I'm all for strong institutions, instead of strong men or women. But imagine, for a moment, what would have happened if the Independent National Electoral Commission had not announced the registration of the All Progressives Congress on Wednesday. And it was a probability. The APC had met the requirements for registration and the law was clearly on its side. But that's not enough. In Jonamaths where 16 is greater than 19, you need more than the substance and appearance of the law to be sure.

You still need, I am ashamed to say, a strong man - or woman. And INEC chairman Attahiru Jega just proved that he still has some fire left in his stomach. Remember that a phantom group with no office address and a hungry leader somehow found the money to go to court and stake a claim to the acronym APC. Remember, too, that with APC-mylitis infecting a growing number of top members of the Peoples Democratic Party, the tin gods of the ruling party were quite desperate for any remedy to kill the merger. Under these circumstances, not only was a fragile INEC under threat of bending, the question - to register or not to register? - was a major personal test for Jega.

This newspaper had reported on June 11 that it had on good authority that Jega was under pressure not to register APC. He had confided in a source that he would quit if "they" tried to force his hand. Jega, the son of a former district officer from Kebbi, wasn't bluffing. The radical, who used to wear Castro-style beard as an undergraduate, came to the job with a record. Apart from Ibrahim Umar and Dandatti Abdulkadir, he was perhaps one of the most outstanding vice chancellors of the Bayero University, Kano. Around 1996 when he was still deputy VC, the VC and the minister of education, M.T Liman, wanted to use him to break the ranks of the local union in a desperate bid to please General Sani Abacha who was mad that a university in his home base had joined the teachers' strike. Jega refused to be used, choosing eviction from campus instead.

His struggles went beyond BUK. He was president of the university teachers' union when higher education needed someone with a spine to tackle the mess that Babangida's military regime had made by creating an elite class of lecturers at the expense of the survival and future wellbeing of the larger system. I was leaving the university then. I will never forget Jega saying that he was fighting not just to save lecturers from the misery of the day, but also to give Nigerian universities a future and a hope.

Sadly, Babangida had other ideas. It must be a matter of regret for Jega that, 25 years after he fought the war to end future wars and endured three months in the same Kirikiri prison cell with the two Italians who had dumped toxic waste in Koko, the universities are still fighting for their lives.

But let's face it. After the 2011 elections, I feared that Jega's courage was fraying at the edges. His bumbling start to the last elections, the large-scale rigging in many parts of the north, INEC's filibuster about producing voting records in CPC's court case against the ruling party, and the casual manner the commission treated electoral fraudsters nearly broke my heart. Jega has since admitted the flaws in 2011 and promised that the 2015 elections would be free and fair.

The announcement that the main opposition parties - Action Congress of Nigeria, Congress for Progressive Change and the All Nigeria Peoples Party - had finally been registered was proof that Jega wants to be taken seriously. Was the outcome what he really wanted? Was it the diligence of the opposition? Or was it the vigilance of the public that did it?

A bit of everything, I would say. But it's fair to give some credit to the man on whose watch Nigeria's first political merger happened. Since 1964, we have had alliances where the parts were bigger that the sum of the whole. Never a merger. If Jega had played along with the crooks that schemed day and night to destabilise the opposition, the merger could have happened in spite of him; but it would have been a far more complicated journey.

This is the opposition's first real opportunity to save the PDP from exhaustion by dislodging it. The euphoria in the merger camp is deserved but it must quickly resist the temptation of behaving as if it has just won the election. With the merger out of the way, the party's fate now lies squarely in its own hands.

How will it manage its cultural differences, perhaps the single greatest challenge in a merger of any kind? How will it manage the ambitions and aspirations of its biggest two principals, who are at once its biggest assets and liabilities - Muhammadu Buhari and Bola Ahmed Tinubu? Now that it has what it wanted badly, what will the APC do with it?

These questions should have been answered yesterday.

Obasanjo And Mugabe Are Cousins Of A Sort

The dinosaur of African politics, Robert Mugabe, has a wicked sense of humour. Last week, he said former president and leader of AU's election monitoring team to Zimbabwe, Olusegun Obasanjo, was not qualified for the job because OBJ was "a serial election rigger".

Obasanjo has not responded, not because he is incapable of defending himself but because he knows it's true. The ridiculous game of the pot and the kettle would have been a thing to laugh off, had the AU not put its own credibility on the line by sending Obasanjo on a fool's errand.