Elections into the federal legislature was scheduled to commence on Saturday, the 2nd of April, 2011 according to the Independent National Electoral Commission's INEC, timetable. Right up to the morning of the election, no contrary message came from INEC.
However, by 12:45pm, the INEC Chairman, Professor Attahiru Jega, sent shock waves all over the country when he announced that elections, already in progress in many parts of the country could no longer hold due to logistics challenges.
Economic experts put the amount lost due to the postponement at the conservative sum of N70 billion. Businesses all over the country were completely shut down. The land, air and sea borders of the country closed out the multibillion dollar aviation, ocean going, freighting and land transport sector.
The elections may have come and gone but the ripples the postponement caused are still evident.
* First the CBN already identified the election as part of the problem that militated against the value of the naira which the financial regulator is still battling to fix.
* Most of the sectors were made redundant while nothing useful was made out of the forced holiday. At the Lagos ports, a demurrage of N9 million was incurred as about 1, 500 containers could not be cleared. One of the big operators in the aviation sectors lost over N269 million to the airport closure. On Monday morning, the naira traded as low as N155.00 to the dollar.
* The loss to the small scale businesses and informal sector that employs over 80% of Nigeria may not be easily quantified. It suffices that many that live on just one dollar a day may have had to starve;
* The Nigerian military, the police High Command and other paramilitary formations, Non-governmental bodies and election observers incurred double expenses running into millions of Naira for frustrated logistic arrangements.
If INEC had countenanced the economic implications of its actions, it would have paid attention to its logistic planning as well as the intelligence side of its mandate so as to know when to postpone an election with relatively manageable costs.
