Dangers of the One Sided Story

A popular Nigerian author, Chimamanda Adichie, gave an excellent TED Talk about the danger of a single story-a story that shows one side but not the other. When I saw this article in the New York Times that was supposedly about Goodluck Jonathan winning the presidency, I felt appalled at the one-sidedness of it. While [...]

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Nigeria Decides: Saturdays vote-Part 2

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Nigeria Decides: Saturday’s vote Part 1

Compared to the previous two democratic elections, Nigerians came out in massive numbers Saturday to press their thumb print on the paper ballot and vote for the next president of Africa’s most populated country. Even though the number of votes reported for Saturday are small percentages of the total number of registered voters in some [...]

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Nigeria’s April 9th election: a pure display of peaceful democracy

April 9th, the first day of Nigeria’s national elections that I observed at different polling places inside the University of Ibadan was an exercise in the purest, most proactive display of democracy I have ever witnessed. Nigerians lingered peacefully at polling places from early morning until late afternoon carefully monitoring the Independent National Election Commission [...]

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The Post-Post-Postponement Post

Well, whoever commented and told me not to be surprised, that I hadn’t seen anything yet after the first election postponement was correct. After hours of meetings between the 63 (Sixty three!! is that a joke?) political parties in Nigeria, the Independent National Electoral Commission decided to set the National Assembly elections back another week, [...]

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They tried…1st set of elections postponed

As Nigerians say, “they tried.” The third nationwide vote in Nigeria since the end of military rule in 1999 almost started successfully today. Due to an unfortunate logistical mishap of ballot materials, specifically result sheets, the elections for National Assembly have been postponed until Monday, April 4th. I heard the news this morning via Twitter [...]

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Day 1 of No Movement: National Elections in Nigeria

Today, April 2nd, 2011, is the first of three consecutive Saturdays of the national election. Today, millions of Nigerians will go to their polling places, wait for obscene amounts of time to elect members of the National Assembly. Nigerians will elect 90 senators and 360 members of the House of Representatives today, choosing candidates from [...]

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