TAMUNOEMI Sokari David-West’s fame as Professor of Virology at the University tends to obscure his involvement in politics where his services as Commissioner for Education (Rivers State), Minister of Petroleum, and Minister of Mines, Power and Steel, all under military regimes, are well known. He is one of those tipped for cabinet membership in the in-coming government.

NIGERIANS and their democracy are unique. If elsewhere people delight in the capacities of their government to deepen their liberties, broaden opportunities, our democracy is delivered as structures, visible and tangible. We call them dividends of democracy.

NOW that the 2015 general elections have gone, save for the few States where the results were declared “inconclusive”, it is appropriate to assess the performance of the electoral regulator and umpire, the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, which Professor Attahiru Jega heads.

AS dates go, 10 November 2012 may not have a place in our political history, but it was the day the House of Representatives held simultaneous peoples’ public sessions in Nigeria’s 360 federal constituencies – they all started at 10am.

POLITICIANS live for themselves. Conviction is not a value to associate with people, whose professed ambition is to access power, and its expansive opportunities, minding neither costs nor consequences. Nothing is new in the speed with which politicians change camp in their search for relevance in the new governments that would be formed.

IF you passed the Oshodi-Apapa Expressway in the last two weeks, you would recognise it. The tankers were gone, the beauty of the repaired road was visible and a trip to Apapa and parts thereof, did not take eternity.

THE mounting excitement about the results of the 2015 elections hardly leave room to consider any encumbrances to the change that has been promised since the herald of that buzz that at the beginning seemed like one of those slogans that manage to exist till the end of the campaign

THE change Nigerians need in their politics has started under out-going President Goodluck Jonathan. In an unprecedented but highly commendable spirit of sportsmanship and patriotism, he called the winner of the presidential election, Maj-Gen Muhammadu Buhari, admitted defeat, and congratulated him, more than eight hours before the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, announced the official result.

WE are in the final hurdles of the 2015 elections. They are, however, as important as the presidential and National Assembly polls held on March 28. Elections to offices in the States affect our people more, but the skewed politics of looking up to Abuja for everything, sometimes tend to de-emphasise the importance of the States.

THERE can be no justification for the threats that His Royal Majesty Rilwan Akiolu, the Oba of Lagos, issues against Igbos days ago. The Oba told some Igbo leaders, who paid him a courtesy visit, that if Igbos did not vote for his preferred candidate, he would throw Igbos into the lagoon. He swore, by the Almighty, that he would carry out the threat seven days after the election unless he was not his father’s child.