One good move, two bad moves

GOOD MOVE:

The Central Bank of Nigeria has banned banks from funding political campaigns.

BAD MOVES

Even as the federal and state governments run up new mountains of unproductive debt, the Senate has approved new debt for the first and second tiers of government.

The courts grant yet another set of inexplicable tenure extensions to state governors, this time to five governors at one go. The courts keep acting as if the constitution was designed to give the protect the politicians' right to four years in office.

Contrary to the courts' illogical, irrational, inexplicable and probably unconstitutional perspective, I have said repeatedly on this blog that the four-year term is meant to constitutionally guarantee citizens the right to choose their political leaders every four years; when you extend terms willy-nilly, you end up with a situation like Anambra State, where the citizens went SEVEN YEARS (from 2003 to 2010) without substantive input in their own governance.

The four-year term is designed as a democratic protection for citizens, not a job-safety device for politicians. The slow-moving courts need to speed up the adjudication of electoral disputes, rather than continually grant politicians tenure-extensions that defeat the purpose of democracy.

PS: You know the funny thing? It doesn't really matter, does it? Look at me, using Anambra State as an example .... as though any of the "elections" held there were substantively democratic. Maybe the courts grant tenure-extensions because they know it doesn't defeat democracy since there is no democracy to be defeated in the first place. Maybe the courts think they are better-placed to impose candidates on the citizens, rather than leaving it to Big Men's back-room deals. Why else did the courts name Rotimi Amaechi the Governor of Rivers State even though he was not even on the ballot and consequently received exactly ZERO VOTES?