened again.

Out of the blue;
out of nowhere; Mrs. Osanyinjobi sneezed. Then she opened her eyes and
sat up. Then I helped her to stand up. And everybody went absolutely
crazy with joy.

We went back with
her to the service with dancing and singing and shouting and clapping.
She sat down calmly in a corner. But the Lord said to me: “Ask her to
dance.” So I asked Mrs. Bola Osanyinjobi to join in the dance. And to
the amazement of all, there was this woman, who had been lifeless for
hours, dancing with everybody else as though nothing whatsoever had
happened.

Talitha-kumi

Pamela Momah,
Deputy-Director of Library, Nigerian Institute of International
Affairs, Lagos had a stroke. She was rushed to Military Hospital,
Onikan, Lagos. When we went to see her, we were overjoyed it was mild.
But while still with her, another drama ensued.

A man had brought
his sick child for treatment, but he had no money. Therefore, the
nurses ignored him. Suddenly, the boy died, right there and then in his
arms. He let out a big cry. My colleague, Pastor Sandra Chikan, had
apparently been watching the drama for some time. “This man kept
pleading with the nurses,” she said. “But they refused to attend to
him. Look now, his son has died.”

Without thinking,
Sandra and I descended on the scene. I grabbed the dead child from the
arms of his wailing father, and we started to call upon the name of the
Lord. Sandra and I prayed fervently, confident that God is more than
able to raise the child from the dead.

After a while, God
honoured our faith and answered our prayer. Life flowed back into the
boy and he opened his eyes. Rejoicing, we handed him back to his
astonished father.

At last, the nurses
agreed to attend to him. They took him away, still grumbling that the
boy’s father could not afford the treatment.

About an hour
later, a male nurse came to us with a strange announcement. “The boy
has died again,” he said with a tone of finality. Then he stormed out
of the room, leaving us with nothing left to do than to console his
grieving father.

Jesus says: “I am
the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me, though he may
die, he shall live. And whoever lives and believes in me shall never
die” (Jn 11:25-26).

articleoffaith@234next.com

House Republicans are seeking to abolish the
Federal Election Assistance Commission – as if the nation is fully
recovered from the hanging-chad nightmare of 2000. The 9-year-old
commission was created in bipartisan Congressional resolve to repair
the nation’s crazy quilt of tattered election standards and faltering
machinery.

The commission was charged with upgrading the
mechanics of voting by certifying electoral equipment, channelling
needed federal aid and guidance to states, and developing a national
mail-in voter registration system. After a slow start, it has made
progress as the 2012 elections loom. But there is still a lot more that
needs repairing.

Representative Gregg Harper, a Mississippi
Republican and the elections subcommittee chairman, nevertheless
insists that the commission “is no longer essential” and is leading the
drive to flat-line it for a savings of $18 million. Surreally, a
related Republican bill would transfer the agency’s mandate to the
Federal Election Commission – Washington’s nonpareil in agency
dysfunction. That would only invite partisan standoff and voting
scandal.

The Election Assistance Commission should have
been focused earlier on pushing all states to require a paper trail
with their post-chad electronic voting machines. But it has tested
voting systems for accuracy, and it oversees the special requirements
of military and disabled voters. It could make more progress if
turf-minded state officials were more open to its valuable studies on
better ballot design. Far from going out of the business, the
commission needs renewed support from Congress. For the sake of
credible elections, the House gambit should be rebuffed.

Editorial – New York Times

Published: April 21, 2011

The ancients in
Judea had no concept of zero. That is why a period of what seems to be
at most 40 hours comes out as ‘the third day’, with Good Friday being
the first day and today, Easter Sunday, the third day on the morning of
which the tomb of Jesus Christ was found empty.

Conversely, by
counting the non-event of April 2 as a zero, it is not out of place to
look forward to Tuesday April 26 as ‘the third day’ of our general
elections cycle in Nigeria.

Until last week,
one could have said that it is state elections that excite the most
passion and strife in Nigeria, and that the third day of elections
might present even greater challenges than those of the second. But
now, some politicians whose candidates lost the presidential election
are complaining. Even the Action Congress of Nigeria, whose
presidential candidate had earlier conceded defeat, is ‘analysing
voting patterns’ instead of consulting its own agents and doing its own
mathematics.

It is not
reasonable to complain that 90-something per cent of the voters who
turned out for the presidential election in the south-south and south
east chose to vote for the winning Peoples Democratic Party candidate:
there are people all over the federation who can attest that at their
own individual polling stations, the votes all went one way. Indeed,
the grim joke in the two zones where Muhammad Buhari hardly campaigned
at all is that there must have been some rigging for him to secure even
the few votes that were recorded in his favour, so meagre was his
support there.

It is more
reasonable to suspect results where there was an unusually high
turn-out of registered voters last Saturday. But did that high turn-out
produce Goodluck Jonathan’s victory? There are grounds for suspecting
that those figures have less to do with election-rigging in President
Jonathan’s favour (since he might still have had both the necessary
plurality and the percentages of the vote for victory even with a lower
turnout) and more to do with practising for next Tuesday’s state
elections. Nigerians are certainly fed up with being told that “he
would have won anyway”, but it is precisely to show what would have
been the margin of that winning (if at all) that the parties must
gather the results from their own agents. It will be interesting to see
whether the states with the most hotly contested gubernatorial races:
where the incumbent knows that he has not performed well, or is
unpopular, or facing a strong challenge, are among those with the
magically high turn-out numbers for the presidential poll.

After all, while
the so-called ‘Modified Open Ballot System’ of accreditation and
simultaneous voting across the country remains the best way of
conducting a credible election where the voters’ register remains
suspect, it would have been naïve to imagine that desperate people
would not be working overtime to see how they can defeat the system,
and perhaps to use the presidential election as a ‘dry run’.

At this stage, it
is impossible to tell whether the coming third day is going to herald
any kind of glorious resurrection for the Nigerian nation. We’ve
certainly had the death part of the Easter story, and it is
particularly poignant to think that youth corps members – on whose
shoulders much of the credit for the successful conduct of the
elections rests – have been killed by other young people protesting the
outcome of the elections. Much work needs to be done among those
disaffected young people who could not accept or understand that the
fact that they themselves all voted for one candidate does not mean
that the candidate must necessarily win an election in which all parts
of Nigeria are voting.

Attahiru Jega, the
INEC Chair, can probably say a few things about being on the receiving
end of shouts that veer so wildly from ‘Crucify him!’ to ‘Hosanna!’ and
back again. But he was given a Herculean task with far too little time
to accomplish it. So with the imperfect architecture that the outgoing
National Assembly cobbled together out of the Mohammed Uwais-led
Committee on Electoral Reform’s recommendations, the best we should
have expected was – not a ‘free and fair’ election (which would have
required an effective way of monitoring campaign spending, media
access, and the use and/or abuse of government resources) – but a
credible poll which accurately reflected the votes cast by the
electorate on polling day.

With even those
modest hopes seeming rather dead and buried, it would probably take a
miracle for the coming polls to be better than the two that went
before. But then, aren’t those just the kind of hopes that, at
Eastertide, are realised on the third day?

Are the political
parties not to blame for this post-election violence because they
failed to educate their supporters on what it TRULY takes to be elected
as President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria?

No matter what one
told the fans of any of the candidates and/or the political parties
prior to the elections, they would just not accept that personal
opinion about the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) would not count. Love
or hate the party, everything favoured her: the numbers, the reach, and
the mathematical formula thrown up by the 1999 Constitution as amended;
these were the factors that would support a president’s general
acceptability to majority of Nigerians, whether you liked it or not.

The test of ‘General acceptability’ is specified in S134 (2) (a) and (b) of the Constitution:

A candidate for an
election to the office of President shall be deemed to have been duly
elected where, there being more than two candidates for the election-

(a) He has the highest number of votes cast at the election: and

(b) He has not less
than one-quarter of the votes cast at the election in each of at least
two-thirds of all the States in the Federation and the Federal Capital
Territory, Abuja.

What this means is
that one’s wishes mean zilch! So too, do perception of popularity,
fanatical acceptance and/or uncanny popularity in one region of the
country. This law, OUR law, recognizes six zones: an average of six
states a zone. If the Constitution recommends the President-elect win
at least two-thirds of ALL the states in the Federation and [in
addition to] Abuja, that is 24 states, at six states a region
therefore, it means that the Constitution expects him to be the choice
of a minimum of 25 per cent of ALL voters in a minimum of four regions
or 24 states.

This politics, one
agrees, can be a bitter pill to swallow. One had previously mourned the
loss of straightforward You-defeat-me-and-I-lose-to-you elections; you
know, the type where people vote, we count the votes and he who scores
the most wins. Human beings, we JUST like to complicate our lives! If
not, why qualify a straightforward requirement further by specifying
exactly what it SHALL mean when the President-elect has “the highest
number of votes cast at the election”?

It is also not for
nothing that the Constitution makes the country one constituency, so
that regional strength will come to nil when electing the president.
Reach is paramount. You are forgiven if you thought scoring high per se
meant anything; in addition, the candidate must make sure there is
nothing left for his opponents to count. Don’t forget that total number
of votes cast will also depend on voter response to the voting itself.
If many don’t vote, there won’t be votes to share, will there? Beyond
registration before and accreditation on the morning of election,
people must actually vote.

In Lagos State for
instance, where about six million are registered, it would be
interesting to see how the parties fare if almost everyone came out to
vote. The truth is that the most popular [ruling] party in any state
mobilizes more; perhaps because the ruling party corners all official
privileges and perks that come with being affiliated to or with a
serving government, to the dismay of other parties in the state. Access
to government owned media by opposition parties is still not equal! And
it is a fact that only ruling parties ‘in’ government can afford to
campaign to ALL the corners of a state or country. Opposition
candidates can NEVER spend as much as the incumbent. Therefore, it
shouldn’t surprise anyone that Goodluck Jonathan got votes even in
those areas where he was perceived to be weak. You underestimate the
power of a presidential campaign by an incumbent
Really-Constitutionally-Powerful President at your peril!

In Kaduna for
instance, it was not enough for the Congress for Progressive Change
[CPC] to score 1,334,244; it should have frustrated PDP with over two
million votes. Leaving a massive 1,190,179 votes to PDP was bad Math.
But look at Imo State; PDP selfishly swept 1,381,357 votes, leaving a
measly 14,821 for ACN in second place and 7,591 for CPC in third place.
In other words, President Jonathan made it difficult for any party to
score an extra 25 per cent in Imo State, taking the glory alone there,
but sharing CPC’s glory in Kaduna. Politics, like law, is an ass! Is it
just too painful for those who voted differently to accept that 22
million Nigerians like GOJO?

Jonathan won the election, Buhari second and Ribadu third.

Jonathan’s PDP attracted 22,495,187 votes or 58.89
per cent of the votes cast. Buhari’s CPC took 12,214,853 votes or 31.98
per cent and Ribadu’s ACN 2,079,151 votes or 5.41 per cent. Seventeen
other parties shared the remaining 3.72 per cent of the votes. That is
a very sizable margin for winning an election.

There are protests claiming rigging as we have
come to expect over the years of Nigeria’s election and the courts have
shown that they will give the fullest attention to any case of
electoral fraud brought before them. But whichever way you cut it,
these elections have been a significant improvement on previous
elections in Nigeria. What do the independent electoral observers say?

The Commonwealth Observer Group, the European
Union (EU) Election Observation Mission, the African Union (AU) and the
National Democratic Institute (NDI) all acknowledged the vast
improvement and praised the Independent Electoral Commission (INEC)
accordingly.

Alojz Peterle, Head of the EU Observer Group said, “Election day showed a generally peaceful and orderly process.”

The Head of the Commonwealth Observer Group and
former President of Botswana, Festus Mogae, said that problems in the
conduct of the election were negligible and Nigerians should accept the
outcome.

“Though there were minor technical or procedural
imperfections, they were not related to mischief. I think the election
was credible.”

Both the Commonwealth and EU teams noted that
there were shortcomings in the electoral process that will be detailed
in their respective final reports.

And thus, the point that Goodluck Jonathan must
ensure that the process of electoral reform is continued. To that end
he must give Attahiru Jega the mandate for INEC to continue the reform,
give him the resources to complete the job and a timetable to produce
the results. There can be no reason why 2015 elections should not be
the best that has ever been seen in any African nation and that means
no rigging, peaceful, free and fair.

Then there is the task of getting on with the job
of running the country and it is here that President Jonathan has a set
of tasks that most Nigerians would agree need to be addressed. Some,
such as power sector reform and signing off the Petroleum Sector Bill,
are hanging over from the previous term. Others such as setting up a
sovereign wealth fund protected by the constitution, as this column has
previously advocated (On Watch: Oil Opportunity, March 13, 2011) would
be a good way of preventing the excess crude account from being
plundered and preserving a portion of Nigeria’s oil wealth for the
future.

It’s relatively easy to tell the President how to
run the country. Being President and implementing these suggestions is
probably the hardest job in Nigeria. However, this should not deter us
from constructing a list for Mr President’s attention. On my list of
‘things to do’, I have the following:

1. Roll out the power sector reform

2. Sign the Petroleum Industry Bill

3. Review and restructure the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation

4. Set up and constitutionally preserve a Sovereign Wealth Fund

5. Reform the Solid Minerals sector

6. Roll out an economic stimulus package for the north that has agriculture and mineral development as its core

What does your list look like? If you were
President, what would be the top five items on your list of things to
do? Let me have them and I will compile a list of the top 10 items
based on the most popular put forward and we will bring them to the
attention of Mr President.

But whatever the list of jobs to be done, Mr
Jonathan will need a first rate team around him to ensure that there is
delivery on every target that is set. Under Umaru Yar’Adua, some
ministers simply did whatever they wished regardless of presidential
instructions. Jonathan inherited some prima donnas and some rogues.
These people simply must not appear in the new cabinet.

The Petroleum Minister, Diezani Allison-Madueke,
is in the twilight of her political career, although she may not yet
have realised it, and must be replaced if the oil and gas sector is to
be cleaned up. The EFCC will continue to exist in the shadows until
Farida Waziri is replaced with someone whom Nigerians and the
international anti-corruption agencies respect. If the north is to see
some serious attention to economic growth and development of key
infrastructure, then the ministries of agriculture, solid minerals and
water resources require outstanding appointments.

We won’t have to wait long to find out who is to
be trusted with building a future that we all hope will bring sustained
improvement in the quality life of every Nigerian.

onwatch@mail.com

While being
interviewed for admission into the Nigerian Military School, Zaria, in
the 80s, my brother, Uwasinachi, was asked why he wanted to join the
army.

“Because I want to someday become the president of Nigeria,” the nine-year-old replied.

The interview panel
of military officers burst out laughing. All, except one. According to
Uwasinachi, the chair of the panel remained stern-faced while his
colleagues fell over themselves laughing, causing my brother to fear
that he had goofed big time.

Uwasinachi need not
have worried. The school’s quota system allowed only one student from
each of the eastern Nigeria states, and my brother ended up as the
chosen candidate from what was then Imo, before Abia State was carved
from it. Months later, the humourless chair was dead – executed by
Ibrahim Babangida’s regime, following accusations of the man’s
involvement in an abortive coup. Back during the NMS interview, the
officer must have known that my brother’s answer was nothing to laugh
about. Being in the military was indeed the route to political power in
Nigeria.

Within a few years
of that interview, the Giant of Africa had moved on. We were voting to
elect public officers under a two-party system masterminded by the
General Babangida administration. My father, then one of the top dogs
of the defunct National Republican Convention in my hometown, Umuahia,
nominated me as a polling clerk to represent his party in the election.
The pay was N80 per day – a bonanza for a girl who had just finished
secondary school. And so, at age 16, I stood at a polling booth in a
village in my community, and, along with other electoral officials
representing both the NRC and the Social Democratic Party, counted the
votes for each party’s gubernatorial candidates.

The incumbent state
governor won. Some villagers rejoiced, others moaned, everyone
eventually dispersed. Then one of the community leaders came into the
village hall where the electoral officials were tidying up, and shut
the door.

“You’re all from this community?” he whispered in Igbo.

We concurred. The electoral commission preferred to assign officials to their areas of origin.

“You need to
realise that the current governor is coming back to rule this state,”
the man continued, “whether anyone likes it or not.”

He had a point. An incumbent losing in Nigerian elections was as rare as a snowstorm in hell.

The community
leader went on to explain that, when the governor eventually inspected
the voting records from all over Abia, he would see that, even though
he won in our community, it was only by a narrow margin, signifying
that our people were not fully behind him.

“That will affect
how much help he renders to us – whether he repairs our roads and
provides us with other social amenities,” the community leader
explained.

With his little
point made, the man watched while the senior officials of our team –
from both the NRC and SDP – looked through the records to determine how
many registered voters had not turned out to vote. One by one, each
absentee voter was accredited. Then the result sheets were amended to
show that those absentees had cast their votes for the incumbent
governor. Satisfied, the community leader dipped into his pocket and
extracted some cash. My teammates – three middle-aged men who spoke
Igbo amongst themselves but switched to English whenever they had
something to say to me – must have imagined me as too young and
innocent and civilised to notice that they didn’t share the booty with
me.

That experience was
proof of what many Nigerians had always suspected: the outcome of
elections had little to do with whether or not we turned out to vote.
However, April 16, 2011, saw me standing under the blazing sun for
about six hours, waiting to vote for the first time in my life.

I stood on one
queue to get accredited, waited for hours before I could join another
queue to ascertain that I had indeed been accredited, before joining
yet another queue to cast my ballot for the presidential candidate of
my choice. Some of my friends reported spending about eight hours at
their polling booths, enduring a process that the head of the African
Union observer mission and former Ghanaian president, John Kufuor,
described as “cumbersome”. Nevertheless, none of us had any doubts that
it was worth it. This time, our votes would count.

Despite
post-election violence and allegations of voting irregularities in some
states, my Nigeria has definitely come a long way from when all you
required to exercise power was a uniform and a gun. The story should
have a better ending come 2015..

Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani, an editor at NEXT, is the author of the novel “I Do Not Come to You by Chance”.

While we’ve been otherwise engaged, events in Africa are being dictated by old and new colonial powers.

It is hard to know
which was more dramatic: in Côte d’Ivoire, Laurent Gbagbo was detained
by Alassane Ouattara, just as he had been when the latter was prime
minister in the 1990s. No doubt Gbagbo was an oppressor, and it is not
the intention here to try “settling the precedence between the flea and
the louse” over whether it is his supporters or Ouattara’s who have been
responsible for the most human rights abuse, rape, mutilation and
massacre in the struggle for supremacy in Côte d’Ivoire. Gbagbo should
perhaps have followed the example of his Senegalese counterpart,
Abdoulaye Wade, who – by his own reckoning – had in the past twice
swallowed the bitter pill of a stolen election rather than plunge his
country into conflict. (Yes, of course, there’s a message there for
Nigeria!)

But the
intervention of France in the events that led to Gbagbo’s arrest
(notwithstanding its disingenuous attempt to present sending a convoy of
25 tanks and armoured personnel–carriers to assault his hideout as a
‘protecting civilians’ activity, with Gbagbo’s subsequent arrest due
solely to pro–Ouattara forces who just happened to be on the spot)
cannot be dismissed as merely the result of French President, Nicolas
Sarkozy’s positioning for electoral advantage back home. Rather,
Gbagbo’s fate sends a powerful message to other African leaders who
might try stepping out of line.

It certainly trumped the efforts of the ECOWAS on the Ivorien crisis.

Meanwhile, in
Libya, British Foreign Secretary William Hague’s insistence that
“Muammar Gadaffi Must Go” at the very time when an African Union
delegation to Tripoli had secured Gadaffi’s agreement to a ceasefire
followed by talks, and was on its way to Benghazi to see whether the
opposition Libyan Transitional National Council might also agree to a
ceasefire and talks, seemed designed to trump anything the AU might come
up with too.

The LTNC gave the
AU team a civil enough reception in public, being careful not to dismiss
them out of hand; but although Libyan pro–freedom groups can find yards
more examples of democracy and resistance to oppression in Africa than
in the Arab world, they have hardly hidden their contempt for Africa and
Black Africans, and after rejecting the proposal for not accepting all
their demands, were sneeringly wondering what conflicts Africans have
ever resolved. Mind you, since South African President, Jacob Zuma, had
diplomatically withdrawn from the Benghazi leg of the trip, they might
have forgotten the liberation of the entire southern part of the
continent and Nelson Mandela’s resolution of the Lockerbie matter, to
name but two.

With Western
powers openly demanding régime change, the LTNC was emboldened to not
only reject even a negotiated cease–fire unless Gadaffi stood down, but
to demand that their Western protectors provide them with weapons:
presumably so that they can outdo Gadaffi in slaughtering their
fellow–citizens.

The excuse that
previous cease–fires have not been observed is thin. After all, those
were self–proclaimed by Gadaffi, whereas what the AU took to Benghazi
was a proposal that Africa was ready to back and seek wider
international support for. If there was justified concern that Gadaffi
would continue moving his troops into position under cover of cessation
of hostilities, what stopped guarantees on that from being part of the
negotiations?

By the end of the
week, the goal of regime change was even more baldly stated with
Sarkozy, David Cameron of Britain and Barack Obama of the U.S.A.
threatening to continue bombing Libya until Gadaffi was removed. With
no cease–fire in place, the ‘protecting civilians’ mantra was still
available to the triumvirate. But it is an increasingly discredited fig
leaf.

Britain’s World
War II Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, once famously advised that
“Jaw Jaw is better than War War.” His 21st Century heirs seem bent on
encouraging peoples who would often be better off with an imperfect
peace on which they can build, to instead continue conflicts which they
themselves are only sporadically interested in seeing through to
conclusion.

The brutality that
many Libyans suffered under the ‘Brotherly Leader’ makes it impossible
not to sympathise with their resistance to ever again coming under his
control, and while Black Africa might not expect a particularly warm
relationship should the LTNC succeed in ousting Gadaffi, his own record
on the continent is hardly such as to cause undue sorrow over his
personal fate. But a negotiated cease–fire would not have re–imposed
Gadaffi’s control over those parts of the country that had risen against
him, and could well have re–emboldened unarmed civilian protesters in
those parts of Libya that had not. So why the insistence on “War War?”

PS: I’d intended
to write something rebutting the Youth Mafia’s complaints about my
article on ‘De Yoot Vote’ this week. But I realised that I would only
be repeating my ‘The Young Do Grow’ article of May 9, 2010.
(http://234next.com/csp/cms/sites/Next/Opinion/Columns/5565422–182/story.csp)
In any case, they only attacked with words — what Churchill might have
called “Jaw Jaw.”

A group of 18 persons is currently being held by
the police in Imo State, on an allegation of plotting to kill — by
stoning — former president, Olusegun Obasanjo, and Imo State governor,
Ikedi Ohakim.

Prosecutors say the accused, on March 31 this year,
pelted a convoy conveying the two politicians with sachets of pure
water. They have all been in detention since the incident happened, and
have been charged to court for attempted murder, which carries a maximum
sentence of life imprisonment.

It beggars belief that persons accused of pelting a
governor’s convoy with sachets of pure water would be taken to court on
a charge that could earn them life imprisonment. But what further
worsens this particular case is that one of the accused, Precious
Efurueze, is only 13 years old and, therefore, a “child” in the eyes of
the law.

In September 2003, President Obasanjo signed the
Child Rights Act (CRA) into law. It was a revolutionary piece of
legislation which sought to convert into law, the principles and
guidelines espoused by the United Nations and other international
bodies. According to UNICEF, it “domesticates the obligations of the
Convention on the Rights of the Child and consolidates all laws relating
to children into one single legislation”.

Section 221 of the Act states unambiguously that:
“No child shall be ordered to be — (a) imprisoned; or (b) subjected to
corporal punishment; or (c) subjected to the death penalty or have the
death penalty recorded against him.”

The Act also makes provisions for the establishment
of “children correctional centres” where “child offenders may be
detained and given such training and instructions as will be conducive
to their formation and re-socialisation, and the removal or reduction,
in term, of their tendency to commit anti-social acts and such other
acts which violate the criminal law.”

But as with many things Nigerian, our penal system
continues to act in ignorance, or defiance, of the Act. Imo State, where
Master Efurueze is being charged, is one of the 24 Nigerian states
whose legislative houses have passed the Act. A pre-CRA study by the
Constitutional Rights Project found evidence that Nigerian children were
regularly detained in police stations and prisons, that “only a small
percentage of child offenders had committed serious offences” and that
“a large proportion of children were not legally represented during
their trials”.

Now, years after the passage of the CRA, not much
has changed. A 2008 Amnesty International Report on Nigeria’s prison
system throws up damning revelations:

“In many of the prisons visited by Amnesty
International, minors shared large dormitories with adults. Most were
around 16 or 17 years old; some were even younger. In Kuje prison, the
Amnesty International delegates spoke with children as young as 11 and
12. Reports suggest that these children were tortured while in police
custody.”

As if it was not bad enough that Efurueze had been
in custody since the incident, last Wednesday, a magistrate turned down
an application for bail for all the accused, without making an exception
for the minor.

Her decision to invoke a “my hands are tied; this
is a case of felony” excuse for her decision, is disingenuous, and
reveals a disgraceful ignorance of the law. Refusing bail to a minor,
especially considering what the minor in question has been accused of,
and causing him to be detained alongside adults, constitutes a flagrant
disregard of the provisions of the Child Rights Act, and is deserving of
condemnation.

Interestingly, this is not the first time the
magistrate in question would be involved in a questionable exercise of
legal judgement. In July 2010, a non-governmental organisation, the
Network on Police Reform in Nigeria (NOPRIN) publicly petitioned the
National Judicial Council over what it described as “the flagrant abuse
of judicial power and process by Chief Magistrate Victoria Isiguzo,
Presiding Magistrate, Magistrate Court 1, Owerri, Imo State.” This was
in relation to the arraignment, before Mrs Isiguzo’s court, of Ikenna
Samuelson Iwuoha, on charges of criminally defaming Governor Ohakim.

Now we are witnessing another case involving Mr Ohakim, and presided
over by the same Magistrate Isiguzo. There is also the hard-to-miss
irony that the name of Mr Obasanjo, who signed the Child Rights Act into
law, is mentioned in this case. We call on Mrs Isiguzo to take the
Child Rights Act into cognisance and proceed with immediate steps to
ensure that Efurueze is treated as the minor that he is according to the
laws of the land.

On April 9, 2011, Nigeria held the first of a series of
elections that will impact the direction of Africa’s most populous country and
second-largest economy, and set the course for the future of democracy in
sub-Saharan Africa. What we have seen so far in West Africa this year is
promising – peaceful and credible elections in Burkina Faso, Benin and Niger,
and the triumph of democracy over dictatorship in Cote d’Ivoire. Some forty
years ago, I began my first tour as a newly-minted Foreign Service Officer in
Lagos. Arriving just seven years after its independence, the Nigeria I found
was one locked in a brutal civil war with an uncertain future. I am proud of
Nigeria’s achievements over the last decades, and its role as a leader in
Africa and the world.

On April 9, I observed along with 17 other US Embassy and
Consulate teams, Nigeria’s National Assembly elections. We were heartened by
what we saw. In sharp contrast to its elections of 2007, Nigeria was
demonstrating that it can hold credible elections that allow the Nigerian
people a meaningful opportunity to elect their leaders. Together with US
Ambassador Terence McCulley, I visited polling stations in the Federal Capital
Territory and adjacent Nassarawa and Kaduna States. I was struck by how well
Nigeria’s civil society and the democratic institutions worked together and the
broad- based and enthusiastic participation of Nigerian citizens exercising
their right to choose their leaders. The commitment and professionalism of the
young people of the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) who performed
extraordinarily well in carrying out their important work is an encouraging
sign of Nigeria’s bright future. I also saw the incredible dedication of
Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) Chair Attahiru Jega, who
remained steadfast in pulling off the round despite the initial false-start on
April 2. Deemed a “general success” despite delayed delivery of election
materials, the presence of “under-age” voters, and some incidents of violence,
Nigeria has the chance to do even better by holding a fairer, freer, and more
peaceful Presidential election on April 16. I urge election and security
officials to build upon this foundation for an even stronger and more peaceful
showing on April 16 and April 26.

Times are changing. Social media played an important role in
this cooperation. INEC and voters exchanged messages via Short Messaging
Service (SMS) texts, Twitter, and Facebook, with camera images sent from
cellular telephones, all to promote a more transparent process, to verify
adherence to correct procedures, and to alert authorities and the media to
potential challenges. This Saturday, I will join Nigerians in watching
@inecnigeria and @swiftcount on Twitter as they transparently work towards a
credible election process.

Democracy is important to all of us. No one person or any single
electoral event can transform an entrenched political culture. Sadly, this past
weekend, some opponents of democracy tried to derail the process by resorting
to thuggery and violence. Political intimidation and violence have no place in
a democratic society. As we move forward, Nigeria’s political leaders – and
those who aspire to lead – must refrain from inflammatory rhetoric or acts of
intimidation. Any election violence is unacceptable, as it casts a shadow over
the entire electoral process. The United States not only condemns violence and
intimidation, but we are prepared to take appropriate measures against those
individuals who violate basic democratic norms, as we have done in places such
as Cote d’Ivoire, Zimbabwe, and Madagascar..

The 2011 Presidential, National Assembly, Gubernatorial, and
State Assembly elections provide an historic opportunity for Nigeria to become
a model for the rest of Africa and the world, especially for those citizens
demanding democracy in their countries. All Africans deserve smooth, peaceful,
transparent, and credible elections. The conduct of the first round of
elections indicates that Nigeria is ready to be that example. We stand with the
Nigerian people in seeking free, fair, and credible elections and I challenge
all Nigerians to work together with even more patience and determination this
weekend to produce leaders elected by the Nigerian people.

Johnnie Carson is the U.S.
Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs

This article was written before the election for
president was held yesterday. When you are reading this article you may
already have a reasonable idea as to who is going to be the next
president of Nigeria. On the other hand, the election might have been a
much closer race than most people thought and the final result might not
be known for some days. Either way, when it comes to an analysis of the
elections, the winner is…Nigeria.

By all standards the conduct of the 2011 elections
in Nigeria has raised the bar on the conduct of elections among African
nations.

While one death is one too many, the fact is that
electoral violence in the current elections has been stemmed from the
terribly high numbers seen in previous elections.

The three key players in making the 2011 elections a
significant improvement on those gone before are INEC chairman,
Attahiru Jega; national security adviser, Andrew Azazi; and Nigerian
president, Goodluck Jonathan.

President Jonathan should be congratulated for
kicking Maurice Iwu out of the INEC Chair. That wasn’t enough to fix
INEC. The choice of Jega was not sufficient in itself. Jonathan gave
Jega a clear directive to improve the election process. To fulfil this
mandate INEC required resources and Jonathan has ensured they have been
provided.

The appointment of General Azazi (rtd) to replace
Aliyu Gusau as National Security Advisor in early October 2010 was a
major statement by Jonathan. This was a significant challenge to some
PDP ‘big men’ and forced Gusau to declare his hand in running for the
presidency in the 2011 elections. In fact, Gusau had stepped down a few
weeks earlier because he knew he was about to be replaced and thus
avoided embarrassment. Kayode Are, the former DG-SSS was acting NSA
following Gusau’s departure. Colonel Kayode was Gusau’s man and so the
status quo seemed to be maintained. But this was merely temporary.
Appointing Azazi over Kayode was another signal from Jonathan that he
was not afraid to confront the SSS and reform the security services.

Azazi was faced with a very formidable task of
securing the loyalty and control of Nigeria’s security services at a
time when there was instability in the south, the middle belt and the
northeast. Azazi was appointed just days after the bombings at Eagle
Square which symbolically struck at the heart of the nation. To compound
the situation, there were those who fuelled conflict with the intent of
showing that Jonathan did not have control of the security situation
and thus should not be president. All-in-all, with less than six months
at his disposal to deliver a workable level of national security, Azazi
seemed to be set on mission impossible.

Jonathan became president of Nigeria in May 2010.
He appointed Jega as INEC chairman in June 2010 and Azazi as NSA in
October 2010.

At a time when the president was expected to be
focused on running hard for election and securing every political
advantage possible, we saw Jonathan going out of his way to create a
situation which drastically reduced opportunities for the incumbent to
unfairly influence election results. This is what Nigerians should
expect from their president. The outcome may not be perfect but it is
hard for any reasonable person to argue that the 2011 elections have not
been a significant improvement on previous elections.

There is room for further improvement in the
conduct of elections in Nigeria and on this point the next president of
Nigeria must give a firm undertaking to the people of Nigeria to
continue the process of electoral improvement that Jonathan has not only
initiated but pressed hard to progress.

In his brief term of office as president of
Nigeria, Jonathan has done much more than merely be a caretaker
president. He has taken major risks in propelling Nigeria forward both
internationally and domestically. In the recent ECOWAS meeting, Jonathan
challenged other African heads of state to share responsibility for the
demise of the people of Cote d’Ivoire and by example sought a solution
that would ultimately remove Gbagbo from office. Previous attempts at
similar action in respect to Zimbabwe’s president, Robert Mugabe, that
should have been championed by South Africa’s president, Jacob Zuma,
have repeatedly failed.

Domestically, Jonathan has taken Nigeria a quantum
leap towards free and fair elections. These gains can be eroded but it
is up to the people of Nigeria to call for continued improvement in the
election process.

Through the conduct of the 2011 elections, Nigeria
has shown other African nations that democracy does work. The people do
have a voice.

If Jonathan has been elected president, then Africa may have a new
leader who can show by example that progress can be made in nation
building. If Nigerians have elected another candidate to the presidency,
then that person will have to work hard, for Jonathan has certainly
raised the bar in what can be expected of Nigeria’s president.