IF like me, you thought the distraction called the Nigeria Governors Forum, NGF, election would have passed quietly, and quickly, you would have been disappointed at the space and spats it is claiming.

An ordinary election for the better being of 36 men (no women please) has been exalted to the only national issue with appropriate linkages invented to further the fortunes of those who have never wished Nigeria well. Now, everything that goes wrong with a governor, if he is supposedly in the opposition, is a punishment for not supporting the President.

President Goodluck Jonathan has shouted himself hoarse over his disinterest in who leads the governors. He possibly would have congratulated the winner if there were no controversies. Panjandrums will not hear of it. They have drawn up all the conspiracy theories they can imagine. Governors voted in a certain manner, they claim, to disrespect the President. Others predict that the 2015 presidential election would follow the same pattern.

The President has not said he would run for another term. The link between his re-election success, if he decides to run, and the NGF is at most tenuous. Is someone imagining that 36 governors (assuming they vote) would multiple their votes to the millions of votes required to win the presidency?

We have all become excitable members of the forum, holding telling views in its affairs though a couple of months ago, the forum meant nothing to almost all Nigerians. I blame the governors who escalated a club election to a national affair. When they scampered to the Vice President for succour, he should have chased them away. Everyone else they ran to should have given them the same treatment.

Valuable state resources – attention, time, money – are being staked in a hollow enterprise that can only waste more resources. The usual army of peace makers are banking on prospering from the confusion by creating more.

Daily, delegations are criss-crossing the country to ease the logjam. All these cost money, our money. Governance has taken a back seat; everything is about helping governors to manage their forum, an organisation we barely know what it does beyond being a pressure for the governors, and sometimes for their States.

None of the governors disputing the results has told us how the election affects governance in his State. Would there have been more jobs, if Jonah Jang, their preferred candidate, won? Did Jang promise to wrench more revenue off the Federal Government for the benefit of the States? How would Nigerians have fared better if one and not the other led the governors?

The major revelation of the tiff is the animosities, jealousies, rivalries among governors. The names they have called themselves in the past weeks show these. Some of the governors, while stating their positions, have confirmed the level of their intelligence, something that for years was in the realms of speculations

With all the challenges Nigerians face daily, what interests their leaders is the leadership of 36 people – whose cares and concerns are hardly in tune with those of more than 160 million Nigerians.

If we do not ignore governors and their forum, they would continue  to annoy us as they ventilate anxieties over their future, rather than ours.

PS: Deputy Senate President Chief Ike Ekweremadu, a lawyer of 26 years standing, suggests that a proposed six-year single tenure for president and governors will be retroactive. Our laws are not retroactive. The only Nigerian law in this category was Maj-Gen. Mohammadu Buhari’s 1985 decree that sent drug peddler to death. According to Ekweremadu, the President and some governors would have to make the sacrifice. We are really in perilous times, more so with retroactive laws.

Mr. IKEDDY ISIGUZO is Chairman  editorial board, Vanguard Newspaper.