Even then no one could have guessed the  gargantuan  scale of the electoral fraud it finally inflicted on  the country in April. For the first time in the  country's history we held an election with ballot  papers that were not serially numbered and with ink  that was easily washable. The bottom line, of course  was that those in power, which mostly meant the  ruling  party, connived with the security forces to simply  allocate votes regardless of how voters voted.  One predictable outcome of all this was an  unprecedented rash of petitions to the election  tribunals. According to INEC itself there were 1250  elections this year as against 560 in 2003 - and  this  in a country where people are typically fatalistic,  leaving every injustice done them to God.

TO make matters worse, we have as chairman of the  commission someone whose arrogance and  head-in-the-sand attitude truly beggars belief; it  beggars belief that Professor Maurice Iwu would have  the courage to waste public resources shuttling  across  the major capitals of the world spinning the  incredible tale that but for him the evil forces at  home and abroad that never wanted the elections held  would have succeeded.

The surprising thing is that in spite of all the  universal condemnation of the elections Iwu and his  team are still in office, raising the frightening  prospects that they will be the ones to conduct the  re-runs of the elections that the courts have  ordered.

True, the top brass of the commission cannot be  fired by fiat. But surely it is not the most  difficult  job on earth for the authorities to persuade any one  who has shown the insensitivity displayed by Iwu to  jump out of his seat quietly.

Trouble is those who should be doing the  persuasion  are themselves the beneficiaries of Iwu's brazen  living in self-denial.

There is, however, a consolation of sorts in all  this sordid affair and it is in the way the  judiciary  under a new Chief Justice, the perpendicular Idris  Legbo Kutigi, has defied the odds to find for  "losers"  in the electoral farce in spite of rumours of huge  bribes flying around.

Hopefully at the end of the day the judiciary  will  upturn enough of the results such that for once  politicians will be forced into thinking twice  before  making for their power grab by hook or crook.

If 2007 witnessed the worst electoral fraud in  Nigeria's history it also exposed once gain the  shallowness of the widespread belief that fraud has  gender and academic qualification. Before the  disgraced and unlamented Mrs. Patricia Ette, the  first  woman Speaker of the House of Representative,  came along the conventional wisdom was that women,  being supposedly more compassionate than men, were  more likely to be more trustworthy and honest  leaders.

Then when Ette shattered that belief by her  brazen  inflation of the contract for the renovation of her  official residence and that of her deputy, many  pundits put it down as to her half-literacy. The  inadequacy of this explanation was soon exposed when  it transpired last month that long before Ettegate a  certain Mrs. Iyabo Obasanjo-Bello, a former health  commissioner in her native Ogun State and now a  senator of the Federal Republic of Nigeria as well  as  the daughter of President Olusegun Obasanjo and a  holder of a PhD to boot, had engaged in an even more  egregious financial fraud.

That Iyabogate which involved the highly educated  daughter of the former president acting under false  pretenses and abusing her office and family status  was  kept under raps for two years or so spoke volumes  about the double standards with which her father  ruled  Nigeria all these eight years. For, while her father  hounded the children of former heads of state,  Generals Sani Abacha and Ibrahim Babangida over  suspicions of shady business deals, his own children were apparently busy cutting dubious business deals  right under his nose.

The days may be early to pass a definitive  judgment  about his eight years in office, but if the sordid  details coming out of Iyabogate is anything to go by  then chances are his government, as well as  conducting  the most fraudulent election in Nigeria's history,  may  yet turn out to be the most corrupt and hypocritical  Nigerians have had to endure.

As a year defined by an electoral fraud of  historic  proportions it was no surprise that it ended on a  note  of a controversy surrounding the fate of the boss of  the country's most successful anti corruption  outfit,  namely Mr. Nuhu Ribadu, who has since been  instructed  to proceed for a year's study at the prestigious  National Institute of Policy and Strategic Study.

Many prominent Nigerians including the Nobel  Literature Laureate, Wole Soyinka, former governor  of  Kaduna State , Alhaji Balarabe Musa and the human  rights lawyer, Chief Gani Fawehinmi, have condemned  this development in the strongest terms construing  it  as an attempt to stop the Economic and Financial  Crimes Commission (EFCC) dead in its track.

Others with little or no sympathy for Ribadu have  dismissed such criticisms as shortsighted not least  because no war on anything can be successful if it  depended on one person. Even then this position  misses  the point that timing and symbolism too are  important  in winning any war.

 Ribadu's tenure was renewed only recently, albeit  possibly without the input of the incumbent  president.

 And, warts and all, he has come to symbolize the  EFFC  as the most effective weapon in the war against  corruption. To date there is no record to show he  has  done anything to discredit that symbolism. This  makes  it difficult, if not impossible not to conclude that  his not-so-subtle sack from the EFFC is a sign that  the new administration has lost the stomach for  fighting corruption.

In the unlikely event that they change their  minds  about the move, 2007 may go down as the year in  which  the bravest and the most sustained war on corruption  lost its steam.

Abroad 2007 was as crises ridden as it was at  home.

Iraq, of course, remained the world's top crisis. As  much a child of human greed as our own crises, Iraq,  once more, exposed the limits of raw power in  imposing  the will of a minority on an unwilling majority.

 It is, however, a lesson that American  politicians  like their Nigerian counterparts seem unwilling to  learn as their troops dig deeper into a war with no  end in sight. It is this unwillingness to learn the  lesson that you cannot win the peace without  addressing the underling causes of a war which led  the  Americans to hedge all their bets on Pakistan's  erstwhile military president, General Parves  Musharraf, which in turn eventually forced them to  broker a power sharing deal between him and former  Pakistani prime minister, Miss Benezir Bhutto, all  in  a bid to give Musharraf some semblance of  legitimacy.

It is this deal that has now proved Miss Bhutto's  nemesis by violently claiming her life in the  twilight  of 2007.

It is again this unwillingness to accept that raw  power - and subterfuge - has its limits that has led  the Americans to send in the Ethiopians to fight  their  so-called war on terror in Somalia for no worse  crime  than being taken over by so-called Islamists. It did  not seem to make any difference to the Americans  that  for the first time in decades the so-called  Islamists  had brought peace, security and stability to that  war  torn country.

Now that the country has descended back in to  anarchy the Americans have been shopping around for  more African countries to help Ethiopia pull their  chestnuts out of the fire. No self respecting  African  country that value the lives of its citizens should  oblige.      I GOOFED  Several readers have drawn my attention to my  error  in stating last week that Chief Olu Adebanjo was  General Obasanjo's minister of information who  initiated the move to limit the reach of FRCN,  Kaduna  back in 1978. The gentleman responsible was Chief  Ayo  Ogunlade as Obasanjo's commissioner of information.

 I  wish to apologise to my readers and to Chief  Adebanjo  for the error.