A few days ago I was excited and amazed to receive my postal voting pack for the upcoming local government elections. I mean, local government is just so amazing and exciting, that, well, I felt quite taken by the whole grassroots democratic process, shaping the future of my community, and all that.

Today I was even more amazed to receive a letter from the WAEC saying that I’d received candidate profiles which “omitted certain information”. Shocked by the apparent miscarriage of our democratic process, I took the new info sheet on the candidates for mayor, and compared it to the old one. Carefully poring over every word, I searched for signs of fradulent representations, or blatantly deleted sentences, or embarrassing typos … and found nothing. In fact, the only difference was that the new sheet included the address for one candidate’s thoroughly unexciting Web site.

There are more than forty thousand electors in the City of Cockburn. I wonder how much ratepayers’ money was wasted on this?