Category: Emeka Omeihe

The government of United States of America (US) just made good its threat to impose visa restrictions on Nigerians it deemed to have undermined the conduct of the 2023 general elections. This did not come as a surprise because that government had warned of such consequences before the polls. US Consular General (Nigeria), Will Stevens did not mince words when in January, he told a town hall meeting of the Niger-Delta people in Asaba, Delta State that the government would deny visa to anyone who encouraged electoral violence or undermined the 2023 electoral process in Nigeria.

“One thing we have done in the past and continue to do is that those who seek to undermine the democratic process can and will be found ineligible for a visa to the US”, Stevens had said.

Secretary of State to the US government, Antony Blinken was only keeping to this tradition when he announced last week that they had taken steps to impose visa restrictions on specific individuals in Nigeria for undermining the democratic process during the 2023 elections.

Those affected according to him, are individuals involved in the intimidation of voters through threats and physical violence, manipulation of vote results and other activities that undermine Nigeria’s democratic process. Blinken did not disclose the names of those affected.

This is not the first time the US will be imposing visa restrictions on individual Nigerians it considered to have undermined the course of free, fair and credible elections in the country.

After the off cycle governorship elections in Kogi and Bayelse states in 2019, similar restriction was placed on Individuals considered by officials of that country to have worked against the democratic process. Both the US and the United Kingdom (UK) similarly threatened same measures just before the Edo and Ondo governorship polls. The UK even expanded the scope of its restrictions to include denial of access to UK based assets and prosecution under international law.  

The latest measure like the one before it has elicited reactions from the Nigerian public with some asking the US government to make public the names of those affected by the ban. They consider such disclosure a more effective way of getting the offending people better feel the impact of the punishment. There are others who still want the US to come up with stricter measures because of perceived limitations of the visa ban.

Yet, others question the propriety of a foreign government determining for a sovereign country the credibility or otherwise of its elections and the actions and inactions of certain individuals during the process. For this group, the question as to whether any group or individual rigged elections or undermined democracy can be determined not by any outside authority but by the tribunals or the courts in that country.

The restrictions are thus considered unnecessary intrusion into the domestic affairs of a sovereign nation especially as the specific offences for which the restrictions were placed on the said persons were not disclosed. The key issue here hinges on fairness and the possibility of bias.

The Federal Ministry of Foreign Affairs shared some of these concerns in its initial reaction to US restrictions after the Kogi and Bayelsa governorship elections and threats of same consequences before that of Edo and Ondo states.

In a statement then, the ministry had considered it, “disrespectful to the sovereignty of Nigeria for any outside authority to sit in judgment over the conduct of our citizens and apply punitive measures such as visa restrictions unilaterally”. This is especially so since there are ample provisions in Nigerian laws to sanction violators and perpetrators of election violence and fraud.

Such have been the views even as there are others who would want the affected persons not to lose sleep after all, they are not under any obligation to travel to those countries. Its further extrapolation would imply that visa restrictions as a tool for discouraging all manner of infractions that undermine the sanctity elections may after all, prove ineffectual. Those banned may not really have to travel to either the US or UK to live a meaningful life. So what value will such ban really serve in redressing the perceived wrongs?  The US can as well go on with its restrictions while the suspects hold on tenaciously to their putrid electoral practices, the argument would further go.

Unfortunately, ours is still a largely dependent country. Our leaders depend on foreign countries for medical tourism; as a source of quality education for their children and wards and as safe haven for hiding looted funds which access to political offices by hook and crook confers on them. They can ill afford to do away with foreign travels. That is where the merit of the ban comes in.

By the same logic, that is where the argument on the sovereignty of the country as the basis for faulting the visa restrictions runs into troubled waters. Yes, Nigeria is a sovereign country. That should not be in doubt to the countries issuing the visa restrictions. But those countries are still within their rights to issue or refuse visa to any applicant.

Even as they did not disclose the names of those affected, they could have quietly waited for such characters to apply for visa only to deny them without giving reasons. But they chose to make the decisions public to drive home their commitment to deepening democracy in this country.

So the matter goes beyond pontifications on the sovereignty of the country and touted nationalism glamour. It is at the heart of democracy both as an ideological construct and development paradigm. It is about a system of ideas, rules and practices that lead to the approximation of the greatest good of the greatest number of people.

 It is all about public good in a world that has been reduced to a global community. The intention is noble and not meant to diminish the sovereignty of the country. It is all about peer review from a country considered the bastion of democracy across the globe.

It would amount to blind nationalism to stop others from volunteering opinions on actions of individuals that continually stultify the country’s march to electoral stability, democratic growth and development. We will be standing nationalism on the head not to admit glaring shortfalls of our electoral practices and the incalculable harm they wrought on the sovereignty of the electorate just because a foreign country is working to discourage such unsavoury tendencies.

The real concerns should be on how to ensure such brazen infractions are exorcized from a system where politicians are in constant search for loopholes to compromise and sabotage the electoral process. We are faced with the paradox of the man that fetched ants-infested firewood which attracted a deluge of lizards into his house. But instead of throwing away the firewood together with the ants to get rid of the lizards, he was busy chasing away the lizards. It is a wrong strategy incapable of offering durable therapeutic solutions.

That is the challenge in stretching the argument on the sovereignty of the country and the rights of our courts to determine who electoral offenders are and the appropriate punishment for them. If we cannot put our house in order by guaranteeing the sanctity of the democratic process, a dose of sanctions including restriction of access to assets acquired from looted funds and possible prosecution under international law, may be the elixir.

 Such measures cannot be deemed to be in conflict with our national interest. Democracy as an ideological construct also contends with other contraptions including benevolent dictatorship keenly canvassed hitherto as a suitable model for Africa given their peculiar organizational structure.

Nigeria has made a choice for representative democracy and must be prepared to play by the rules. There is nothing so sacrosanct about democracy or western capitalism to suggest it cannot atrophy when it no longer delivers because its rules are observed in their breach.

That is the challenge. That is where the interests of other countries come in since events in Nigeria are bound to have far-reaching consequences for other parts of the world. It is in our national interest that this country is saved from its ruinous electoral tendencies.

National newspaper recently came out with a searing front page lead, “Where are new Naira notes? The poser arose from the outcome of investigations by the publication across some major cities in the country which showed the new notes are virtually not in circulation several months after they became legal tender

They are neither being dispensed by the Automatic Teller Machines (ATMs) of depositors’ banks, nor are they available at the Point of Sales POS outlets across the country. The situation is even compounded by the near disappearance of the new currency notes from the daily commercial and other transaction activities of the citizenry.

That the scarcity of the new notes has persisted even as the currency in circulation is reported to have increased from N982.09 billion in February to N1.6 trillion at the end of March is even more confounding. Faced with this inexplicable situation, it was only logical for the publication to interrogate the whereabouts of the new naira notes.

The findings should also evoke the concomitant question of what has become of the Naira Redesign and Cashless Policy of the Central Bank of Nigeria, CBN.  Is it still on course or jettisoned overboard by the contradictions that trailed its faulty implementation?

This immediately throws up issues as to what has become of its high-minded objectives? What has become the fate of such policy objectives as the imperative to take effective control of the currency in circulation, address the hoarding of the Naira outside the banking system and check the increasing counterfeiting of the high denominations of the Naira?

The CBN had in October last year introduced the newly redesigned notes and gave January 31, 2023 as the deadline for the use of the old currencies. But President Buhari officially unveiled the new N1000, N500 and N200 currency denominations in November with the same deadline for the old notes to cease as legal tender.

Within that time frame, both the old and the new currencies circulated together. But as the deadline for the old currencies to cease as legal tender approached, the situation became chaotic as the new notes were nowhere to be found even as people made to deposit their old currencies to beat the deadline. Apparently sensing danger in sticking to the old deadline in the face of acute scarcity of the new notes, the CBN had to extend the deadline to February 10, citing the approval to that effect by the president.

But nothing substantially changed as the situation unleashed such excruciating hardship on the citizenry that compared with the sufferings and untold dislocations experienced only during war situations. People found it extremely hard to access basic necessities of life as the old notes were being rejected even when the redesigned currencies were virtually unavailable.

Soon, the Naira began to sell against itself at very ridiculously discounted rates. Faced with serious hardship, some governors went to court to challenge the Naira redesign and cashless policy even as allegations of political motives were freely traded. The timing of the policy close to the general elections was further touted as evidence of an agenda of a political hue.

The Supreme Court came to the rescue when it gave an injunction for the status quo to be maintained pending the determination of the substantive case. The implication of this was that both the new and old currencies should circulate contemporaneously until the final ruling in the case. Before the apex court gave the final ruling, President Buhari in a national broadcast countermanded the injunction.

Buhari had given approval to the CBN to release the old N200 bank notes back into circulation as legal tender with the new bank notes for 60 days from February 10, to April 10, when the old N200 notes will cease as legal tender.

Read Also: CBN authorises foreign banks to give loans in dollar

The president’s directive only succeeded in injecting further confusion to a hopeless situation as the cash squeeze got to an alarming dimension. The reintroduction of the old N200 notes made a near zero impact on the biting cash squeeze.

 There was a heavy sigh of relief when the Apex court gave the final ruling directing that both the old and new currencies should circulate concurrently till December 31. But that was not the end of the matter as both the federal authorities and the CBN kept mute for days over the implementation of the court order.

Feeble attempts by some depositor’s banks to pay in the old currency notes were resisted by their customers on account of the inability of President Buhari and the CBN to come clear on the Supreme Court order. The situation lingered. But the citizenry were obviously at the receiving end.

It took accusations and counter accusations for the president to wash off his hands from the inability of the CBN to implement the apex court’s ruling. In the midst of this, allegations arose that the CBN was about to inject large quantities of the old naira notes into the banking system to mitigate the untold suffering unleashed by its policy.

But this did not come into full force until the Nigerian Labour Congress, NLC threatened to picket all the branches of the CBN across the country if the situation did not improve. Apparently fearing the warning by the NLC, the CBN began to release substantial funds to depositor’s banks. The NLC had to call off its scheduled occupation of CBN offices citing improvement in the cash situation.

But those who went to the banks to cash some money soon discovered that depositor’s banks were only paying out the old notes. Customers withdrawing money from the ATMs and POS were paid in the old Naira notes. Cash transactions across the country, as I write, are also virtually done in old notes. This has raised curiosity as to what has become of the new Naira notes-an integral part of the Naira redesign and cashless policy of the government. It was out of the puzzle generated by this development that the said publication embarked on investigations which revealed that the new currencies are not really in circulation. That is the unfortunate situation on ground.

So what happened? What of the December 31, deadline for the old currencies to cease as legal tender? Why are the new currencies not circulating with the old ones to make for ease of transition when the old notes eventually go into extinct? If it has taken these months without the impact of the new currency notes being felt, what guarantee is there that any magic will happen in the remaining months?

These questions and more point to the impending danger in the CBN having the old currencies circulate to the near exclusion of the new ones. It is not clear why the situation has remained so even as speculations abound.

There is the theory of hoarding of the new notes by the rich. There is also the dimension of a deliberate action by the CBN to control the cash flow outside the banking system. Sabotage has also featured as a possible reason for the scarcity.

Even as hoarding cannot be ruled out, the banks should be held liable if that is a major cause for the scarcity. At no point since the new policy did the commercial banks pay the new notes through the ATMs in substantial quantity. Had the banks been paying the new notes through the ATM galleries, acute shortage would have been a thing of the past.

It would appear the scarcity is a matter of deliberate policy by the CBN. It is part of the measures to achieve the objectives of the Naira redesign and cashless policy of the government. But it is a potent danger to allow the situation to persist.

There is the frightening prospect of the odious experiences faced at the earlier stages of the policy repeating. That prospect is very high unless substantial amounts of the new notes are injected into the system to circulate with the old ones to make for seamless transition.

But nothing should again be done to take the citizenry through the excruciating hardship they faced on account of poor conception and implementation of the policy. It is hard to fathom the positive impact of the policy so far, if all we are left with is the old Naira notes as the medium of transactions.

President Buhari just postponed the 2023 census. No reasons were given except the new date will be determined by the incoming administration.

When last year, the government scheduled the census a month after the 2023 general elections, I had in this column on April 25, 2022 under the above title raised issues on the propriety of the timing given extant realities. The postponement has just given ample credence to issues raised then. I hereby reproduce the article:

Reservations trailing the decision by the federal government to conduct a national population census immediately after the 2023 general elections are not unexpected.

This is more so given the history of past censuses marred by intense controversies that rubbed off negatively on their overall outcome and acceptance. With this contentious background, the minimum expectation was that the authorities should have taken measures to eliminate all stumbling blocks to a credible and generally acceptable national headcount.

But this projection appears not to have been properly factored in when the Director-General (DG) of Nigeria Population Commission (NPC), Nasir Isa-Kwarra, announced after the National Council of State meeting that the exercise will be held a month after the 2023 general elections. Curiously also, the agency intends to hold a pilot census this June after the primaries by political parties.

The NPC boss sought to justify the imminence of the census on the grounds that extant population data are obsolete projections and estimations with questionable value for planning purposes. It is an open secret that this country has no reliable census data. It is also not in doubt that previous attempts at reliable census data were dogged by intense controversies, sometimes leading to the rejection of their outcome.

So, the issue is not as much with the justification for a reliable national headcount as with its timing. Why the NPC scheduled its pilot scheme after primaries by political parties and the national census after the general elections remains unclear. Is there anything in the conduct of elections that promises to enhance the success and credibility of a national headcount? There is no evidence of that. Rather, the two engagements share common traits in their capacity to divide the country along the line. They are potentially rancorous and explosive.

Being potentially controversial and explosive engagements, there is the mortal risk of effectively managing eventualities arising from their outcome. Ours is a country where elections are synonymous with violence of unimaginable proportions leading to loss of lives and property. In some previous instances, it took considerable time before the crisis escalated by such elections could normalise.

It remains puzzling how a national census that may divide people along the line will fare immediately after usually disputed and rancorous polls. The probable scenario is one that will re-ignite the misgivings and distrusts usually generated by the outcome of such elections.

Their combined outcome will likely produce consequences nobody can predict. In effect, having the two incongruous and controversial national assignments close to each other may ignite a crisis of proportions that will make a child’s play extant insecurity in the country.

Even now, many local government areas across the country are inaccessible on account of festering insecurity levied by all manner of non-state actors. There are genuine worries on the prospects of elections holding in those communities and local governments if insecurity remains in its current form. It is for the same reason that many well-meaning Nigerians have expressed doubts as to whether the 2023 polls will even hold.

Even if we manage to gamble the elections as INEC has vowed, it will be counterproductive to treat a national headcount similarly. It will make a mess of the entire exercise if people in crisis-torn areas are neither reached nor counted. The suspension of the continuous voters’ registration exercise by INEC in some local government areas should drive home this point most poignantly.

When you add up the potentially disruptive effects of do-or-die elections to the unceasing insecurity that has reduced the worth of human life in this country, one is not left in doubt that the proposed census is ill-timed and ill-advised. It is loaded with frightening prospects for sliding the country closer to the precipice.

The country is currently assailed by existential challenges from all fronts. It is more divided and fragmented than ever before, with rising suspicion and mistrust among the constituents. Such misgivings are bound to exacerbate, given the high premium the constituents place on the headcount. Things are not remedied by the fact that both revenue sharing and representation in national and state legislatures are based on population.

The two last censuses in 1991 and 2006 did not mark any departure from previous ones as they were equally embroiled in intense disputes as sections sought to gain advantage over others. But while that of 1991 posted a figure of 88.9 million people, its 2006 variant came up with 140 million people.

Even then, the unreliability of these figures was brought to the fore by a former chairman of the NPC, Eze Festus Odimegwu. He had told officials of the INEC who approached his agency to officially release some certified data to them to assist in their planned constituency delimitation exercise that there was no officially certified data for all the localities in the country.

Hear him, “the enumeration centres we have, some of them do not exist in reality, some politicians bought them the way you will want to register voters and some people will buy voters’ cards in order to have advantage”. He said those who bought these enumeration areas raised the figure from about ‘250 to 500 and if you later count and discover that the population is 10, they will say no, but we gave you 500, you have to raise it to that number that we gave you.’

Odimegwu lost his job for coming clear on the monumental fraud past censuses had been. But the issues raised illustrate how desperate our people can go on such issues, and a measure of the level of controversy they engender. We can do with less of that crisis now.

Unless there is an agenda that must be executed before this administration exits, the census should wait for the next government after it has satisfactorily addressed subsisting security challenges.

Former governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Muhammed Sanusi had cause last week to express concerns over the current state of affairs in the country. He had observed at an event in Lagos that Nigeria has never been this divided since the civil war of 1967-1970.

“I don’t think Nigeria has been in a place as difficult as this since the civil war. We have a challenge of nation building”, he told his audience. Sanusi lamented that because of elections, “the country has been divided dangerously along ethnic and religious lines”.

These challenges he said, have put the integrity of public institutions to question as people now have suspicion about policies, policing, judiciary and the electoral umpire. Sanusi’s observations are not entirely new. The divisions trailing the elections are just manifestations of the failure of the leadership to find enduring resolution to extant vexatious issues of our federal order.

Before now, many Nigerians had deprecated the inability of the leadership overtime, to properly harness and effectively manage the country’s diversities to unleash the creative energies of the constituents for rapid national development. In the absence of credible social re-engineering process, the country has had to contend with all manner of divisions as trust deficits in the capacity of the central authority to equitably disburse public goods and services to the constituents held sway.

The indifference in responding to the challenges of a multi-ethnic, multi-religious and plural society was to become very manifest in the policies and programmes of the Buhari regime such that former president, Olusegun Obasanjo had to in an open letter draw attention to the dangerous slide. But nothing changed.

Scant attention was given to the balancing of the divergent orientations and persuasions of a mixed society with the regime seemingly placing higher premium on political expediency. Key appointments never reflected the federal character principle despite the copious constitutional provisions to guarantee balance and inclusiveness.

These skewed policy issues were being implemented in a country where rising agitations for true federalism through the devolution of powers to the component units has been quite rife.

Curiously, the reaction of the federal leadership to genuine feelings of alienation and mismanagement of our differences has been the parroting of such precepts as its commitment to the oneness and indivisibility of the country as if these will come under assault if an equitable, just and accommodating political system is instituted.

The leadership trudged on as if maximum force is all needed to secure the trust and loyalty of the disparate segments seeking genuine accommodation and safeguards. It is increasingly clear that non-kinetic approaches serve national integration better because of the social and psychological reorientation issues embedded in that process.

If the primacy of force could be rationalized during the foundation of modern states, its value diminishes as national integration takes the front stage. The recourse to the supremacy of force in procuring the loyalty of the citizenry 62 years after independence is a clear evidence of how low we are on the rungs of nation building. It is reflective of the failure to construct the Nigerian personality from the distinct and variegated nationalities that inhabit this geographical space.

The state has continued to fail the citizenry not only in its inability to live up to its statutory responsibilities but also in imbuing in them, a common sense of national belonging and shared identity. The evidence is glaring. It can be discerned from the plethora of security challenges constantly threatening the authority of the state. It is evident from agitations for self-determination and the phenomenon of non-state actors competing with the central authority for the allegiance of the citizens.

So, the divisions have been there long before the elections. The rhetoric of politicians; the ethnic persuasions of key contestants and their language of political discourse may have reinforced these differences.

 If the conduct and outcome of the 2023 general elections reinforced extant suspicions and mistrust in the polity, it only reminds us of the herculean tasks facing the emerging leadership. It all goes to show that irrespective of who is eventually declared the overall winner by the court, how effective he is able to manage these diversities will determine the future direction and progress  of this largest black African population. That is the daunting challenge.

There are genuine issues relating to INEC’s observance of its guidelines for the election; rigging and falsification of results. The integrity of certain arms of the security organization and INEC has also come under intense attack for allegedly compromising the collective will of the electorate. Though some of these allegations have been denied, reports from local and international observers speak of clear electoral malfeasance and violations in high and low places.

The INEC has declared Bola Ahmed Tinubu the president-elect having satisfied the constitutional requirements. But Atiku Abubakar and Peter Obi who came second and third respectively in the race, are also laying claims to victory. They have gone to court to pursue their claims. And you ask: how possible it is for three contestants in the same election to emerge winners?

Those claims arise because they are questioning the process; the integrity of the elections and its umpire-the INEC. That should instruct that the process through which Nigerians choose their leaders must be more transparent.

The judiciary cues in appropriately here, because on its shoulders, rests squarely the resolution of all disputes arising from that election. Too often, the media have sought to extract from politicians and sundry citizens whether they have confidence in the judiciary. I think reporters are not being fair when they ask litigants such questions. Confidence in the impartiality of the judiciary as the last hope of the common man should be assumed.

Perhaps, those who pose such questions to litigants do so against the background of very questionable judgments coming from the same judiciary especially on election matters. There have been judgments awarding victory to people that never contested the primaries of their political parties. We have seen a candidate that placed fourth in a governorship election declared winner in circumstance that has remained very confounding.

All these do not imbue confidence in the independence of the judiciary which is key to any vibrant democracy especially in the resolution of election petitions. In verity, the task of sustaining the confidence of the people in the judiciary should be the responsibility of the judicial system.

Its officers have to demonstrate through the quality of their judgments that the people have every reason to trust them. They have to prove themselves by the quality of judgments they dispense in the avalanche of election petitions that will be brought before them. That is the challenge before them and the way they handle such petitions will be a measure of the trust they command.

There were 786 election petitions from the 2019 polls with Imo State recording the highest number of 76 even as Jigawa State had none. The figures for the last elections are yet to unfold. That should be a measure of the level of acceptance or otherwise of its outcome. The future of our democracy will depend on the way the judiciary handles elections petitions in the face of the bitter controversy trailing their outcome.

Those nursing the hope that the biting cash scarcity will soon abate should perish such thought. We may have to live with its dislocations and excruciating hardship far longer than anticipated.

The reason is simple. The contrived scarcity is the second component of the ‘Naira redesign and cashless policy’ introduced by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) late last year. The twin policy is among other objectives designed to take control of the currency in circulation, address the hoarding of the Naira outside the banking system and check the increasing counterfeiting of the high denominations of the Naira.

Implicit in the three itemized objectives is the imperative to take effective control of the currency in circulation especially outside the banking system. This policy should also be seen against the disclosure by the governor of the CBN, Godwin Emefiele that more than 80 per cent of the country’s currency in circulation was outside the banking system prior to the new policy.

The aim is therefore to drastically reduce the amount of cash in circulation. The CBN has since been beating its chest on the successes recorded in curtailing excess cash in circulation and their prospects in achieving set objectives including discouraging kidnapping for ransom.

At a press conference last December, Emefiele had noted with dismay that the currency in circulation had grown from N1.4 trillion to N3.23 trillion as many Nigerians especially the rich were hoarding the currency.

“We cannot allow them to become banks in their homes. They don’t have the license to build bank vaults in their homes. They are keeping the money to speculate against our currency and it is making our work difficult at CBN”, he had said. At other times he had blamed inflation on excess liquidity in the system.

Will the CBN now throw its doors wide open for such unrestrained cash flow in the economy in view of the Supreme Court ruling? And will that not amount to rubbishing the very grounds on which the policy was ab initio predicated? These posers are at the heart of the tardiness in the reactions of the CBN to the order of the Supreme Court to allow the old currencies circulate with the new ones.

Even as it is reluctant to come public on this, the underlying reasoning is that carrying out the order of the apex court will ultimately, sound a death knell to the main objectives of the policy. That seems the point many are yet to come to terms with.

That should explain why the CBN is not keen in injecting more cash into the economy. That is why also depositors’ banks are not dispensing cash. That also informed the broadcast by President Buhari in which he countermanded the apex courts’ order and directed that only the N200 notes should be added to those in circulation.

But the apex court took the bull by its horn when it finally ruled that the old and new currencies should circulate concurrently until the end of December this year. The court further lampooned the president for flagrantly disobeying its order through that broadcast. Even after the final ruling by the apex court, the dilly-dallying and covert sabotage did not abate.

This led to confusion as to what order to obey- that of President Buhari or the Supreme Court. For more than a week, this disorder subsisted. There was neither a directive from the CBN for the commercial banks to begin disbursing the old notes nor were the new notes anywhere to be seen. Some of the commercial banks which managed to issue very limited amounts of the old currencies met stiff resistance as the people were not willing to accept them.

It took a statement from Buhari denying he had a hand in the inability of the CBN to comply with the court’s ruling for the bank to reluctantly issue a statement directing depositors’ banks to begin paying and receiving the old notes. But nothing substantially changed since then. Neither the new currencies nor the old ones are available as people continue to buy cash at ridiculously reduced rates.

So on paper, the CBN has complied with the Supreme Court’s order. But in practice, it has found other ways to frustrate and incapacitate it. Yes, the CBN has directed the banks to accept and pay out the old currencies. But how much of the old and new currencies the CBN makes available to commercial banks remains outside the purview of the apex court. And there is nothing the apex court can do in that regard as the final decision on monetary management rests squarely on the shoulders of the CBN.

That seems the game going on at the detriment of the suffering people of this country who have been at the receiving end of the ill-conceived and hasty policy. The policy is biting even harder and about to grind business and commercial activities.

Our policy makers may have borrowed the idea from India which a couple of years ago, implemented a monetary policy that shares similarities with the current exercise. What was the Indian model like?

The then Indian Prime minister, Narendra Modi had on the night of November 2016, made a surprising television announcement in which he declared the highest two denominations of the country’s currency notes (Rs 1000 and Rs 500) withdrawn from the market with immediate effect.

Termed demonetization by the media, the policy was targeted against what they called “black money”. By declaring the two currency notes worthless overnight, India hoped to destroy the large piles of black money hidden away by tax evaders, curb corruption and counterfeiting. It was also envisaged to mark India’s transition to a digital and cashless economy.

The immediate outcome was unmitigated confusion and chaos as people struggled to cope. It brought with it excruciating suffering especially among the poor even as some deaths were recorded. A few years later, it became obvious that the policy was not a resounding success as black money challenge had neither disappeared nor inflation brought under reasonable control.

Though there were gains in tax collection and progress in digital payments but the cost of the policy far outweighed whatever gains it was meant to achieve. There were obviously better and less painful options to approximate the same objectives. That is the path the Nigerian authorities have chosen to thread in their current Naira redesign and cashless policy.

The same confusion and chaos that hallmarked the Indian experience are with us today. For months now, neither the new currencies nor the old ones are anywhere to be seen with a majority of citizens exposed to all manner of scorching hardship. Nobody knows for sure the amount of new currencies the CBN has printed since the exercise. Neither is the bank willing to make such disclosure.

The speculation at the weekend was that the CBN was about to flood depositors’ banks with the old currencies to lessen the pressure of the ill-conceived and ill-managed policy. The touted new resolve is coming in the wake of the decision of the Nigerian Labour Congress, NLC to picket and occupy all branches of the CBN nationwide in protest against the untold hardship imposed by the policy on workers.

 One is minded to ask, where are the new currencies? Why circulate the old currencies to the exclusion of the new ones? One would have thought that the right thing will be for the apex bank to use the time provided by the Supreme Court ruling to make the new currencies go round.

 Circulating the fast expiring old currency notes without the new ones, may be CBN’s strategy to limit the amount of cash injected into the economy. But it is loaded with the frightening prospects of prolonging the debilitating cash squeeze up to the December deadline. That will entail that we may have to live with acute shortages of cash even after the new deadline. That will obviously lead to counterproductive outcomes.

By the time this article is published, the presidential and National Assembly elections would have been conducted. Hopefully also, their outcome would have become public knowledge. And as usual with such contests, the elections would have been lost and won.

Thus, some of the issues being canvassed here will have to contend with what actually happened in the field on the day of the elections. Given the fluidity of the situation under which this article is written, it is difficult to be precise on the way events will unfold on the day of the elections. That notwithstanding, it is vital to highlight certain critical factors to the elections for ease of assessment of the level of progress made on the democratic chart.

These issues are not entirely new as they were copiously canvassed before the elections. The way they play out on the day of the elections will serve as a veritable benchmark for assessing the overall preparedness of the relevant agencies of the government to bequeath an election that is substantially free, fair and credible.

The elections will offer us the opportunity to interrogate all the assurances from the relevant agencies of the government that they have taken adequate care of these anticipated challenges to ensure that the polls hold in an atmosphere devoid of official connivance and malpractices, intimidation and violence. 

 In a matter of this nature, the first focus should be on the electoral umpire-the Independent National Electoral Commission INEC.

Logistics: the credibility of the elections will inexorably hinge on timely distribution of election materials across the country.

In the past, we had situations certain electoral districts waited for hours before election materials were made available to such centres. This led to late commencement or even postponement of voting to the following day.  Situations that usually give rise to all manner of accusations of bias against the electoral body must not be allowed to rear up their ugly heads. Timely and contemporaneous distribution of election materials will go at lengths to ensure the credibility and acceptability of the elections. INEC will be facing serious test in this regard.

Technology: Much of the optimism that the presidential and National Assembly elections will mark a sharp departure from our putrid electoral past is hinged on the deployment of technology for the conduct and transmission of election results. Here, the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System BVAS comes into focus. BVAS will ensure that only registered and accredited voters are allowed to vote on the day of the election.

By this arrangement, much of the electoral malpractices that hitherto took place at the polling units would be eliminated as only validly accredited voters are allowed to vote. The BVAS will come into very serious performance test not only in terms of its functionality but challenges that may be presented by poor network services from the service providers especially in very remote areas of the country.

 The BVAS holds the key to the overall success of the elections. There should be no room for excuses as its outcome could be very dire. INEC did test trials of the functionality of the BVAS in selected areas and came up with a successful verdict. It will obviously send wrong signals to hear that the BVAS deployed to some areas could not be of much help for one reason or the other.

Insecurity: the challenges posed by insecurity are multidimensional. This is not just a challenge to the INEC but the country’s security architecture. The country is assailed by all manner of insecurity across the country. As we were going to the polls, critical segments of the country still remained under the control of sundry non-state actors.

There are local governments and districts that political parties could not take their electoral campaigns to on account their volatility. That much was even admitted by a key official of the INEC when he warned that if nothing was done to check the insecurity in certain states, elections may not hold in very significant constituencies such that may lead to inconclusive outcomes and possible constitutional crisis. That prospect is high.

The security agencies have offered copious assurances on their capacity to guarantee a safe environment for the elections. The facts remains that many of those areas were still largely unsafe on the eve of the elections. Political assassinations, killings and attacks on key candidates were still recorded in some states few days to the polls.

Presumably, the INEC intends to hold elections in these very volatile constituencies. How it intends to ferry personnel and materials to areas which the political parties were afraid to campaign remains largely curious. In one of such states, a kite was flown that voters would be assembled at the local government headquarters to cast their votes. The idea could not fly but it demonstrated the dire security situation in such areas.

It will be very interesting to know how INEC was able to navigate this huge security challenge to conduct elections in such constituencies. So both the INEC and the security agencies will be facing serious test on the manner of elections conducted in areas prone to high level of insecurity.

The security challenge also comes from the dimension of the impartiality of the security agencies. How the security agencies perform their jobs devoid of manifest partiality is also at issue. The security agencies will be tested against the background of their neutrality and impartiality.

There is equally a new dimension of the security challenge that would be on test on the day of the polls. The quasi security outfits set up by some state governments to complement the efforts of the federal government in combating rising criminality will come into serious public focus.

Before the elections, allegations were rife that some of the states have secretly been deploying such security units to hound political opponents. They have also been fingered in many of the unresolved killings across some of the states.  Whether they will become willing tools to hound the opposition and manipulate the elections is also in contention.

The undue influence of money in politics is another source of concern. Part of the justification for the currency redesign and cashless policy of the government was to reduce the influence of money (vote buying) during this particular election. A lot of noise has been made on the propriety of the policy given the hardship it brought to the citizenry.

The election will show whether the new policy was able to prevent vote buying or politicians invented new avenues to circumvent the policy and continue business as usual. It will be a measure of the preparedness of the political class to part ways with a decadent order that has kept this country down overtime. 

But more fundamentally, how much progress the country has made in national integration will also come into serious test by the outcome of the polls. With the major candidates of the political parties coming from the three dominant ethnic groups in the country, the continued role of primordial, ethnic and religious sentiments in influencing voting patterns will come into serious assessment. It will be interesting to know which factors played key roles in the pattern of votes secured by the major contenders.

If it happens that voting pattern followed primordial lines, it would be a big statement on whatever progress this country has recorded in national integration 62 years after independence. That will also give a clue to the enormity of the challenges in forging a common sense of national identity, peace and progress of the country. It comes as a defining election.