An election challenge in Africa

I got the word Sunday afternoon at LAX as I was getting ready to board a plane to Nigeria: the African nation’s presidential election—for which I was to be an observer—had been delayed.

The problem was that ballots and results sheets for an earlier scheduled parliamentary election did not arrive on time, meaning both elections would now have to be pushed back one week. As the head of Nigeria’s election commission put it: “We cannot bury our heads and say there are no problems. It’s regrettable. It is unfortunate. It should not have happened.”

These postponements illustrate the kind of mess Nigeria’s electoral process is in—and the challenging organizational issues and logistics election officials there continue to confront. They had originally planned to delay the parliamentary elections for only two days but then wisely decided they needed a full week to get their act together.

So, next Saturday, Nigeria will hold its parliamentary elections. And I’ll be on the ground with the rest of the international delegation assembled by the Washington-based National Democratic Institute, a non-governmental organization that, among other things, monitors elections in emerging democratic nations.

At NDI’s direction, we’ll be monitoring next Saturday’s parliamentary elections because the organization believes they’ll foreshadow the issues likely to be encountered during the presidential election, now scheduled for the following weekend.

We shall see.

Posted 4/4/11