THE frenetic race to the aborted February 14 election, which has now been shifted to March 28, during which the choice of 109 senators will be made across the country had reached feverish pitch before the shift of date.

I WAS shocked to read the editorial of February 16, entitled “Nigeria’s Miserable Choices.” First, it was the Independent National Electoral Commission, not President Goodluck Jonathan, who decided to postpone the election, a power it exclusively has under our constitution. INEC Chairman, Attahiru Jega, said publicly “nobody has coerced us… to take this decision.”

IN the past few weeks, there has been a lot of peace accords along with the attendant media hype. The first of these was the Abuja accord where the leading political parties and their presidential candidates signed an agreement essentially against election violence.

THAT politics is the branch of social science that deals with the allocation of power to a few individuals, to use as they deem fit, on behalf of the majority of the people is no longer news.

POOR Attahiru Jega! The distinguished Professor of political science and Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) is once again in the dock. Indeed, the first salvo against Jega in the court of public opinion is that he is biased. Those who say that Jega is biased cite his now aborted plot to create 30,000 polling booths eighty per cent of which would have been located in the North as evidence of his ploy to give his side of the country an edge over the rest of the country. Another charge against Jega is to the effect that the umpire has kowtowed to pressure from the opposition party, the All Progressives Congress (APC), to disenfranchise voters who are seen to be sympathetic to President Goodluck Jonathan and his ruling Peoples Democratic Party ( PDP). The story making the rounds in Lagos is that INEC, in solidarity with APC, has denied the Igbo who constitute more than 46 per cent of the population in Lagos the Permanent Voter Card (PVC).