Nigeria's Presidential Elections

From what I heard on CNN, there were 25 candidates on Saturday. How do you choose from 25 different candidates? Weren't there primaries held to limit the final vote to the candidates with the highest percentages of votes? I was only aware of seven that were running at some point - Yar'adua, Buhari, Atiku Abubakar, Utomi, Okotie, Duke and Orji Kalu. At the beginning of the process, I was very excited because I thought things truly had changed in Nigeria for us to finally have candidates like Duke and Utomi putting throwing in their hats.

However, as things progressed, the old Nigeria began to surface. It turns out that the future leader would be selected, not elected when he was chosen by his party as the candidate. Why weren't the people given a chance to choose their party's candidate in primary elections? Instead, a few old cronnies got together to decide for the country. Naija is messed up like that. I hate that last sentence. I hate that I even thought to say that but things like that happen in Nigeria. What were the issues? What did the candidates stand for?

Apart from Duke and Utomi, I never really got to know what the candidates were about. I am looking forward to the day when we'll vote based on what candidates can do, the issues they hope to tackle when they are in office. I asked a few Nigerians around me: "Would you have voted if you were in Nigeria?" Some said yes and I asked who they would vote for? Without knowing the man, they said Yar' adua because that's who the current president supports and with nothing else to go by, that's the choice they would have made. I most likely would have voted at the gubernatorial level but other than that, I think I would have saved myself the trouble of voting for a president that had already been selected a long time ago. That's speaking as an outsider. Perhaps if I was in Nigeria, I would know more but based on what I've read about the presidential process, I would have been better off staying at home. Sad indeed.