With Emeka Aginam

Barely minutes after the Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission INEC Professor Atahiru Jega on Saturday announced that the National Assembly elections had been postponed, business activities immediately resumed in the Ikeja computer village as computer traders and phone dealers hastily threw open doors to their shops to make the most of a literarily wasted business day.

Our reporter reported seeing a steadily increasing swell of human movements even though it could not be clearly ascertained if amongst these people were customers who had come to the market to purchase IT appliances as there are serious doubts, computer and phone buyers had been filled with equal optimism to visit the market as many in Lagos had kept to the stay-at-home order issued by the Federal Government even after the four o clock time deadline.

Things did not however remain in this position for long as barely an hour later, the market resumed to it’s former self of pulsating with people that frantically leapt from stall to stall trying to conduct their buying and selling with accelerated time with the hope of beating the sun which had already begun to drop from the sky and heading quickly towards dusk.

Our reporter reported that like most Nigerians, these extremely business minded people who could be termed hustlers expressed deep disappointment at the way the botched elections had ruined what would have been an extremely profitable day for them. No doubt, business usually within the market is consistently at it’s ebb even during the week but then weekends, especially Saturdays things go from good to overwhelming as business deals running into billions of naira are transacted in the market.

Already, there are fears by many of these traders that the three Saturdays slated for the elections are virtual doomsdays for their businesses. Due to high costs of paying for their shops in this highly competitive market and maintaining business in the market, many of them have termed it as unfair that they have been unduly forced to leave their businesses for the elections to take place which in their words should have been a thing of free will and not presumably forced on them as it was not the case in previous elections.

With the recent postponing by one week of all the elections in the country by INEC means that traders in this market will lose yet another full Saturday to the three Saturdays initially scheduled to be lost to the elections. It is a most painful and inevitable circumstance but then, many are beginning to have options to stabilise the rather business unfriendly situation. Fridays have now been targeted to temporary replace the extremely business market play outs of Saturdays. Last Friday and for the next three Fridays to come, transactions in markets nation wide will move to more than quadruple as Nigerians scuttle to adjust and be well ahead of the no-movement order that will now be synonymous to the elections.