Before now, it looked like we had a closed political  space with the third-term agenda. Now, it is open. What does it mean in terms of a successor in a setting where even the opposition appears still largely in disarray?
I think two things have happened. When the President said it was victory for democracy, many Nigerians, including me, shared that view. It also includes the fact that Nigeria was getting to a very dangerous point where people feel that whatever the executive wanted was always possible even when others opposed it. The people have better confidence now that the institutions can work, and that the President may not always get what he wants. Two is the fact that the President’s first public comment after the defeat was to ask the PDP to go and do reconciliation. And we’ve since seen all sorts of efforts in all sorts of places to reconcile.   For the opposition, I do not share the view that they are now in disarray. I think people now realise that it is possible to play the game on a level playing-field. Before now, many people believed that the only way to be in business is through the PDP. Now the opposition parties are beginning to  gain more confidence. But the real danger (that) I see, and where I believe the press can play a major role is that a lot of people oppose third term for different reasons. There are many members of the public, the civil society and some members of the National Assembly who were genuinely opposed to it because they saw it as a threat to democracy. And rightly so. But the truth also is that there are also people who thought that third term means they would remain out of power and, power being their only source of livelihood, another four years of being out without business with the state means that they won’t be able to survive till 2011. For them, it is also a matter of life and death. Therefore, you have good people opposing third term and political criminals doing so too. The danger I see is that the polity could be misled into putting everybody that opposes third term as being sincere. Gani Fawehinmi pointed this out when he identified some people and warned Nigerians to be careful about them. And so the challenge before the press is to assist Nigerians not to forget the credentials of the people so that what we know about them is not completely buried and replaced by what we can call a battle of convenience as far as the third term is concerned. People who were known to have amassed wealth through corrupt means, if we are going to have a responsible leadership in the post-2007, every effort must be made to stop them from using their ill-gotten money to intimidate and manipulate the process. If that happens, the very moderate gains that one can point to over the last seven years would be lost completely.

What about the Electoral Act?
I have not looked at the new electoral bill to see the clean copy of what was passed. I have also read that I should expect the House and the Senate to pass two different versions. But I also want to believe that they will learn from their past experience. You remember the controversy over the 2002/2003 elections where both the executive and the leadership of the legislature admitted that they deliberately allowed some errors which they agreed they would explain to the people if discovered. But in the end, interestingly, the leadership of the same National Assembly was the victim of the same Electoral Act. Those who are familiar with the Act will tell you that it is worded in such a way to make it extremely impossible and rather difficult to sustain an appeal against the result declared by INEC. This was why most of the cases in courts took long to resolve because of the kind of evidence required. In the end, more than two-thirds of the members of the National Assembly were themselves victims.

How would the people benefit?
Other areas to look at is the person because, at the end of the day, the law could be anything. What I think could really make the difference is the determination of the INEC leadership. The chairman that I know has what we call progressive credentials. He had been a union member of the Academic Staff Union of Universities, ASUU. And I know that, to hold any position in ASUU, you must be clear politically and usually, you must be very  progressive; that is Iwu’s antecedent and I think with that he has what  it takes to give the country a credible election. And if he has the resources, that would be made easy. Again, this is controversial. The National Assembly seems to be concerned about ensuring that INEC gets enough it needs to do what it has to do. But, whether these credentials will translate to a transparent electoral system remains to be seen. However, there is nothing that inherently suggests to me that he cannot be trusted to give the nation a credible election.