Professor Attahiru Jega, the chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), is a university teacher. He was picked from the classroom, where for many years, he had conducted tests for students to carry out a very crucial national assignment of conducting the 2011 general election. Many Nigerians have come to see a free, fair, credible and generally acceptable election as an elusive phenomenon in the country.

Jega is today like the proverbial three-year-old dead body that is no more a stranger to the grave. In other words, the professor is very familiar with tests in the proper sense of the word. Before becoming a professor, he had encountered all forms of test. In the course of his teaching carrier, he had conducted tests for many students. So, Jega understands what it takes/means to do well or fail in a test.

The first leg of the 2011 general election is for Jega’s INEC to produce a credible and authentic voter register that will contain the names of all eligible voters throughout the country. It is, no doubt, the first major test that the new INEC boss is facing since his appointment. The exercise is one of the major determinants of whether Jega would succeed where others had failed or just mark the failure register as his predecessors.

The compilation of the names of eligible voters kicked off nationwide (at least, that is the assumption) about a week ago. However, reports from many parts of the country are only saying that “it is not yet uhuru” as far as the efforts towards the seemingly elusive free, fair, credible and generally acceptable elections in the country are concerned.

From the complaints of faulty and/or ineffective Direct Data Capturing (DDC) machines to the snatching and/or stealing of the machines by faceless people believed to be politicians or their agents in many parts of the country, the resolve of Jega to conduct a credible and generally acceptable election this time round appears to be on a shaky ground.

Reports all over the country show that the politicians in the country have started displaying their dexterity in the art of election rigging, which in Nigeria, they believe, starts from the compilation of the voter register. From the reports so far, the exercise has been reduced to a sham. Some of the DDC special machines were said to have developed wings, landing in the homes of some of the so-called party chieftains to register, as usual, fake voters.

In many places, the presence of the INEC officials doing the registration is yet to be felt. Yet, it is almost two weeks that the exercise began. In my own area, with very large population, just as in many other areas, if anyone had registered, such a person must have done so somewhere else. Then what happens to them after the exercise which is expected to end after two weeks? Would they be de-enfranchised?

The problem on ground now can be viewed from two different angles. First from the angle of what appears to be INEC’s short-comings and secondly from the age-long rigging mindset of Nigerian politi-cians. They form the formidable items in Jega’s first major test as the INEC boss.

The truth of the matter is that it will be difficult to hold any of Jega’s predecessors personally responsible for all the evils that bedevilled the past elections in the country. Implicit in this is the fact that, in spite of the general applause that greeted the appointment of the new INEC boss, if nothing is done about the structure of the rigging machinery on ground and the rigging culture of an average Nigerian politician, then Jega should forget about aiming at anything better than the detestable records of his predecessors.

What we are saying here is that, from various reports and observations about the ongoing voter registration, Jega may fail this all important test except something is urgently done to stem the prevailing tide of failure.

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