Election issue is personal not structural

What is happening at the Electoral Commission (EC) is personal not institutional. Institutions use their structures to flush out persons who undermine their structures.

How timely the flushing determines institutional efficiency levels. The only point the one pleading structural and not personal would have is that the structure erred in her appointment; she should not have had it.

What is happening now is some compatriots taking full advantage of the motherland EC’s institutional arrangement to address the poison of persons appointed to work in it who should not be there. It is the EC system flushing out its garbage.

When some of us raised issues of maturity, experience and humility as requirements for the position, as well as demonstration of foresight, many insulted us. They called us anti-woman because we would not want women unfit for certain offices to disgrace themselves by displaying ineptitude to sabotage the woman can do cause. In the EC case, she had not shown competence in the public office she was holding.

Today, it is incompetence and corruption everywhere you look within that important institution.

The way the CHRAJ woman went, I knew the EC woman would go. Looking at the pattern of their appointment, things were so much of CHRAJ is like EC and so if X has happened to CHRAJ, it was sure to happen to EC. People kept asking where the appointer found such appointees for the imposition. They both seemed to have gone in after personal comfort than institutional efficiency. They both cared nothing about anyone else but themselves. And the arrogance of both, their spite for institutional arrangements and subordinates matched so closely.

I hear: ‘This my deputy did this wrong thing and, that my deputy acted in that corrupt way. In both cases I sat with nonchalance watching them doing nothing. And, oh, as for that IGF, it was an oversight we didn’t capture it in our budget.’ Good gracious! As if that was not enough, I have read: ‘I am not the commission … I am speaking for myself as chair.’ A chair holding the closest to life appointment in this motherland with all the privileges of immunity from manipulation speaking like that? It actually sounds so much like because I have been corrupt, I am unable to do anything about their corruption.

The saga, the drama, the cheating, it is the Supreme Court 2012 election petition hearing all over again. One unpalatable revelation after another. We should push for the positive end of that hearing; accepting that people have been stealing elections and therefore developing the 2016 anti-thieving mechanisms that enabled the cheaters to be halted in their tracks.

We, the against and critics of a bad appointment worsening, actually destroying, institutional structures can claim vindication. The solution is not some arrangement to keep them from misbehaving and blame it on the structures that have given them those positions. Unfit is unfit. Institutional structures are weak because people who occupy them have no respect for those structures.

I have argued in this column over and over that people with the congress ampebr? mentality live by we work in the public institution to our personal benefit and not to build them to work in support of the motherland’s development.

That thinking with its accompanying attitude is the canker dragging the motherland’s progress and prosperity to snail pace why others are advancing with electronic speed.

People build institutions and people destroy institutions. No matter the structures, bad people will always find ways of destroying. If you put a control freak in charge of an institution that requires consensus to function effectively, that head will destroy the consensus mechanism and accordingly the institution.

Should they not have instituted their own structures, they would not have found themselves in their individual and collective disgraceful position now. As for those crying making the motherland ungovernable or displaying naked bodies they would be shocked no compatriot would be interested in, we hear them. We hear them say we thieves of the motherland have appointed someone to help us thief. Either you allow the thieving or we hang you all.

Definitely, my compatriots and I are not going to sit down to be hanged. Rather, we would use the law and every lawful avenue to ensure that they the bad nuts of motherland governance hang themselves at the gallows of their ignorance, deceit, lack for moral decency and thieving ways.

That the destroyers of a noble system have no nobleness in them to nudge them to leave the institution alone shows why they should never have found themselves there. A lesson must be taught by dealing with them for all my compatriots to learn people survive with institutional wellbeing and not the other way round.