JAKANDE: Nigeria’s response to people-oriented leadership via credible elections

The fourth in a series, so far, of public lectures, in honour of the first democratically elected governor of Lagos State – Alhaji Lateef Kayode Jakande – was an occasion on which Gbemiga Ogunleye, a lawyer and former provost of the Nigerian Institute of Journalism, Ogba, Lagos, and one other, made a case that Jakande was well deserving of an honour by the Lagos State and federal governments.

Beyond mediation and voters participation, in such a contest, it was the submission of Akhaine – a political scientist and specialist in demilitarization and constitutionalism, in a post-military nation-state, that is preparing herself for multi-party democracy – that the skipper of the umpire body should be elected by the parliament; in Nigeria’s case the National Assembly, which comprises the House of Representatives and the Senate.

The role of parliament – especially in a liberal, free-enterprise democracy, as in the United States of America – is to ensure that, with a competent, neutral head, the umpire body of a voting exercise, which he’d supervise, turns out an approximation of a final result – with a finality that would make, less necessary, a post-poll contestation of the results, which, in the Nigerian milieu, could be extremely violent, as horribly demonstrated by Operation Weti e, in the early 1960s and the Ajasin-Omoboriowo vendetta in Ondo State, in the early 1980s.