General elections to transit from this administration to another began last Saturday with those of presidential and National Assembly candidates.

Details of their outcomes are trickling in.

The president-elect is anxiously being awaited locally and around the world and while there are 18 political parties on the ballot for the contest, political pundits have narrowed it to a four-person horse race among the leading candidates: that of the All Progressives Congress (APC); Labour Party (LP); New Nigeria Peoples Party (NNPP); and Peoples Democratic Party (PDP).

A total of 109 seats in the Senate and 360 in the House of Representatives, were equally contested for.

Regrettably, polling continued in 141 units in Bayelsa State on Sunday, following security breaches that made it impossible to be carried out on Saturday.

The INEC chairman, Mahmood Yakubu, said this in an update on the conduct of the exercise, while also reporting some glitches in Lagos, Imo, Anambra, Borno, Abia, Edo States, among others, subjected to thorough scrutiny for action.

Experiences from Saturday’s elections revealed that much has not changed in INEC’s logistical nightmares. Electoral officials and voting materials arrived at some centres as late as between 11 a.m. and 4 p.m., forcing the exercise to spill over to Sunday. Lagos and Abia States were among the areas affected.

Equally disturbing has been reports of voter intimidation in some parts of Rivers, Abia, Akwa Ibom, Gombe, Edo, Lagos, Ogun and Taraba States, where armed thugs invaded polling units and snatched ballot boxes, burnt them, or threw thumb-printed ballot papers into the gutter.

These electoral bandits were not acting alone, as reported by a number of media organisations. Law enforcement agencies would be doing good to nab the suspects, as governorship and state assembly polls come up on 11 March.

Even more, is the growing anxiety and suspicion that presidential election results are about to be tampered with.

The fear is fuelled by INEC’s failure to upload results directly from polling units onto the INEC Result Viewing Portal, IreV, right from BVAS machines without delay.

Polling concerns about the limited functionality of the portal triggered the belief among many Nigerians and two of the political parties, to allege that there is a plot to manipulate the figures.

However, INEC has since denied this, citing mechanical and logistic issues.

The road to this juncture in the transition process has been strewn with thistles and ramparts. Nigerians are hungry and angry: there is no money in their pockets, due to the Central Bank of Nigeria’s (CBN) redesigning of the naira policy, which compelled everyone to deposit their N200, N500 and N1000 currency denominations in banks for exchange with new notes.

However, this swap is yet to occur.

The general feeling of a CBN finagle has driven youths to violent protests, smashing banks and property of innocent victims. Fuel scarcity and its astronomical costs when made available and most epileptic electricity supply have pushed citizens under the bus.

The asphyxiations are unbearable, deprecatory and emblematic of the denouement in Buhari’s failure to govern well.

The new president-elect, therefore, has his job well cut out. However, every new administration ignites optimism that things will soon get better, with the heavy load of promises made during campaigns.

Unfortunately, this has not always been the case since 1999, in a country in which tokenism so often dwarfs expectations.

Nigeria is in dire need of a seismic change – a radical or revolutionary departure from the status quo.

Corruption, mismanagement and lack of vision over the years have hauled 133 million Nigerians into a seeming cul-de-sac of multi-dimensional poverty, according to a report late last year released by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) and its foreign partners.

Pulling them out of this is going to be a hell of a task.

<strong>The Overflowing Presidential Plate</strong>

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