On September 21, barely three weeks away, the people of Edo State will march to the polling units to elect a new governor. All seems ready. The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) says it’s ready. On September 10, INEC would strengthen its readiness with mock accreditation of voters.

The mock exercise is to test-run the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) and the process of uploading results to the INEC Result Viewing (IReV) portal. Great idea.

Edo has a population of a little over 5 million people. A small state, comparatively. From INEC’s published statistics, the state has 2,501,318 registered voters, that is persons with Permanent Voter Cards. Out of this number, 2,128,288 PVCs have been collected by registered voters, leaving 373,030 PVCs yet to be collected. This is encouraging and it demonstrates that despite the voter intimidation, harassment and violence that defined 2023 general elections, Edo people are unfazed by the past. And you can sense their enthusiasm on the streets and shebeens.  Edo is ready. INEC is ready. But who are the candidates, what are the issues? INEC has published the final list of candidates. A crowd of 17 parties are fielding candidates made up of 16 male and one female candidate.

On paper, there are three front runners. They are candidates of the incumbent Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), All Progressives Congress (APC) and Labour Party (LP). But in reality, it’s a two-horse race between the PDP and the APC. Asue Ighodalo, an economist and lawyer flies the PDP flag. Senator  Monday Okpebholo, a businessman, is running on the wings of APC while Olumide Akpata, former Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) president is the candidate of the LP. Ighodalo and Akpata come into the fray with strong private sector pedigree and years of successful law practice. Both are scholarly endowed and share so much in intellectual aptitude. Both are engaging and look well-primed for leadership in the 21^st century. They evince a deep knowledge of the challenges of these times for Edo state and for the country. But Ighodalo has the edge both in diversity of knowledge and experience in management and leadership. He’s also flying on the wings of the PDP, a party which is not only the incumbent in the state but has well established structures across the 18 local governments.

Not so Akpata whose Labour Party has limited structure in Edo and nationwide. Nigerians, including Edo people, are not treating LP specially. They only treat a special candidate of LP in the person of Peter Obi. Akpata is a good candidate but he is limited by his own party’s limitations.

The candidacy of Okpebholo is hamstrung by his now hugely exposed inadequacies. Leadership must both influence and communicate. Okpebholo is not communicating. In a multi-ethnic state like Edo, fluency in one or two ethnic languages does not guarantee effective communication. You need proficiency in the nation’s lingua franca to be able to communicate to Edo people and to the world.

In this age of coding, Artificial Intelligence, smart cities, growing development partnerships among other dynamics of national and international relations, Okpebholo looks sufficiently challenged both in knowledge of existential challenges besetting Edo state and in his ability to engender and communicate solutions. His inability to effectively engage any audience including his party men and women, his lack of presence at political rallies, his carefully choreographed absence from townhall meetings and the media, two potent channels that offer him the opportunity to market himself, short-sells him as a political product. He is not helped by his handlers. Keeping Okpebholo from the media space in an Information Age driven by the media, orthodox and new media, is simply telling the people that you are not sure of his competences hence you are not proud of him. Such obvious oddities plus Okpebholo’s continuous slip-ups and pathetic bloopers at gatherings even of his own party faithful cast doubts on his capacity. Trending videos chronicling his gaffes and incoherence do damage to his person and to his party. It’s a cruel throwback to the late President Yar’Adua electioneering days when Obasanjo and other PDP top cats were the ones campaigning for him because Yar’Adua was too weak to speak or stand the rigour of addressing a crowd of supporters. Okpebholo’s public outings have been disastrous. His deliberate reclusive style of politicking advertises him as a man ungainly and inept, shorn of gravitas and grossly unfit for the seat he seeks to occupy. Nigerians noticed this trait in Muhammadu Buhari, a man unfit both mentally and in managerial acumen, and he ended up a disaster, the worst president Nigeria ever had. It’s all too obvious. APC is hiding Okpebholo. For what? Why hide a man who seeks to govern a state? And for how long can you hide a man who is already in the public arena, especially the partisan politics space? There must be something innately wrong with a product which the manufacturers are keeping away from the market. But they should realise that the more they hide Okpebholo, the more they afflict him with more reputational diseases. As it stands now, Okpebholo is perceived as barely literate, unfit for the office of Governor, unprepared for the nuances of leadership in the modern era and lacking the grace and candour required of leaders even in the most backward third world jurisdictions.

Ighodalo is a cut above the crowd of 17 candidates. He cuts the image of a ready man. He engages effectively with the publics; with Edo people home and abroad, with the media and civil society groups, with professionals and business people; with commoners and the elite. His manifesto is robust and he speaks to it at every opportunity. He inspires hope, hope for Edo people, hope for Nigeria. He bears no baggage, no encumbrance. His experience as former Chairman of the Nigeria Economic Summit Group (NESG) and as one who also served on the Board of the Nigerian Sovereign Investment Authority among many other public and networth private equities, lends him to the job he’s applying for. Ighodalo is largely perceived as the fit foreman that Edo people need at this moment to drive the system.

But Edo election is beyond the electorate and the candidates. INEC and its retinue of ad hoc staffers must be determined to make all votes count. Writing, cancelling and mutilating result sheets should never be entertained this time. This is not a national election but a one-state election and compromise should be abhorred.

Already, there are manifestations of thuggery and violence ahead of the election. The nation’s security apparatchik must rise above partisan clouds and ensure that no voter is intimidated and that electoral materials are not snatched or compromised in any form. The usual refrain by security personnel of ‘acting on order from above’ to do evil before, during and after election should be banished from our electoral culture. Edo presents a redemptive opportunity for both INEC and the police to win back public trust in elections. INEC should give Nigerians a clean election in Edo.

First published in Sunday Sun