28 Feb 2009 |
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AGBASO’S CASE: IMO PEOPLE LOOK TO THE JUDICIARY.
By Stephen Nwahiri. Last week, the Court of Appeal threw away the case for preliminary objection filed by Governor Ikedi Ohakim to stop the case instituted by the robbed APGA governorship candidate for Imo State, Martin Agbaso to order INEC to release the results of the April 14, 2007 gubernatorial election in Imo State, which he won. The court, in dismissing Ohakim’s objection, said it has jurisdiction to hear Agbaso’s case and that it is not one and the same with the pending case between Ohakim and Ifeanyi Ararume at the elections tribunal, as Ohakim sought to make it look like. Convinced that there is fire on the mountain and seeing the end to his twenty months coveting of the Imo governorship position, which rightly belongs to Agbaso, Ohakim has ran to the Supreme Court, which justifies my earlier contention that the Supreme Court will settle the Imo governorship case. I also contended that there is no other justiceable settlement to the Imo governorship tussle than declaring the APGA candidate, whose victory was halted by the shameless INEC chairman, Iwu when he was about to be declared the Imo Governor just because Iwu felt that the Imo governorship should be a compensation for the dirty jobs he did for the PDP in May 2007 and should be reserved for his Mbano clan. He succeeded in getting the amoral former president, Olusegun Obasanjo to cede him that chunk of the unholy bazaar of April 2007 and succeeded in awarding it to Ikedi Ohakim, after Ohakim agreed to cede choice positions to Iwu. Nearly two years after and after a winding judicial struggle, all indications point to the fact that the Iwu/Ohakim loot is about to end and the Imo governorship is about to be returned to the rightful winner. For those that never knew what happened in Imo State in that mockery of an election, here is a quick recap. Agbaso was the candidate of APGA, perceived as the Igbo-oriented party while Ararume won his case to be made the PDP governorship candidate. The PDP hierarchy vowed that Ararume would not be allowed to fly their flag, for reasons best known to them. For this, the former president, Obasanjo had to fly into Owerri few days before the election to announce that the party hierarchy had decided to forfeit the Imo governorship rather than have Ararume as their candidate. The state government, under the PDP and the state PDP went ahead and threw their support behind Martin Agbaso and mobilized their men to work for him. It was almost like a solo run and on election day, it was entirely an Agbaso affair. When the results from all the local governments have been collated, there were rumours that INEC leadership in Abuja had halted the announcement of the election results. Within a few days, the rumour was confirmed and the laughable position was that the governorship election was marred by violence. But, wait for it; the state assembly election, which was held at the same time, cast in the same ballot box was upheld. Again, in a move that surprised Imo people, all were awarded to the PDP when every Imo man knew that the votes cast in that election were entirely for APGA! Iwu’s INEC was to go ahead and conduct another election, which to every indication was a huge sham. By then, Ararume had gotten himself back to the ballot even as the state and national leadership of the party vowed that they would not support him. Iwu went on a shopping spree and together with the departing Udenwa government, were able to pick Ohakim, who has no known grassroots support after he made hefty concessions to both characters. The so-called repeat poll was a huge sham, which result has been compiled before the event itself. Even the poll was characterized by so much melo-drama. First we heard that a helicopter ferrying electoral materials to Imo State, crashed on the eve of the polls, together with the electoral materials but lo and behold, in the evening of the election day and despite the fact that most Imo people protested they saw no electoral materials, results were declared, with Ohakim emerging a run-away victor and thus the present charade in Imo State, which could be astutely described as a triumvirate of Ohakim-Iwu-Udenwa joint misrule was flagged off. It is also instructive that immediately after the callous annulment of the April 14 polls, Agbaso went to court. The case has gone through a tortuous journey, which culminated in last week’s decision of the Abuja division of the Court of Appeal that it will hear the Agbaso case because it has merit. The case predates the ones at the tribunal, which Ohakim naively want to equate it with. The case pre-dates the sudden emergence of Ohakim, who garnered a little above a thousand votes in the first election. The case is supposed to take pre-eminence over the shoddy one Ararume is prosecuting at the tribunals. It is indeed soul-lifting that the Appeal Court has affirmed these positions and has said that it will hear it. It is even good that Ohakim has gone to the Supreme \Court, in a move that confirms the fact that Agbaso’s case, like those of Peter Obi and Rotimi Amaechi are constitutional issues and may go all the way to the highest court in the land. This introduces a happy dimension to the Imo governorship tussle and if justice is still justice, every Imo man is warming to the possibility of an Agbaso governorship. The Imo man is on the verge of celebrating his own political independence from the hands of the serial manipulators that have cornered Imo State. Martin Agbaso’s case is premised on the age-old belief that falsehood can run for a long time but truth will eventually catch up with it. The way and manner it had caught up with the impostors and pretenders in Owerri Government House introduces a happy dimension to the grand foolery that has been happening in Imo State since May 2007. One fact it brings to the fore is that thieves will always leave one trail that will do them in. When he embarked on the most senseless manipulation of the April 2007 election all over the country, Iwu never fathomed that he would leave the stupid opening he left in Imo State where one of the two ballots cast in the same box would be affected by violence while the other was not so infected. By now, he must have realized that his house of fraud is about to go down, just as such other houses are going down all over Nigeria where he infested his dirty entrails in April 2007 in the most senseless corruption of an electoral system in human history. The onus is now left to the courts to set a precedence that no electoral official has the rights to void any election on any self-serving pretext. The courts must use the Imo State case to ensure that no one ever takes a people for granted, the way Iwu did to Imo people in April 2007.. The court must rise to the challenge of ensuring that the votes and feelings of the people are the only things that matter in an election and not the narrow interests of collaborators, as was seen in Imo State in April 2007.. Yes, Maurice Iwu, Ikedi Ohakim and Achike Udenwa have shared out the booties from their fraudulent manipulation of Imo State election in 2007 but should that override the interests of Imo people who elected Agbaso on April 2007 and who watched helplessly as that election was annulled for reasons that were frivolous as they were false? Should Agbaso, his party APGA and Imo people be sacrificed for the interests of Iwu, Udenwa and Ohakim? The present case gives the Nigerian judiciary another chance to sanitize the electoral system and ensure that what stands at the end of every election is the expressed intent of the people. It gives the judiciary another opportunity to give a landmark verdict that will ensure that elections are not whimsically voided after the process is completed. Fact is that no law in the land gives INEC or anybody the power to annul elections that have been completed. Fact is that no law in the land allows for the kind of liberty Iwu and INEC took with the Imo election of April 14 2007. No law in Nigeria allows electoral umpires the opportunity of ensuring that electoral results must conform to the interests and narrow ends of the electoral umpires. The courts have the Agbaso case to once and for all put an end to the callous subjugation of the rights of the people to choose who governs them to the pristine interests of a few people. When Nigeria is yet to completely outlive the sad and disruptive fallout of the annulment of the June 12 election, it is proper for the Nigerian courts, which have done tremendously well in clearing the man-made fogs the past government, in cahoots with Maurice Iwu’s INEC stole into the electoral system to make it subservient to their interests, to clear this great fog, which, if allowed to endure, will completely annihilate the rights of Nigerians to be the final deciders on who governs them. The Appeal Court is on an irrevocable path to rectify the wrong done to Martin Agbaso, APGA and the Imo people by the criminal annulment of the April 14 2007 Imo governorship election. We urge them to expeditiously do this and we remind them that justice delayed is justice denied. We want them to know that Nigerians are eagerly expecting their verdict on that very clear case and what they decide will go a long way in setting a precedence on the conduct of elections in Nigeria vis-à-vis the powers of the umpire and how to wield it. The judiciary is further assured that Nigerian people expect a landmark judgment that will free not only the Imo people from the dictatorship of a cabal of electoral manipulators but give them the ultimate power to decide who rules them. Imo people, nay Nigerians, are eagerly waiting for the courts.
Stephen Nwahiri. Mushin Lagos.
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