The Anambra State Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) Congress to elect the Party’s gubernatorial candidate for the February 6, 2010 governorship election has landed in a cul-de-sac as a court order by Justice B.A. Nwakenyi of the Aguata Judicial Division stopped the party from conducting its primaries last Friday.

The court had adjourned the case till Monday, October 12, whereas the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) expects all parties to submit the names of their candidates on or before Friday this week.

The order, which was granted last Wednesday, September 30, restrained PDP from using the delegates list submitted by Benue State Governor Gabriel Suswam Committee for the nomination of its governorship candidate for the 2010 election. 

As the INEC deadline for the submission of candidates expires to morow, the question Anambra people should be asking the PDP is; how did they get here? How did they manage to tie themselves in this knot? It is urgent for all lovers of the state to put heads together to find a just solution to this crisis; Anambra 2010 is a disaster waiting to happen. Experience has shown that whatever happens in PDP Primaries is a precursor to what occurs in the general polity. 

For governor Suswan of Benue State, substitute Maurice Iwuh, the INEC Chairman; as Suswan ignored the result from the field to announce the result fudged by Chris Uba and his group, imagine what Iwuh might do.  

As a public service to my home state, Anambra, I wrote three informed articles on the unfolding drama in Anambra State. I exposed and analysed the roles of different dramatis personae that appears to be acting a carefully choreographed script to land Anambra State into the Abyss. For the script writers, look for the men that surrounds President Yar’adua and the goons at Wadata plaza. 

For record purposes, these men should be held responsible for the logjam in the Anambra PDP Congress: the Benue State Governor, Gabriel Suswan, National Chairman of PDP, Mr Vincent Ogbulafor and Speaker House of Representatives, Dimeji Bankole. 

However, one individual should bear ultimate responsibility for this debacle for as Harry Truman famously said of the office of President: "The buck stops here." 

For good or ill, the nature of our flawed democracy is that all power flows from the office of the president. So much so that even those empowered by the constitution or even the president himself to independently perform their legitimate duties would still wait for the nods and winks of the president or those close to him. 

This could only explain why shortly after the choice of Suswan, Bankole et al to conduct the Anambra primaries, they would still go to meet the President to sound him out as to his preferred candidate. Whatever happens to the constitutional right of Anambra people to elect their leaders! 

Even today, the party’s main dilemma involves the method to adopt in choosing its candidate for the governorship election as time is fast running out, inside sources say pressure is still being mounted on President Yar’adua to anoint a candidate. 

Therefore when I wrote last week exonerating Yar’adua for the crisis for having done all he could to ensure a free process and also wrote that Someone should tell the President that the men he trusted to deliver in Anambra State have decided to rubbish his efforts; one respondent simply wrote back: “Is the President deaf and dumb? A president that has instructed others to carry out a task should institute monitoring mechanisms to ensure that his instructions are carried out”. 

Since the party has so far been unable to conduct the state congress and the Friday (October 9) deadline fixed by INEC for all political parties interested in fielding candidates for the election is fast approaching, confusion is said to have set in within PDP which currently parades 47 governorship aspirants. 

Right now some are suggesting that the only option left for the PDP is to pick its candidate by other means other than congress election as the adjourned date for the case will be three days after the expiration of the deadline for submission of candidates’ particulars to INEC. 

Others suggest the unconstitutional method of having only the statutory delegates elect the PDP candidate to the exclusion of the ward delegates. 

But it ought not to be so. Anambra people have gain been betrayed by outside forces with the connivance of their local Igbo minions. 

When I wrote of the malpractices that characterised the ward congress that took place on September 28, I made it clear that the list submitted by Suswam were not elected but handpicked by Chris Uba some dismissed the allegation as coming from bad losers. 

The truth remains that the list submitted by Suswan did not contain a single name of the authentic people who won in Ward Congress. Obviously someone had bribed Suswan to submit a fraudulent list to the PDP for the primary. 

But even after this fraud by Suswan, the matter could have been salvaged if we had a conscientious umpire. PDP procedure guarantees that complaints arising from the Ward Congress should be heard by an Appeal Committee. The Appeal Committee’s deliberation was still in progress when Bankole scuttled the Appeal Process when he announced that he is not going to work with any other delegate list apart from the one supplied by Suswan and Chris Uba.  

Before that the list of statutory eligible delegates for the Congress apart from the delegates that were elected from the Ward Congress with which Bankole had with him to conduct the state Congress included the names of those characters that Yar’adua had already directed should not take part in the Primary. 

These comprise of the Uchenna Emordi- led Anambra PDP Executive. These are all men put into office by Chris Uba, the enfant terrible and self proclaimed godfather of Anambra politics. Once these men are included, that gives Chris Uba an automatic advantage 130 votes! Why did Bankole bring that list? 

What Bankole should have done was to allow the Alhaji Hassan led Appeal Committee to immediately verify the names submitted by Suswan before the Friday Primaries. 

By dilly-dallying before finally caving in to repeated demands to take a second look at Suswan’s fraudulent list, it gave the opportunity for another mischievous character to obtain a court order that finally forced the hands of Dimeji Bankole to postpone the Primary. 

Those that invested heavily in the appeal committee before Bankole’s arrival simply refused to allow him to get away with his plans. 

Now as the party gets ready to challenge and vacate the court order, to beat the INEC deadline, and the party chairman promising to produce a candidate before the Friday deadline, the conundrum is what list will now be taken as the genuine winners of the ward congress? 

As the aspirants and organisers wait for the Court ban to be lifted and for the appeal process grind to a halt Nigerians must be alerted to the fact that whatever comes out of the process might be fraudulent. Or simply an imposed candidate. 

Following the two-day deliberations by the Hassan Adamu led Congress Appeal Panel on the 1,357 petitions sent to it, 285 delegates believed to have earlier emerged from Uba’s camp were changed and shared among Ukachukwu and Soludo while Annie Okonkwo also had some local governments allocated to him. 

A source also said Chris Uba was spending heavily to cancel out the results from some Local government areas favourable to one advantaged aspirant.  Moreover, when Adamu, a former Nigerian Ambassador to United States said that out of the 47 governorship aspirants, six appeared and gave evidence, what type of evidence did they actually appear to give? What criteria are being used to allocate these delegates? 

An aspirant claimed that he was asked to pay money for delegates, an allegation dismissed by the Committee. 

My questions are: what measures were put in place to ensure that whoever emerges victorious from this process is not tainted; to ensure that delegates are not arbitrarily allocated to the highest bidder? Will the aspirants now accept whatever figure that will be announced by the Appeal Committee? 

If the party in their effort to beat the deadline wields the big stick and choose any of the 47 aspirants it feels has the capability to win the governorship election, how democratic would that be? Would the party’s arbitrary choice be acceptable to other aspirants? 

Why is concerted effort not being made to collect from the returning officers of the party the genuine results from the ward congress? Who is afraid of the choice of Anambra people? Could it be that the party hierarchy’s favoured candidate lost out in the election? 

I will not fail to mention that one of the aspirants is not prepared for any contest, and have been at the forefront of efforts to frustrate the process so that the President will simply 'anoint' someone, so long as that 'someone', is himself. Right now, the same candidate is spending heavilly to ensure the court does not vacate the stoppage order so the INEC deadline will pass.

The president should resist the pressure to impose a candidate on Anambra state. Such imposition is not just undemocratic; it is a recipe for chaos. If the President succumbs to pressure and "anoints any candidate", different from the choice of the people, what happened in 2003-2006 in Anambra state will be a child's play. 

While I have it on good authority that Yar'adua will not anoint a candidate, the president should simply ask for the actual result from the ground.  

President Yar’adua has just 24 hours ahead of him to find a solution to the Anambra dilemma, and the authority to make whatever decisions he deems necessary -- decisions that will determine his place in history. 

As a politician, he is aware that success has a thousand fathers, but failure is an orphan. Harry Truman was right when he said of the office of President: "The buck stops here."

Daniel Elombah publishes www.elombah.com

Robot  # 1 | 08.10.2009 07:18

...Read the full article.

ariteni  # 2 | 08.10.2009 07:54

So, the President should give Anambra a Governor?  Or find solution to Anambra logjam? You must be joking. The crude solution open to PDP at this stage is that given by Suleiman Takuma during the 1983 NPN Primaries i.e. that ALL cases filed by ANYBODY in court against the Party be withdrawn FORTHWITH unconditionally. Failing which, Uba gets his stolen Mandate or Ngige comes back to complete the good work he started with the stolen mandate or Peter Obi might just turn out to be the "Obasanjo" of Anambra.