[size=14pt]Nigerian lower house approves January poll[/size]

ABUJA — Nigeria's lower house of parliament on Tuesday voted to move up general elections to January, confirming a decision taken by the senate a week earlier, a parliamentary source said.

"With the decision of the House of Representatives today, it means that both houses of the National Assembly have agreed to move next year's election to January. This decision will be gazetted to become law," the source told AFP.

The move, which concludes a process of constitutional amendment, is expected to pressure President Goodluck Jonathan's ruling party into deciding whether its candidate will be from the mainly Christian south or from the majority Muslim north.

The current constitutional rules state that polls must be held between 30 and 60 days before the new president's term begins. Presidents take office on May 29.

Jonathan, who took over following the death of president Umaru Yar'Adua in May, is widely expected to run, but he has not officially declared his candidacy.

There has been a dispute within the ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) over whether it will back Jonathan.

Governors of Nigeria's oil-rich Niger Delta have pledged their backing for Jonathan if he decides to run.

The governors of the Delta's five states -- all from the PDP -- took the decision at a meeting in the southern oil city of Port Harcourt on Monday.

However, some politicians insist that the party should back another candidate from the Muslim north rather than Jonathan, a Christian, since Yar'Adua did not complete his term.

The five Delta governors also backed the president's plans for electoral reform ahead of the 2011 polls.

Nigeria has a long history of electoral fraud, and disputes over the last elections, in April 2007, are still pending in the courts. That election was judged deeply flawed by local and international observers.

The PDP, in power since 1999, has traditionally alternated its backing between candidates from the north and south as a way of smoothing over ethnic, religious and social divides in Africa's most populous nation.

The party's primaries are expected to be held by October.

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. . .Rigging, here we come!

One of the main reasons given by people who wanted the dates changed, was so we 'elect' a president before we 'elect' governors, hence we don't have powerful governors dictating who the next president would be (as they tend to do); and I agree with that. However, I really think this decision should have been run by Jega, he is the one conducting the elections after all so it would be good if the leader of INEC had a say so we know how feasible free and fair elections would be in such a relatively short planning period of time, and if not, what actions would be necessary to give us such something close to it.