By Rotimi Fasan

IN just a matter of days, the much anticipated February 14 election would be history. Or so Nigerians thought. After much planning, scheming, deliberation and physical and verbal violence, even slander and libel of the most venomous variety, Nigerians thought they would have the chance to choose who would be their president for the next four years, and either of the two leading candidates of the ACP and PDP would win or lose the election. But it was a long journey to this point.

An election that was long in planning, and for which there had been much assurance that all was set to make it happen, suddenly got stalled. What started like a mere hint, then a suggestion to sound out the national mood, thereafter took on a sinister colour with calls for its postponement. It was like a violent repeat of history, a contrived reversion to the better-forgotten days of June 1993 when a cabal of career spongers, misnamed Association for Better Nigeria and their ilk at the corridors of power, embarked on a campaign to stop the June 12 Presidential election. The activities of these shadowy characters would herald the annulment of that election.

In 2015, just a couple of weeks ago, it was the National Security of Adviser to President Goodluck Jonathan that would raise the call for postponement of the February elections. It came, first, like a suggestion. But before any one knew what was happening Dasuki’s became something of a clarion call for others apparently waiting in the wings for such a call.

INEC official displays an empty ballot box

They echoed Dasuki and began a clamour aimed at putting pressure on both the electoral body, INEC, and, especially, its chairman, Attahiru Jega, to concede to a postponement. Some like Chief Edwin Clark and some old war horses went as far as calling for the arrest of Jega while yet others began the scare-mongering that the military was planning a takeover! For what really should Jega be arrested- doing his job? The Dasuki suggestion is now reality with the postponement of the elections to March, announced by Attahiru Jega last Saturday.

It was and should be curious that any call for postponement of the election should come from a senior member of the Goodluck Jonathan administration. But even more curious is the fact that those who backed Dasuki and became the arrowhead of the postponement call were mostly members of the PDP. It gave the impression that something was afoot.

One could almost smell the bad odour of evil conspiracy reminiscent of that provoked by ABN and company in 1993. That representatives of foreign governments and electoral observers in the country were urging the Jonathan administration and INEC not to postpone the election convinced one that there were indeed powerful Nigerians who wanted the election postponed. The American Government, as are other observers, has since expressed its disappointment in the shift in date.

The main reason earlier touted for the proposed shift in the electoral date at this eleventh hour was the fact that many, literally tens of millions of Permanent Voters’ Cards, remain unclaimed at the various offices of INEC across the country. Rather than seeing this as, perhaps, a reflection of the true voters’ population of the country after unregistered and ineligible people had been bribed and bussed to register at electoral centres by politicians hoping to convert their votes for illegal purposes, or an indication of voter apathy in the face of their unchanged material circumstances after many years of voting, Nigerian politicians have chosen to see the incidence of unclaimed PVCs as evidence of attempt to deny millions the right to vote. What seems apparent now is that the Jonathan government and the PDP want to play for time in order to improve their chances at the polls or strengthen their ability to subvert the electoral process without detection.

One thing we must not forget is that if there must be any shift in the electoral date at this late hour, it should not be a key member of the Jonathan administration that should lead it. Aside being an indictment of the administration, it should be recalled that this was the same government that had been assuring Nigerians for many months, even within days of the call by Dasuki, that it had put everything in place and was ready for the election. It is, therefore, strange that it is a member of that administration that rose to sell a strange but familiar ware to Nigerians. Let Dasuki and his co-travellers know that Nigerians had been at this point before, and are wiser for it. Six weeks may seem far away but it is not forever.

The several shifts in the handover date of the Babangida and Sani Abacha regimes, as were similar regimes/administrations that dabbled in such subterfuge, were informed by reasons similar to the one hawked by Dasuki and members of the PDP. To have acceded to such demand is to wrongfoot the electoral process and ultimately lay the ground for invalidating both this process and the elections that would be its outcome. This shift in date ought to have come well before now, not on the eve of the election and at a time members of the ruling party had been making panicky remarks about electorate in their putative strongholds not keen on collecting their PVCs.

It is no longer reassuring that President Jonathan had not himself made any call for postponement as those who have spoken have obviously spoken his mind. He must now take responsibility for any unfavourable consequences of the shift. Once we thought that in the event that Goodluck Jonathan loses this election, it won’t be him but those who have sponged on his presidency and taken advantage of his person that would be worse affected by it. We saw Jonathan in this instance like President Shehu Shagari, given the manner the latter had gone on with his life after his government was overthrown by the same man seemingly poised to be Jonathan’s own nemesis on Saturday 14 February 2015.

Left to him, a loss in this election would, one thought, pluck no hair off Jonathan’s body. He would, it seemed, rather appreciate Nigerians for giving him the opportunity to serve and move on with his life. It was such simplicity of character that the Jonathan personality suggested. Not the fire and brimstone rhetoric of the power profiteers that surrounded him; people whose scaremongering he is now fully sold on given their excuse of shifting a long-planned election in order to fight insurgency. Jonathan, it is now clear, finds power too tasty to give up. He would do anything to hang on to it. Where that would lead him only time will tell.