Sicilian-American Mafiosi has a saying that goes like ‘the hydra is such a resilient animal that you can never be sure you whacked it unless you cut off its hideous head’. The Professor Maurice Iwu I knew back in Washington is not a hydra but the organization he heads – INEC is one, which some people want to kill because of the flaws present in Nigeria’s last general elections. Maurice Iwu is the head of INEC - the hydra. So that makes him look like the despise-prone head of the hydra and therefore as part of any attempt at lynching INEC, Maurice Iwu, the said hydra’s head must be decapitated first, that is, allegorically. But can you really force out Iwu without some reconstituting of INEC, top to down; and think that Nigerians will as soon be trooping to the polls to vote again, considering the quantum of nullifications issuing from our Election Tribunals?
Whether Iwu alone bears the entire blame for the malpractices present in the last elections is not necessarily within the direct purview of this discourse. The discussion will primarily comprise of my candid recollections of the Maurice Iwu I knew back in the day in the United States. If you are an unforgiving critic of Maurice Iwu or amongst those calling for his ouster, please prove your maturity and sense of balance by reading what I have to say below. It is not really in his defense since it is but a direct presentation of plain cold facts based on my personal knowledge and basic research, some of which you will find in the public domain if you look far enough. And I doubt if Iwu will remember who I am after the stress of overcoming the hassles of third term, mass indictments, disputed disqualifications, and an amazing level of duplicity on the part of many Nigerians in the many election woes that betide a Nigeria with faulty institutions. And the last time I met Iwu in person was donkey years ago when Dr. Alex Ekwueme toured United States in late 1998 to canvass for Diaspora goodwill for his presidential bid and I was amongst the Nigerians that were on hand to fete with the Chief. But there were too many star-struck jolly Diasporans crowding each other out to have their fifteen seconds of fame with Dr. Ekwueme, and with Iwu passing as Ekwueme’s chaperon-in-chief, I am sure he hardly noticed me when I shook his hands. So, you can see that I can hardly be branded a garden variety Iwu lover, but I must tell you, facts are facts and I will now proceed to present them below.
Fact - Maurice Iwu is a world-acclaimed professor in an arcane field of pharmacy, and in my opinion, Nigeria gained some respect from Iwu being chosen on merit for a generous foreign grant to do advanced research in ethno-medicine/pharmacy at the prestigious Walter Reed Military Hospital in Washington. Recall that ethno-medicine or its garden variety dealing with the ancient botanical sciences of Africans has never earned any credibility and stature until the coming of Iwu and his mass body of research in the field, and which was so stellar as to have passed the muster of an America that parades the strictest peer review of any research work in the sciences before according any recognition or value to it. Recall also that Nigerian intelligentsia that controls public policy in Nigeria is known to treat anything remotely connected to African medical sciences with contempt and are wont to refer to purveyors of such ideas pejoratively as ‘native’ doctors’. And it is this our post-colonial attitude to African medical practices that the West, including Britain and the United States mimicked by also treating our native medical science with equal, if not more pronounced contempt. And then there was a certain Nigerian named Maurice Iwu who was to prove their practical relevance to contemporary illnesses – all to the point that the clever West, led by the United States recognized the prospects by inviting Iwu to ply his expertise to some marginal advancement of critical care medicine at the Walter Reed. My research demonstrates that America was grateful, the rest of the West courted Iwu, and Nigerians living in the United States waxed proud. Iwu’s stint at Walter Reed is not by accident but a deliberate design to place Iwu and his neo-pharmacy at a locale responsible for treating servicemen wounded and maimed in many of America’s foreign military expeditions. And before anyone forgets, Walter Reed was where late President Reagan was treated after he was shot at the grounds of Washington Hilton.
Fact - the Iwu that I knew is not politically daft, is patriotic, and an upstanding member of the Nigerian community in the Washington metropolitan area, if not the entire United States. If my recollections serve me well, Iwu was amongst the first conveners of Imo Forum in North America and I was there to witness some of the political turf war he fought or parried just because he was insistent on bringing the Imo Diaspora together to find collective ways of giving back to the motherland. And consider that back in Nigeria, it has come to be regarded as a truism that Igbos are republican by nature – meaning that they are possessed of this visceral tendency to distrust overly centralized authority or given to subjection of their leaders to the most rigorous levels of unanimity in community decision-making. So, you can imagine what Iwu passed through with his republican compatriots in an America that is also the ranking republican nation in the world. Republicanism or not, a democratic Imo Forum in America finally emerged, and sooner than later it ballooned to a gutsy, focused platform that brought former Governor Udenwa to America for the first time after he made good.
Barrister Ike C. Ibeh who ran an admirable and a near miss campaign to become Governor of Imo State and came a close fourth in the PDP primaries in 2007 was on hand back in the US to help and he too contributed equally to seeing to it that Imo Forum stayed the course when Iwu had to take time out to tend to the complex sciences of looking to African pharmacology to heal Americans. It came to pass therefore that when Achike Udenwa came to America, Iwu and Ike Ibeh were amongst the persuaders of Udenwa to try the novel concept of a state government practically having an embassy in Washington, which euphemistically had to be called a Liaison Office, and lately, Imo Trade Office. Yet, by whatsoever name called – Trade Office or Liaison Office, it out-performed many embassies possessing of full diplomatic commissions. Iwu was instrumental to that but the real engine house that pounded the pavement was Ike Ibeh who ran the office so well that enlightened Americans elevated him by calling him ‘Imo Trade Representative’, and those that still thought of Africa as a country instead of a continent thought of Ibeh as ‘Africa’s Trade Representative’, much to Ibeh’s discomfiture and amusement. Much as Ike Ibeh deserves the most credit for pioneering the first Nigerian Diaspora-led medical missions to Nigeria as a whole, Iwu also deserves honorable mention because Ibeh’s appointment to that office has some remote connection to Iwu’s shared vision of an organized Imo State in North America imbued with the clout to conceptualize a complex program a freshman Governor Udenwa embraced with much aplomb. And amongst the larger Nigerian community in North America, Iwu also lived up to his billing.
Fact - Professor Iwu was doing pretty well financially and professionally in the United States before he was called home to serve. He was living the American dream - represented by his colonial home in a quiet suburb of America’s capital, a cool big budget automobile in his garage, a stable marriage, humongous grant dollars in the pure sciences, and the respect of American scientists in his peer group. Above all, he enjoyed and loved his job. It therefore took many Diasporans by surprise when he accepted the initial call to serve motherland Nigeria in the election commission. But on my part, I was not surprised at all because the Iwu I knew had always waxed patriotic and had his mind set on going home someday, if not sooner. He loved Nigeria and believed that the nation had a good chance way back in 1998 to get her acts together with democracy building. Then, he became the Chair of INEC which suddenly brought him into his ultimate date with history. Now the question: Has he done well as Chair of INEC or did he just go in there and screw things up. The jury may still be out, but I will go ahead and tell you what I think.
Fact - whichever way you look at it, Iwu and our Nigeria were confronted by two opposite events as far as the election and the transition it bore are concerned. There was no third way. It is either Iwu conducted an election that could produce a new president or he suddenly scattered into little screaming things and failed to conduct the elections. Let us consider the scenarios that lurked and stressed the polity and Iwu to no end in the countdown to the polls. First, rewind back to his lost battle with electronic ballot system that held better prospects for minimizing rigging, then came the specter of third term and a lame duck President misled by a significant number of Nigerians that claimed to support third term. Second, fast forward to mass indictments, the uncertainty of a successor president posed by Atiku’s spat with OBJ and the terrible political garrisoning of promising leaders like a gutsy Orji Kalu, who was hounded for simply declaring third term a bad idea and daring to express interest to run for president. And then, the polity convulsed more when the High Courts of the land began to set aside series of indictments and disqualifications, which led to hurried printing of new ballots just days before the polls. And talking of indictments and disqualifications, if you read the Nigerian Constitution and the Electoral Act, the plain interpretation that immediately arises is that indictment is complete once accepted by government and published in a White Paper, and the stark absence of a clear legal path to who possessed the authority to disqualify created a vacuum that encouraged INEC to assert that it held the implicit authority to disqualify for cause. It was only after much vigorous litigation, followed by a highly reasoned analysis of complex legal questions that the Supreme Court spurned the inherent laxity of extant laws on point by choosing the doctrine of ‘true intent’ over ‘plain meaning’. But clarity and certainty – two essential elements for free and fair elections were still lacking. And there is more. It is doubtful if we, as Nigerians truly possessed of the political will to see the elections through and we desperately needed a fall guy to duck under.
Fact – consider that it is Nigerians that constitute that huge number in the National Assembly that aggressively purveyed third term, not to talk of the aid and comfort coming from corporate Nigeria, the billions of naira from Nigerians to Nigerians to oil third term, the stark silence of those who had the clout to dissuade a messianic OBJ, the blessing received from various Nigerian religious bodies for third term to prevail, the easy acquiescence of voters to grand Nigerian conspiracies to engage in electoral mayhem and then an INEC and Iwu who cannot be detached from all these because they are simply human and again, Nigerians. So, to recap, Iwu had two choices, both of which are catch 22 – conduct elections and be dammed or fail to conduct and Nigeria is damned. So, like the patriotic, resilient and wily professor he is, he chose the former, and damned he is but beloved Nigeria survived. The man has admitted the presence of egregious flaws and explained why overplaying or succumbing to them would have assured Nigeria the first constitutional crisis that might dwarf the civil war. I respectfully beg to concur because the Maurice Iwu I knew back in the day is a decent man who somehow got into the eye of the storm by carrying the weight of an entire nation’s first civilian to civilian transition in the midst of a nationwide bedlam and faulty legal order of a proportion capable of putting paid to Nigeria as we know it. Iwu helped to save the day and it is time to let him be. Let’s quit trying to make him the perpetual fall guy simply because our conscience is pricking us that we all carry some vicarious blame for what happened.
Aloy Ejimakor is of Law Group International, Washington, DC. alloylaw@yahoo.com
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