Just before assurances were made by Senate President Ahmed Lawan that the Senate will not pass anti-people laws, the Hate speech bill had on its own suffered a major credibility deficit. Last week, its sponsor, Senator Sani Abdullahi issued a statement purporting to have received support from an official of the American Embassy in Nigeria.

Some simplistic fellow Nigerians quite often naively assume that persons who are nominated for awards in the country may have achieved a lot. It is not always so. Even our national honours award lost its credibility long ago when government started allocating figures to certain institutions and positions like governors, top legislators and ministers instead of outstanding citizens. Perhaps the most common but annoying awards are those organized by the media and civil society groups who for their own material benefits are seen falling on each other to honour the same characters. Sometimes some governors who failed to pay workers’ salaries are honoured while some other honourees have had to walk into EFCC cells a few months after their lavishly published awards.

Apart from electioneering periods when some politicians project their opponents as non-Nigerians for the purposes of de-marketing such opponents to voters, the general presumption is that all our political leaders are bonafide Nigerians.

An electoral commission is a body charged with the management of elections in a community. Although how it is composed is not necessarily uniform everywhere,ample effort is usually made in all cases by the body as soon it is inaugurated to guarantee fairness in the conduct of elections. The common trend is for the entity to consists of persons who have no partisan political inclinations and can thus be regarded as likely to be impartial in the handling of all matters relating to elections. In some jurisdictions however, the body is made up of representatives of political parties such that each of them has its interest guaranteed. Nigeria operates the former in which the body is seen as an impartial umpire, whose members may not be easily persuaded to support one group of actors against the other. In fact, Section 156 of our constitution prohibits a member of a political party from becoming a member of the electoral body, known in Nigeria as the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC).

Governorship elections in Bayelsa and Kogi states fixed for November 16, 2019 are less than two weeks away. On the same day, voting will also take place to elect a senator to represent Kogi West Senatorial District in the National Assembly. Bearing in mind the popular categorization of both Bayelsa and Kogi as violence-prone states, some Nigerians are justifiably scared of political ferocity during the polls. History would stop us from blaming those who are apprehensive. For instance, at the height of political tension during the last Presidential and National Assembly elections earlier this year, the Nigerian Army in Yenagoa claimed to have arrested 15 armed thugs. operating at Ikebiri 1 in Southern Ijaw Local Government Area of Bayelsa.