The electorate in Kogi State, Northcentral Nigeria, will go to the polls on Saturday, 21 November, to elect a new G overnor. The election is seen by many as a straight contest between the incumbent Governor, Captain Idris Wada and former Governor, Abubakar Audu, although there are 22 candidates seeking to occupy the Lugard House, as the Government House is called.
With massive deployment of security personnel to the state, it is expected that there will be a high level of security to ensure a successful election. We expect that the security personnel will not conduct themselves the way they did during the Ekiti and Osun governorship elections in 2014. During those elections, security personnel, some of them hooded, brazenly intimidated and arrested opposition party leaders hours before the polls without any formal charge brought against them. The victims were detained for several hours and were released after the elections were concluded. Such was the impunity under the then PDP-led Federal Government.
The Kogi polls will be the first baptism of fire for Prof Mahmood Yakubu, the new chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, who succeeded Prof Attahiru Jega. During the 2015 general elections, Jega did a good job and now the benchmark he set must be matched or even surpassed by Prof. Yakubu.
INEC had a long period to prepare for the Kogi election and therefore has no excuse if things go wrong on election day. Election materials and the officials must arrive at designated polling units at the right time to ensure the exercise gets under way promptly. With 4,000 Youth Corps members as ad hoc staff of INEC, much is expected of INEC on election day.
The outcome of the Kogi governorship election and that of Bayelsa State on 5 December this year will go a long way in determining whether INEC will conduct subsequent general elections in a free and fair manner, devoid of the usual rancour and logistic challenges that characterized previous elections. The All Progressives Congress, APC-led Federal Government is also being put to the test as far as the Kogi and Bayelsa states governorship elections are concerned. It must show that it will not travel the route of the erstwhile PDP-led Federal Government that deployed the federal might to crush the opposition with security operatives during elections.
