One school of thought maintained that a petition would not have been needed if the President had felt that it was in the public interest to postpone matters until next month. Others seem to be firmly convinced that the petition was required in order to provide the President with grounds for intervention and argued that it only needed to prove that it was fraudulent in order to invalidate that particular decision.
A somewhat different line of thought was that the President has such unqualified powers available to him that the petition was in fact irrelevant. In any case, we sat in the dark whilst others were debating these matters. For no less than thirty (30) hours, our electricity was either off, stone cold dead, or flickered, came on, went off, and then came briefly back, still unable to make up its mind. The thieves, (surely too kind a word?) wasted no time and seized the opportunity presented by the lack of light in our part of the village and cut the same length of telephone line that they had removed only a week or so earlier! Presumably the same people were involved using the same ladder, industrial cutter, and truck - and the same place to store their gains and the same dealer to trade them in. If the power supply in our part of Odi continues to be disrupted by the weather, it is likely that this particular length of phone will be cut again and again and again. Why not? Because the government, the BTC, the police, the tribal authorities, the village community are currently collectively unable or unwilling to take action, these particular crooks are given licence to take whatever they want.
