FEW elections have had the hype of the 2015 elections, which has created strands of expectations that would be challenging to manage. They are principally on two fronts – expectations of victory and campaign promises to change the country.

THERE are more issues in the 2015 general elections than the tenure of the Chairman of Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, Professor Attahiru Jega. A focus on them, instead of Jega, is critical for the free and fair elections Nigerians desire.

IF Chairman of the Independent Corrupt Practices Commission, ICPC, Mr. Ekpo Nta, intended to shock Nigerians with his disclosure to the Senate Committee on Drugs, Narcotics, Financial Crimes and Anti-Corruption, that some contractors presented forged tax certificates, he at best produced partial shocks.

OUR humour can be electric. It must be in drawing from its eclectics that someone came up with the line, “every problem has an expiry date”. Stephen Keshi, Eagles coach, whose cognomen, Big Boss, tells its own story, defies every logic about dates retiring problems.

THE Nigerian military and the security agencies would wish to forget 2014 because of the strange, nightmarish experiences they went through. It was a year things became so bad that people wondered aloud if this was the mighty military that fought the civil war, effortlessly put down other insurrections and became the reliable guard of troubled countries in the West African sub-region and beyond. In the past 50 years, our troops have been in high demand internationally and they always returned with accolades.

SEVERAL reactions have trailed the report of the PricewaterhouseCoopers forensic audit of the Nigeria National Petroleum Corporation, NNPC, which resulted from the allegation of unremitted $49.8bn that former Governor of Central Bank of Nigeria, Mallam Sanusi Lamido Sanusi made. Mallam Sanusi at various points reviewed the figure to $10.8bn, $12bn and $20bn. The Federal Government was accused of delaying the audit. Some had concluded the report would never be made public.

BY its admission, more than one million permanent voters’ cards have been stolen from the Indepen-dent National Electoral Commission, INEC, which prefaces this story with the trite line that the cards are useless since only their authentic owners could use them. INEC should get wiser as the thefts continue.

WHAT do we do when robbery suspects question society’s morality? We dismiss them as justifying their crime. We found this incident and its knocks on our laws profound. Garba Sani, 24, a private guard accused of robbery, and Okwudili Godwin, 30, said to have received the stolen goods, gave reporters a treatise on commonness of crimes in Nigeria.

Sierra Leone said on Wednesday it was seeing a spike in Ebola infections, blaming unsafe burials that threaten to undermine the recovery from the deadly epidemic.

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.

Early results from an Ebola trial using the experimental drug Avigan (favipiravir) showed Monday it was somewhat effective at saving lives if given early in the illness, but not later.

PERHAPS, if we called the Minister of Power the Minister of Electricity, we would have been speaking the same language about the poor state of electricity supply. The Minister speaks about “power generation”, we are interested in “electricity supply” to places we need them.

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. People offered their views on amendments to the Constitution, the only time the people have had a say in the making of the document that governs us. On 24 July, 2013, the House of Representatives voted in tandem with the people, another landmark of the amendments.

AFTER investing billions of Naira in fighting corruption, the verdict of the Minister of Finance, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, is that corruption persists in Nigeria because we do not have institutions, systems and processes to prevent corruption. She should know.

POLITICIANS are suddenly awake. The smartest beings in existence think it is time they said a few words to the Nigerians. Power belongs to the people, it is time to wrest it from them democratically.