By Umar Ardo, Ph.D
There are moments when the machinery of state must slow to acknowledge the weight of national grief. When twenty-five souls, some of them may have been my cadets, perish in the service of their country – when a Nigerian Air Force aircraft falls from the sky and an entire nation is plunged into mourning – the tempo of governance ought to change. Not stop, perhaps; the business of a nation does not cease. But it must bend. It must slow down to show that those who administer the republic are capable of feeling its pain.
2. President Bola Tinubu understood this perceptively. His declaration of a three-day national mourning, with flags ordered to fly half-mast across the federation, and in all our embassies worldwide, was the proper and necessary act of a Commander-in-Chief who recognises that the uniformed services do not merely serve the state – they embody it! Every flag lowered in honour of the fallen was a statement: *We see you. We grieve with you. Your loss is our loss.*
3. And yet, even as the nation stood in this posture of collective sorrow, the Independent National Electoral Commission proceeded to hold its world press conference. One struggles to understand the urgency. Yes, INEC is a constitutional body with a mandate that brooks no casual interruption. Election administration is serious, exacting work and the commission is right to guard its operational independence. But a world press conference is not a polling unit nor a collation centre on Election Day. It is not the final declaration of results under constitutional deadline. It is, by its nature, a discretionary event – a scheduled communication that can be advanced or postponed without imperilling the democratic process.
4. What, one must ask, was so compelling in that briefing that it could not have waited another seventy-two hours? Was there an existential threat to the electoral calendar that demanded immediate global address? Was the commission in such desperate haste that three days of deferential pause would have unraveled its plans? The answer, almost certainly, is no.
5. But this is not merely a question of scheduling. It is a question of institutional empathy – and of institutional memory. The Nigerian Air Force is not some distant ministry with which INEC shares only a passing bureaucratic acquaintance. The NAF is, in a very real and operational sense, a strategic partner in the electoral process. When Nigerians go to the polls, it is Air Force personnel and aircraft that often shoulder the critical burden of logistics – ferrying election materials to remote and difficult-to-access constituencies, ensuring that the instruments of democracy reach every corner of the federation, often under conditions of insecurity that ground lesser services. The NAF does not merely support elections; it enables them!
6. To hold a major international press briefing while the Air Force is burying its dead, while its commanders are comforting widows and orphans, while the nation is still counting the human cost of a single catastrophic moment, is to sever the emotional and operational cord that ought to bind institutions in times of tragedy. It is to behave as though the loss of thirty-two military lives is an unfortunate sidebar to the main business of state, rather than a national wound that demands a temporary laying aside of non-essential ceremonial duties.
7. This is not about legal obligation. INEC broke no law by proceeding with its programme. The commission was within its statutory rights. But governance, especially in a nation as fractured and fractious as ours, is not sustained by legal minimums alone. It is sustained by gestures. By symbolism. By the quiet, unforced acts of solidarity that tell citizens that their institutions are human, not merely mechanical.
9. Imagine the power of a different headline: *INEC Postpones World Press Conference in Honour of Fallen Air Force Personnel*. Imagine the signal that would have sent not only to the grieving families of the NAF, but to a Nigerian public perpetually hungry for evidence that its leaders and institutions possess a shared moral imagination. It would have cost INEC absolutely nothing but three days. It would have bought the commission something far more valuable: the respect of a nation that notices when its institutions choose grace over haste.
10. There is a dangerous tendency in our public life to treat sensitivity as weakness and protocol as sufficient substitute for propriety. We hide behind the letter of our mandates to avoid the spirit of our common humanity. But institutions are not algorithms. They are composed of men and women who live in society, who breathe the same air as the bereaved and who ought to know that there are times when the most professional thing one can do is simply to wait.
11. The fallen airmen and women deserved that pause. Their service to the republic, including their quiet, indispensable service to the electoral process, deserved that recognition. And the Nigerian Air Force, now diminished by thirty-two irreplaceable lives, deserved the simple dignity of knowing that its partners in governance could still their drums of publicity for three short days in honour of the fallen.
12. By holding that Press Conference, INEC did not commit a crime. But it missed an opportunity. And in the architecture of national cohesion, missed opportunities are not trivial. They are the small fractures that, accumulated over time, weaken the foundation of trust between the governed and those who govern.
13. The press conference is over. The headlines have moved on. But the families of the deceased are only beginning their long walk through grief. For them, and for a nation still in mourning, the question lingers: Could INEC not have waited? The honest answer is yes. Yes, INEC could have waited. And yes, it should have.
14. Still, let the Airforce and the nation overlook this folly in the belief that it was a thoughtless act that would not be repeated. May the souls of our departed soldiers be blessed and may God give their families, the Airforce and the nation the fortitude to bear the irreparable loss. Ameen!