SOLVING THE ANAMBRA POLTICAL CRISIS. 

The political developments in Anambra State is a clear typification of the age of anomie we live in. since the dawn of the dysfunctional democracy we have found ourselves in presently. Anambra has been a rolling ball that has been whimsically kicked about by the putative characters that were thrown up at the federal level by this compromised democracy. All types of experimentations have been tried on Anambra and no pranks, no intrigues and no antics have been spared on Anambra. The state has seen the worst of different political speculators, jobbers, pimps, scavengers, rent-seekers and marionettes beholden to Abuja since 1999 and in Anambra, no tactics is considered too foul to be adopted in ensuring the state remains stranded in the very lowest depth of political chicanery. Anambra seems to be permanently ensconced in the very nadir of political intrigues such that for most of the past eight years, Anambra has become a ready metaphor for hair-raising sponsored political guiles that have drawn inspiration from the lords of the manor in Abuja. 

For Anambra, the renowned playwright, Prof. Chinua Achebe hauled a national honour by the present regime to the swine. The other reason is that the award of national honours has been terribly scaled down to accommodate serial thieves and reprobates that rebuke the country’s sense of decency and probity. For this, he earned the legendry name-calling and abuse from the swooning mealtime knights of the roundtable that abound in great numbers in the Obasanjo regime. Recently, he was to issue another strong tirade to the Obasanjo regime for subjecting Anambra to perhaps the most brazen spate of state-sponsored destabilization in the history of the country. But he might have been talking to the marines, with a regime that has grown trenchantly unrepentant by its acts of indiscretion.  

For Anambra, the past national chairman of the PDP lost his job. He shelled through the conspiratorial silence of his party men that stared with silence approval while the presidency and its local agents subjected Anambra to unending political perfidy. For this, he was removed at gunpoint, in a move that not only mocks democracy but also says much about the inheritors of the vast fiefdom Nigerians secured from the military in 1999.   

For Anambra, statesmen have talked and counseled. For Anambra, religious leaders have railed and advised. For Anambra, Nigerians have wailed and mourned but these have failed to strike any reasonable note in the ears of a self-opinionated fascist order that masquerades as a democratic regime and which would spares nothing to achieve its foul means. With a remorseless cartel of poorly educated but brute menservants, Anambra has seen the worst of state-sponsored destruction, which peaked in November 2005 when a wholesome state-sponsored destruction was visited on Anambra State government infrastructures by a ring of hoodlums sponsored by Abuja. This however, falls a little short of the horrendous electoral robbery perpetrated on Anambra in the sham election of 2003 that has just been outdone by the phantom election of April 2007. In both instances the franchise of the people of Anambra, like their counterparts elsewhere in Nigeria, was violently rended from their hands and handed as prize trophy to a cartel of political hirelings, jobbers and quislings that were sponsored by the amoral presidency that came to become a nightmare to Nigerians as it progressed in years. 

It took the resilience of Governor Peter Obi and the domestic quarrel between the cartel to wrestle that mandate, after three of the four years of the mandate have been wrongly spent. If Nigerians thought that the chicanery on Anambra had ended, they were wrong, as what was to follow was a most horrible Abuja-backed impeachment of Obi for not opening the vault of the state to teleguided charlatans that draw tutorials from Aso Rock. Infact, Obasanjo, ostensibly on a state visit to Anambra, blew the whistle for that nefarious impeachment. This latest act that was roundly condemned and exposed further the duplicitous underbelly of Aso Rock, then hiding behind the pretence of an anti-corruption regime, was to bring out the resilience of Peter Obi and his challenge of the process was to lead to the upturning of the impeachment by the courts, even after the Obasanjo government and his awkward justice minister that could as well have been the legal adviser to the PDP had made strident efforts to frustrate his comeback. 

The re-emergence of Obi was to throw open the bag of intrigues the Obasanjo regime lined up for Anambra as it positioned one of its domestic servants, one that is being trailed by so many scandals including a money-laundering indictment in the United States and a questionable academic record, Andy Uba for the takeover of Anambra by whatever means possible. Obasanjo was to lead the charge for the imposition of Uba whom he celebrated as his choice valet, with the knack of preparing his best soups and possibly arranging his best escorts. For this, he gloated that he would reward this servant’s fidelity to him with Anambra and that was to open perhaps the most distasteful and dirty manipulation that attended the 2007 sham elections. First this choice servant was given the job of scooping out the chairman of the electoral commission INEC and he did a good job of it by exhuming a run-down fellow, with an equally contestable academic credential, Maurice Iwu and from then, there were no bounds too indecent to cross in the task of forcing Andy Uba on Anambra.   

Iwu, who never sought to rise above the lowly state of servitude to Uba saw his job as serving the dirty interests of his benefactors which was why he deigned no scruples clearing the turf of all known contenders en route Uba’s emergence as governor of Anambra. He eliminated the charismatic Chris Ngige on watery reasons that were upturned by the courts, yet he refused to have him on the ballot. He barred the very popular incumbent, Peter Obi, for reasons that are still as incoherent as the minds of Iwu. He forced out Nicholas Ukadike for yet to be ascertained reasons. With this, it was almost a single-track route for his master that is still being trailed by trailer loads of indiscretions. Even with this sleight of hands, Iwu never trusted the saleability of his master hence he decided that there need not be any election in Anambra for Uba to emerge. So, on election day, as has happened in many states in Nigeria, Anambra people trooped out to vote but Iwu and the masters he serves decided to disappoint them. What better epitaph to that parody in Anambra on April 14 than that well-documented piece from the thorough governor of Anambra that on April 14, all known prominent citizens of Anambra came out to vote but never voted because there was no election, except the show Uba generously advertised. That position is yet to be contradicted even by some that were mentioned in that statement but who have jumped into the Uba bandwagon, with the generous payoff that it entails. 

If the tragedy of the hobbled election was sordid, the release of the governorship election results was couched in the very worst form of criminal melodrama that could have only been possible with Maurice Iwu and his shameless appetite for demeaning scruples. The very first result from Anambra gave Andy Uba over 1.9million votes. When it was discovered that, added to the votes allocated to other candidates, the figure exceeded the registered number of voters in Anambra, it was hurriedly amended to 1.09million in an obvious abracadabra that was rampant in the fraudulent elections of April 14, 21 and 28 2007. Thus, the fate of a state as Anambra was sealed in a deadly circus that revolved around Obasanjo, Maurice Iwu and Andy Uba and the state sentenced to another winding period of instability. 

But then, there may a redeeming grace in the Anambra crisis and this obtains in the suit filled by the incumbent governor asking for a determination of what his tenure should be. We should recall that Obi was elected for four years in 2003 but a widening conspiracy, akin to the one that produced Uba diverted his mandate such that after he fought a courageous battle that led to his reclaiming his mandate, he had barely one and half years left in his original four years. Hardly had he settled down as governor when he was wrongly removed in another circle of intrigue spinned by Obasanjo and his servant, Andy Uba together with the PDP. The courts were to overturn this illegal removal but by then, the harm had been done on the Obi mandate in Anambra such that by May 29, 2007, Obi would not have put in up to 18months out of the four years for which he was elected. The big question is whether we would have been fair to Obi if we tell him to pack and go by May 29, 2007. The answer is no and I believe cases like this made the framers of the constitution to insist that a person elected governor or president would have a four years mandate, from the date he was sworn into office. Like many Nigerians that have commented on this issue, I don’t think there was any ambiguity encased in the statement, which is why the court of appeal should see the need to address an impending political crisis in Anambra by giving Obi his full mandate, so as to prevent situations where usurpers covet offices others won and taunt them to go to court, hoping to use the coveted mandate, as happened in Anambra while applying all manners of delay to ensure that where the victor eventually gets justice, it would amount to a pyrric victory.. 

But the most important implication in the Appeal Court ruling favorably in Obi’s case is that it would stultify the imposition of another impostor in Anambra and restore the thoroughly abused potency of the people of Anambra to decide who governs them. If the Appeal Court rules in Obi’s favour, it would not only address one of the unintended catastrophes of the country’s electoral process but would give Anambrans the power to chose from among themselves who governs them and how he governs them. That power had been violently stolen from them by Obasanjo, his PDP and the unending cult of local vampires that are never in short supply in a state like Anambra. They are the ones that reduced the same state that produced the great Zik, Chinua Achebe, Odumegwu Ojukwu, Cardinal Arinze, Philip Emeagwali, Alex Ekwueme and so many other leading lights in the Nigerian federation into a pimp’s colony where the worst forms of political cannibalism reign. It is being threatened with a reckless imposition of a spineless pimp but the courts would help frustrate this and give Anambra back to the people of Anambra. 
 

Peter Claver Oparah.

Ikeja Lagos. 

Robot  Villager

# 1 var sbtitle3749=encodeURIComponent(Solving the...Read the full article. Posted by Robot| 20.05.2007 20:31

ikechiji  Villager

# 2 The mess going on in Anambra State rests squarely at the doorstep of Obasanjo and PDP who have utmost contempt for the rule of law and believe that power belongs in their backpockets instead of the people. Iwu was emboldened by OBJ to disobey court orders and still talk from both sides of his mouth. How can two separate courts rule -1) Place ANPP's Ukachukwu on ballot; 2) Place AC's Ngige on ballot, yet Ewu Iwu disobeyed those orders. He should have been locked for disobeying those court orders even before the Presidential elections. I hope he gets locked up this time around for disobeying the Presidential Election Tribunal's recent order to produce evidence of his sham. In terms of Anambra, the way forward will start with a ruling from the Appeals court on May 22 that Peter Obi's term expires in 2010. The constitution is quite clear about the tenure of Governors - it should not even be a close case. However, I am hedging my bets because of some of the previous unsavoury behaviour of Appeals court judges. Either way though, the Supreme Court will ultimately rule that Peter Obi's term expires in 2010. Andy Uba's trick is to first become Governor and use delaying tactics (aka Ibori) and bribery (aka Ugochukwu Uba) to survive but that will not work. The Judiciary will surprise these kleptomaniacs this time around. Odego Posted by ikechiji| 21.05.2007 06:19

igwe  Villager

# 3 A "state that produced... so many other leading lights in the Nigerian federation ...is being threatened with a reckless imposition of a spineless pimp but the courts would help frustrate this and give Anambra back to the people of Anambra. One can only hope that the judiciary will again save Anambra State. If not the Appeal Court, then certainly the Supreme Court. Ka Chineke mezie Okwu! Posted by igwe| 21.05.2007 12:07

IgoTalk  Villager

# 4 I ask one question. one which I seek an answer to: Why have Dim Odumegwu Ojukwu and Dr. Alex Ekwueme, prominent Igbo leaders and Anambrarians, NEVER come out to publicly denounce the goings on in Anambra and the charade which led to Uba's selection? Why are these men silent? Obi's case is a last ditch effort. Uba will be sworn in on May 29th. Obi will still be in court. Dame Virgy Etiaba will still be in court, Dr. Chris Ngige will still be in court...Uba will be in the goverment house. How sad :( Posted by IgoTalk| 21.05.2007 18:21

truthsayer33  Villager

# 5 Why is Emeka Ojukwu called 'Dim' ? In England this means stupid.Does it mean somethng else in Anambra state? Posted by truthsayer33| 22.05.2007 07:20