GEJ's moves seem to have been worsening progressively for the past week or two. I think that its a sign of incompetence and indecision, but I might be wrong. I just think that having a leader with any of these traits is bound to be a bit frustrating. And MEND wouldn't have taken the blame for the attack if it didn't carry it out. Its a move that might evoke unnecessary violence upon MEND and its members and ruin its chances of getting its demands fulfilled. Furthermore, I don't think that the SA gov't would've arrested Henry Okah if there wasn't enough evidence to prove MEND's involvement in the attack. I think that all the talk about the attack being politically motivated is just an attempt at making IBB look bad, not that he's good, but its just trying to make him look worse, I think.

I've noticed that there are a whole lot of similarities between Nigeria and France before the French Revolution, and I thought it'd be interesting to post them up here.

Pre-revolutionary France was:
A kingdom comprised of several semi-autonomous territories that were united only through the French language
A feudal nation with an economy based on agriculture
Ruled by a few nobles and clergymen
Divided between the three 'estates', the clergy, the nobility and 'the rest'
Also divided between the rich and the poor
Witnessing the emergence and growth of a French middle class
Very highly influential all over Europe because of fashion, music, language, involvement in international wars and disputes and diplomacy

Nigeria is:
A nation comprised of several semi-autonomous states that practice a myriad of laws, ranging from sharia, to common western law to animist laws in some places
A nation in which a plurality of the population have jobs in the agriculture sector
Ruled by a select few, or 'elites'
Divided between the aforementioned elites, religious leaders (imams and priests) and 'the rest'
Also divided between the rich and poor
Witnessing the rapid emergence and growth of a middle class
Very highly influential all over the African continent because of fashion, music, language (pidgin), involvement in international wars and disputes and diplomacy

Maybe this is a sign of a revolution coming, or maybe its just a coincidence
Either way, it is very interesting

YAY!
Now the army can go on a rampage and kill all those armed robbers

By Yinka Ibukun

LAGOS (Reuters) - The list of voting stations for next year's elections in Nigeria is littered with duplications and flaws that suggest almost a quarter of the 120,000 polling centres might not exist, an election watchdog said Tuesday.

The West African Non-Government Organisation Network (Wangonet) said it had come upon the inaccuracies, which raise questions about election organisation in Africa's most populous nation, while trying to plot polling stations on a digital map.

"In our estimation, approximately 28,000 booths out of the purported 120,000 are ghost," Wangonet founder Tunji Lardner, a former Nigerian journalist, told Reuters.

For example, a tally of all the polling stations listed on the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) database came to 111,078, compared to the 120,000 regularly cited by INEC, Lardner said.

Furthermore, 7,992 of the officially listed booths from the 2007 election, which is being used as the basis for the 2011 vote, were duplicated at least once -- and in one instance appeared on the list 40 times, he added.

Other polling stations were listed as next-door to one another in the same street in the same village, and others appeared twice in the database but with names slightly altered, Lardner said.

Unless rectified, the discrepancies suggest Nigeria's fourth election since the end of military rule could be as messy as its predecessors. Nigerian media have already described next year's poll as one of the most expensive ever staged.

"You can't manage what you can't compute," Lardner said. "A lot of things are predicated on that data -- electoral computers, the logistics around that, the financial planning around that, the number of INEC officials."

INEC spokesman Kayode Idowu said election organisers were aware of possible inaccuracies and that the 120,000 total "may not be the gospel truth" but said there had not been enough time to audit the list before ordering polling equipment.

"When you do a budget, you don't look at the baseline. Savings will be made and returned to the government," he said.

The elections were due in January, but INEC has asked for a three-month delay to iron out problems with voter registration lists that it said threatened the credibility of the polls.

Nigerian elections have tended to be marred by massive irregularities and legal wrangling, although since 1999 the Peoples' Democratic Party (PDP) has always emerged victorious.

Next year's polls are likely to be highly contentious due to the absence of PDP consensus about its candidate for president following the death earlier this year of Umaru Yar'Adua, a northern Muslim, in his first term.

President Goodluck Jonathan, a southern Christian who succeeded Yar'Adua, has registered as a candidate but some PDP officials feel he should not run because of an unwritten PDP rule that power rotates between north and south every two terms.

(Additional reporting and writing by Ed Cropley; Editing by Jon Boyle)

http://af.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idAFTRE68R2X020100928?pageNumber=1&virtualBrandChannel=0
And the bane of Nigerian politics continues to haunt us.

We neeeeeed military intervention in Aba

Please ooooooooooooooooo, We need some kind of military intervention here

Goodluck isnt reaaaaaally creating much of an impression on me at the moment.
I mean he's sposed 2 be for democracy
This kinda meeting IS democracy in action

This is why, I think, we need Ribadu. Its because he wants to rid Nigerian politics of all those corrupt elements, and it is only after their removal that we can begin to rebuild our nation.

He has shown himself much too flexible, spending ONE BILLION NAIRA on BRITISH DUSTBINS

The problem is that not that many people know about Ribadu, let alone his presidential ambition

yeah GEJ for this part
buuuut we need to escape the PDP
like ASAP

Even if we have credible elections, we might not have such leaders.
Because the leaders lie

I trusted GEJ, up until i saw that his gov't wants to spend about a billion naira on british dustbins

After spending about a billion naira on british waste bins??
I think not

GEJ seems to be reshuffling everything a bit too much before these elections

well well

No
I'm just saying that while some people said GEJ was just a toy, he's proving to be a rather progressive individual
and that I still think Ribadu might have a bit more to offer.
Maybe

The sad thing is that these crooks'll probably be given an amnesty of some sort.

@chyz
Ok
I like to keep an open mind is all

Nigerians are, generally, intelligent people. It is absolutely shameful that we should have such failures in our educational system.

and you guys said GEJ was just a pawn on OBJs chess boards.
I still got my chips on Ribadu, though.

@chyz
Money? Electricity? Good roads? Health care?
They can also educate the Northerners.
We dont need to adopt their ideologies
But they can help us develop

@chyz
Maybe, but I myself think that Nigeria'll be better with the North, because then we'll be able to appeal to oil-rich Arab nations for economic assistance and stuff.

@chyz
Being landlocked means that its going to be much more difficult and much more complex to export goods. And that the countries surrounding landlocked ones closer to the sea can actually control your own economic growth.
It pretty much limits self-dependency.

Not necessarily, because it probably wont want to be landlocked

And I repeat
The north can secede
But it will not

No self-respecting Nigerian should vote IBB in.
Its as simple as that
I hope

I will be the aboki representative here
The north can secede
But it will not
It is as simple as that

You guys are commenting as if the entirety of the north is parasitic, rich, uneducated and just plain evil. The north might be the poorest part of Nigeria, and although Northern leaders suck arse, the large portion of northerners that are educated are good individuals who also see their leaders' flaws.

If I could vote, I'd do so for either GEJ or Ribadu, as they seem to be young individuals capable of leading this nation to what I have seen as being described as 'the promised land'

I'm going to come at this from a different angle now.I know it might contradict my previous statements, but after a little bit of thinking, i began to believe that it is not the fulani, or any other ethnic group in the country, that are holding the grips of power in Nigeria. I believe that there exists in Nigeria a class, one that is entirely comprised of individuals that I will refer to as the 'super-elites'. That class comprises of individuals from ethnic groups all across the nation, and I believe that those individuals have the power to change the nation as they desire.
Well, thats what I've begun to think.
Dont attack me for my beliefs please