Politicking

There's lot's of smoke and mirrors activity going on with the 3rd term. The press is full of allegations that various senators have been promised N100 million (with N50m initial payment) - with senators being spotted visiting banks in Abuja to pick up the cash (must be a lorry load!) Plus each pro-3rd term senator is allegedly being given a car. Who knows how true all this is? Meanwhile, This Day alleges (in yesterday's paper) that the govt-owned conglomerate Transcorp is funding the payments with Zenith Bank and UBA being the two main backers. It could of course all be being made up by the anti-third term lobby, but then again it could be true. AIT's live televising of the debate has put the senators under a lot of pressure, with many senators resisting pressure from within the PDP to vote for tenure extension.

What is the case is that the pilot electoral role information gathering exercise in Abuja has been an utter farce. Very few people know that the INEC exercise is going on. With the elections less than a year away and no realistic timetable for building a reliable electoral role, it looks like there are huge opportunities for the kind of massive vote rigging that plagued the elections in 2003. It seems that democracy is just not yet a strongly held enough value in Nigeria to counteract the pressures of patronage.