So many Nigerians including me are envious of the recent presidential elections in America that has returned Senator Barrak Obama to a second tenure of another four year period. It is a very welcome development to all Americans including non Americans who are based in America for embracing his overall polices in uplifting and developing his country and its citizens.

It is even more envious to African nation’s nay Nigerians, knowing that in the life of every American, election are held every four years and during that period nobody would be able to guess who will become the president.

My dear country is far behind in that aspect, as we always know who will be governors, president or councilors even before elections are held. I envy America the more because incumbency does not count as far as politics is concerned unlike in Nigeria. I have been doing some research on American legal system and I keep wondering if they don’t like to take election cases to tribunals and appeal courts where cases would be filed and later adjoined and later re-adjoined for one year then two years then another and so on till the litigants even forget the purpose for which they went to court.

I learned a lot from this election, from the beginning of the voting until when voting ended, there was no announcement about government sending armored personnel to pooling booths and or late arrival of voting materials. I may have learnt other things during the election but Nigeria, the country of my birth, cannot be said to have learnt anything. From time immemorial, Nigerian government has always sent capable men and women as election observers to other countries to see and copy and put on paper whatever they learnt, so that incoming administrators would usher in the best system. We have not fared better because we have refused to learn.

President Obama had completed four years of his first single tenure and I ask myself, how many times has he visited Nigeria as against our own leaders like Gen. Olusegun Obasanjo, Shehu Yar’Adua, and President Goodluck Jonathan who always visit America.

I envy America, not because I was not born an American but because I have learnt that it makes you a man the more if you stand up before your opponent and shake his hand and say, I congratulate you for being a worthy opponent and for your victory. That was what Governor Romney did  and other contestants that failed before him. Here nothing makes you proud, there is nothing an old man would learn from the process of elections in Nigeria that is worthy of passing on to his growing children who may wish to go into politics or would want to partake in politics.

It is on record that many political and election pundits have said and proposed that until hunger leaves the doors of the average Nigerian, when every citizens could afford three square meal a day, voters would continue to sell their rights as had always been the case in Nigeria.

Twenty to twenty five years ago, Nigeria as a third world country, was better and far ahead most other third world countries in the far East including countries like Indonesia, South Korea to mention but a few. Today these countries are called developed countries because they not only learn but they also applied what they learnt while, we appear to be contented as a third world country! Discipline and awareness of everything that happens around you and what could happen is the key. When a voter is poor or does not know his right, does not know the role the person being voted would play then there is a problem. Nigerian voters are not treated like their counterparts from other countries that was why they sell their vote and allow their fate to hang in the balance.

Why would I not envy America when the whole world saw how real election was done. Can you compare that to our selection system which we call election? Until Nigeria administrators decide to learn and apply genuinely what they have learnt from other countries who have jealously done theirs again and again without any problem, more Nigerian would become fans of America’s election system, we will be the worse for it.

Aggo Dick resides in Port Harcourt.