Olusegun ARIYO
Just as Professor Chinua Achebe Mentioned In His Book titled The Trouble with Nigeria, Published In 1983, for Decades after, Professor of Communications at Baze University, Abiodun Adeniyi, has suggested why Nigeria’s elections are always shrouded in dispute.
Speaking during an interview on Arise Television’s ‘Prime Time’ on Friday, which was monitored by Urban Express News, Adeniyi said elections are always contested and disputed because there is no transparency.
He added that the bane of Nigeria’s democracy was elections, stressing that to grow the nation’s democracy, every hand must be on deck to make elections credible.
“Obviously, no one benefits because often, we celebrate the longevity and the fact that democracy has stayed for 26 years.
“But I’ve also highlighted the fact that the bane of our democracy is election, electioneering, the fact that we are so vociferous about it, always contested, always disputed, and it is disputed because there is no transparency. It’s often the case that we find it difficult to conduct free, fair, credible and transparent elections.
“The major problem we have identified, and we have also said that to grow a democracy, to consolidate it, to make it much more imbued with integrity, we need to do everything possible to make it open, transparent, credible, and one way to do this is the ramping up of technology into the process.
“So whenever citizens see anything that appears to deviate from that trajectory, it becomes very concerning, and that’s why the communication that came out from the Senate was very disturbing, until we started having some kind of problems with semantics and people started wondering if it was a matter of inappropriate communication, miscommunication and such other things. As we speak now, I think they see a bit of confusion,” he opined
