Friends:
As Nigeria's "electoral" politics evolves (or, should I say, stagnates), given all the events and their permutations that we witnessed between February 25, 2023 and March 18, 2023, we must now begin to re-interrogate what the following concepts mean in concrete terms, in the Nigerian context: "elected," "declared result," "victory," "winner" vs."declared winner," "INEC declared winner," "INEC announced results," "announced polling result" vs "collated election result," "politics is a numbers game," "go to court," etc., etc., etc.
A visitor from outer space must be intrigued by Nigeria's political abracadabra, its dramatics, and their rhetorical peculiarities!
-- Sincerely,
Victor O. Okafor, Ph.D.Professor and Head
Department of Africology and African American Studies
Eastern Michigan University