The very fact of your choosing over and above all other important things to be here to discuss the subject of how we can harness our respective ideas and talents to collectively build up values of leadership and governance in our country - which is what electoral democracy is all about - testifies to your love for the country.

I am delighted to be here with you for this interaction. I can confidently say that I too have had Georgia on my mind. A visit to Atlanta for the very purpose of interacting with the large population of fellow Nigerians who reside in this part of the world has long been on the drawing board. The very fact that Nigerians resident in Atlanta and, indeed, the rest of the State of Georgia are known substantially to be top professionals and enlightened compatriots makes it very important that we engage in such dialogue about our nation's future, as this forum provides us opportunity. Our dear country, Nigeria is in a crucial phase of development. Nations that have made the great leap in development and those that realise what it takes to achieve such great leap of history know very well that not only is such transformation not a happenstance, it is also almost always confronted with several challenges and distractions which are capable of deferring, if not completely, derailing the attainment of the national goal.

No matter how bad or backward a system is, one thing we must never lose sight of is the fact that there are those who benefit and have been benefiting from the decadent system. It is only natural that those who have been the masters and beneficiaries of the old order will resist change, especially if the change will no longer guarantee them the self-serving advantages they have enjoyed for long at the expense of the larger populace. This, at present, is one of the key challenges in the efforts to change the old order of doing things in our dear country.

Nigeria has made remarkable progress in the last decade. Don't let any one convince you otherwise. Whether in the economic/corporate realm, or in social life generally, Nigeria has made remarkable strides. Politically as well, the country has made historic progress. In the modern world that we live as it is generally held and with good reasons, everything revolves around politics. That, of course, is the reason for our being here in this conference today. How do we get our politics right? What do we do to achieve the ideal democratic system of our collective aspiration? The challenge is to be realistic, to be committed and to be sincere in the pursuit of what we say we want.

The irritation in managing some aspects of our national life is many, especially those who dominate the public media space and influence others do not align their dreams with realities. Maybe, that is the nature of dreams.

Take the 2007 General Elections, for instance. For 47 years, Nigeria did not manage to successfully transit from one elected government to another. At crucial junctures in every republic, when election was due for change of government, a conspiracy by civilian and military forces thwarted the nation's political progress, with self-serving politicians always ready to undermine democracy, unless they had their way by hanging on to power.

Before the 2007 elections, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), had called the attention of the nation to various problems in the political environment in Nigeria in which the election will be conducted. Among other things, the commission had noted that too much money was being spent in politics and elections in the country, and that the danger inherent in such a situation was that people with money, rather than those with ideas and good intentions, were bidding to buy off the electorate.

We introduced a new political finance regime with the aim of reducing political campaign expenditure, but the larger society paid no attention to the new initiative. The numerous political activists and even the media showed no interest in the issue.

Within the ranks of the political parties themselves, it was not difficult for all to see that things were not going on well. Indeed, there was no democracy at all inside the parties. The leadership of the various political parties ran their affairs as empires. The system of primaries for instance, which serves to select candidates was turned into a joke as various parties shoved aside many of the hapless fellows who won the primaries and picked those who either had more money or had the endorsement of the party leaders. The Electoral Commission could not do much about this aberration, as the Electoral Act had made the internal affairs of the parties just that, with the commission having little say on such matters.

Still on the political parties. Some time before the 2003 general elections, some of the politicians had gone all the way to the Supreme Court with a case for the criteria for registering political parties to be liberalised. The Supreme Court ruled in their favour on the matter. The immediate implication of the situation became the sprouting up of 30 political parties for the 2003 elections, which ballooned to 50 political parties, as every politician and a handful of associates had no problem meeting the condition for registering a party. While it must be admitted that this situation helped in lowering the tension in the political scene, as every politician could now become a party top shot of sorts and, possibly, a presidential candidate, there was the other side of the coin. Groups and forces that could have coalesced into a strong opposition party now scattered themselves into small parties, each an entity of its own, but all failing to provide any meaningful challenge to the dominant ruling party.

To compound the situation, for the first time in the history of the country, the Presidency was thrown into a crisis. It split down the line, following irreconcilable differences between the President and the Vice President. The latter left the government and the ruling party with his supporters and floated their own political party from which he ran for president.

As it turned out, disturbingly, some members of the ruling party and those in the leading opposition did not want the election to hold. The reason on each side was simply selfish. The nation found itself once more in a situation where another republic may collapse and democracy truncated. But we were determined to conduct the 2007 elections, what ever the shortcoming may be. And we did. Thanks to that incident. Nigeria broke the jinx of 47 years, and has now entered a new phase as a democratic system where the end of two tenures of an elected government will no longer be a source of great anxiety.

In the days after the 2007 elections, the idealists, the mercenary public commentators and the confusionists within our society - and there are many of each - have taken to the media; the newspapers at home and the internet worldwide, to descend on the Electoral Commission and its chairman in particular, for not giving Nigeria a first-class election. And you ask yourself: How does any one that is sincere to himself and his nation expect a first-class election out of what is obviously a troubled third-class environment?

I have said it in the past and I will always repeat it with every sense of candour and responsibility to my nation; that considering the circumstances in which the 2007 General Election held, it was not only successful it was remarkable. It does not help our quality of analysis or sense of proper appreciation of our national affairs for anyone or persons to completely ignore the context in which an event held and still proceed to assess the same event.

It did Nigeria and its political development a lot of good that the 2007 General Election was conducted. It would have been an unmitigated disaster for the nation if the jinx, of not managing to transit to a new government after an old one had completed its term in office, had been allowed to reassert itself in Nigeria's history.

One of the points easily and inappropriately held up by those who criticise the 2007 elections is that the verdict of various election tribunals upturned the result of some elections. Those who make this point miss the point completely. Election is a process and not an event that happens only on voting day. Election Tribunals are part and parcel of the electoral process. They were established to complement the act of conduct of elections.

The mechanism of election tribunals was set in motion to help ensure that the right things are done in the process of elections. If, therefore, an election tribunal upturns an election result and either orders for a re-run election or, in the extreme, awards victory to a different person from the person earlier declared winner, what it means is that the system is working as it was made to work.

Even at that, it must be noted that the total result of elections upturned by the election tribunals in the entire 2007 elections has remained negligible. And more importantly, most of the results upturned by the tribunals derived more from technical reasons and failure of the political parties to do the right thing rather than lapses in the conduct of the elections.