Maurice Iwu And The 2007 Elections: My Case Against Nullifications

By

Prince Femi Omoyole

fomoyole@yahoo.com

 

 

After Maurice Iwu’s telling and credible responses to the interrogatories propounded by Atiku, I wonder why anybody would still be calling for nullification of the 2007 polls. All those still complaining, including the complainer-in-chief, Atiku should pause for once to recall the events in the period before the elections, and they would as soon agree that their defeat at the polls had absolutely nothing to do with Maurice Iwu or any rigging. Atiku’s problems and eventual fall stemmed from his bitter split with OBJ which set off a chain of adversities that included his grave indictment for corruption by the EFCC, his expulsion from the PDP, the censure from the National Assembly for corruption, his unwise protracted battles in court over some spats he should have just ignored, and his take-no-prisoners tactics to boot. The INEC and Iwu he continues to blame acted within extant legal authority to disqualify him pursuant to the written advise of the then AGF Bayo Ojo, which was confirmed by the Court of Appeal. Everyone, except Atiku, knew very well that he lost the election before it began because he no longer possessed what it took to have won it against Yar’Adua/PDP, and the little he had (including his pet GDM) was wrenched from him, not by Iwu, but by a combination of system forces arising from the political and legal war he and the system levied against each other. The PDP even went to court with a near successful claim that he was no longer vice-president and even some elements in his own AC sought to frustrate him because they saw him as a desperate interloper. And Nigerians knew that AC was just a party of protest held together by disgruntlement and possessing of only sentimental appeal in Atiku’s Adamawa and Lagos (because of Tinubu). And where is AC today? Many are with Yar’Adua – meaning, the man is still winning while Atiku is still losing.

 

On his part, Buhari had his many issues with his own party, including the nasty challenge by Ahmed Yerima, the strongman and main financier of ANPP. Ditto for many other ANPP governors and apparatchiks, most of whom decamped to PDP. Further, Buhari did not have the kind of money and ANPP lacked the national spread that must be present before anyone could think of winning a presidential election. Its popularity and structure lay in only four or five states in the far core north, and there was no evidence that Buhari or the ANPP had sufficient numbers anywhere in the south to even win a councillorship election. So, how could he have won the presidency? And where is ANPP today? Majority are in Yar’Adua’s government. That means Yar’Adua is still winning.

 

Orji Kalu was very clever to acknowledge early in time that his party did not yet have the structures to win the presidency not because he is not popular (the man is well-liked amongst Ibos and Northerners) but because PPA was just a new party founded in protest over the lack of internal democracy in the PDP and OBJ’s bitter battles with Orji. So, Orji demonstrated better political smarts than Atiku and Buhari when he chose not to contest the presidential poll results in court. That Orji and the other odd 50 presidential candidates did not file petitions against Yar’Adua is relevant and probative evidence that the presidential election passed statutory muster and impeaches the merits of any claim to the contrary. In the United States, Al Gore’s initial concession of victory to Bush was part of the material evidence that emboldened the US Supreme Court to stop the recount and affirm the initial declaration of Bush as winner. As regards our own, AC and ANPP’s poll agents accepted and signed off on the REC-collated final results of the presidential poll before Maurice Iwu went to press with it. So, how can Atiku or Buhari now claim that there was no election in more than 29 states when their agents had contemporaneously signed off on the results of elections conducted in those states? And as if this was not enough, Atiku is now claiming that he was excluded from the ballot when all Nigerians knew that Maurice Iwu had to go to extra expenditure and hard work to include him in the ballot pursuant to the Supreme Court ruling in his favor. I personally saw his name on the ballot. And if you look at the spread of the party’s performance in the state/national assembly and governorship elections, you will notice that the parties maintained just about the same number of votes they garnered in the presidential election. These and Iwu’s credible responses to Atiku’s interrogatories have bolstered the proposition that the election was actually in substantial compliance with statutory mandates and therefore should stand for the most part. The governorship tribunal in Nasarawa has led the way and even went further to award costs as a deterrent to frivolous judicial challenge of election results.

 

If aspects of the election were rigged, I would say they are too minuscule to constitute grounds for disturbing the outcome. Notice that each of the parties won in the states and electoral precincts where they had larger followership and better structures. AC strong-armed PDP in Lagos not because of Atiku but due to Tinubu’s famous winning abilities. Or did he and Atiku rig that one too? In Adamawa, AC was strong but the Court of Appeals’ affirmance of the disqualification of their governorship candidate and the presence of warhorses like Jibril Aminu and Marwa overwhelmed a wounded Atiku. So, it was a no contest for PDP. PPA carried the day in Abia because Orji proved too wily for a clumsy Onyema Ugochukwu who expected OBJ to do every winning for him. And in Imo, the entire PDP National and State leaders, including Governor Udenwa leveraged on their control of the political space and state power to deliver an unknown Ikedi Ohakim of a fledgling PPA, trouncing a lonely and party-less Ararume and a rejected Agbaso whose structure lapsed into disarray when PDP double-crossed him at the ninth hour. It is laughable that these folks are also blaming Maurice Iwu for troubles that totally had nothing to do with the man. Thus, in the rest of the country, the PDP prevailed for the same reasons ANPP, AC, and PPA prevailed in the select areas where they did. Anybody who recalls how and why Osakwe prevailed over Ahmadu Ali’s wife in Delta can easily discern what was really going on in the country and would agree that it was not Maurice Iwu or INEC that also went over to Delta and picked Osakwe over Ali’s wife. It was OBJ (who then was nursing a huge animus against Ahmadu Ali), El-Rufai who was busy demolishing Ali’s house in Abuja, and a foxy Ibori, who wanted to please OBJ in the hope that Ribadu would remember the favor and forget about following through with the threat to arrest him once he leaves office.

 

In both emerging and advanced democracies, elections are not won on the pages of newspapers or by court battles like Atiku loves to do but with lots and lots of money, organization, and quantum of party spread in electoral wards. Nigeria is a special case - the monumental level of poverty and deprivation in the country affects or even controls voting behavior, as majority of Nigerians are likely to vote for the highest bidder. A few are just cowed and no Iwu can change that. Another factor that affects voter behavior is our well known system of communal harmony where communities get together and decide to give most of their votes to only one party, except in few ultra-metropolitan areas with little ethnic homogeneities. This is true of both the North and South. If you doubt it, go and ask the Emirs, Ezes, Obas and all the other layers of community leadership common to many locales in Nigeria and they will give you details of how they preside over meetings where decisions like this are reached. Certainly, Maurice Iwu did not invent this culture. So, all the blame-mongers are either ignorant of the uniqueness of the Nigerian voter or trapped in terminal hostility to a man who just declared a result handed to him by Resident Electoral Commissioners (RECs) he cannot even overrule or fire. As fellow Nigerians, the learned justices of the Presidential Election Tribunal cannot ignore all these and return a verdict of nullification because whoever wins in any re-run would have won for the same reasons that Yar’Adua won, and the reasons are nothing more than the ones listed above. And none of these reasons had anything do with Maurice Iwu (as the umpire-in-chief) or with any other new umpire that might replace him when his tenure expires in about three years. The same set of serial complainers will still rise against any new umpire and harangue him until he buckles under and declares them winner or eats crow like the Kenyan umpire did with disastrous consequences. And they are certain to use their second passports and prodigious wealth to escape to the safety of their foreign mansions once Nigeria begins to boil, leaving the innocent common man to hold the short end of the stick. It is so obvious and so sad.

 

It is now clear that Atiku and the others who pressured Iwu not to hold the election and even went to court to stop it are abusing the opportunity of a petition to achieve the same dubious aim. Whether the election was then postponed or cancelled by Iwu could have brought the following scenarios into play: Some mischief makers would have instigated violence against Ibos by claming that Iwu, an Iboman cancelled an election won by a Northerner as part of an Ibo plot (again?) to frustrate power shift to the North. OBJ could have gleefully declared a state of emergency and thus achieve his third term ambitions by default and thanks to Atiku who was opposing third term and pressuring Iwu not to hold the elections all at once. The much worrisome ‘failed state’ predicted for Nigeria by America would have come to pass before time. And the army could have struck, and justifiably so. Nigerians would have been likened to the gladiators of ancient Rome who sang ‘Mori Turi Te Salutamus’ (we, who are about to die salute you, our king) as they marched past their Emperor into the arena to fight lions made raving mad through starvation. In this case, the King would have been OBJ and the lead gladiator would have been Atiku. The same could be true in the event of judicial nullification.

 

A popular adage in management goes thus ‘if you think that training is not important, you should try ignorance’. As applied to the 2007 elections, if you think an election that ushered a crucial transition should be nullified, then try no-election or the famous nullification of Abiola’s election in 1993. Therefore, as the Tribunals weigh the various requests for nullifications, the learned justices will do well to consider the uniqueness of the Nigerian federation as part of the material evidence that should detract from what many legal experts have come to see as mere technical violations of the Electoral Act in which INEC was helpless due to the many skirmishes instigated or abetted by those who are rooting for nullification. In the United States, the learned justices there call such technical violations ‘excusable neglect’, and as the phrase implies, they are hardly grounds upon which an extreme and extraordinary remedy like nullifying the result of a major election can be sustained. A good example is a situation where a party known to exist only on the pages of newspapers or inside the briefcases of one man seeks nullification merely because it was excluded from the ballot. In such a case, the Tribunal will be well within the universal rules of evidence and fairness to require such party to show strict proof that it had the numbers, the structure, the preparedness, and the spread to win the very election from which it has been excluded or was itself in compliance with the strict statutory mandates on national spread. So, absent the high probability that an excluded party had provable or judicially-noticed chances of winning, it will comport with real-world principles of political justice to conclude that such a party or its candidate only existed to play a spoiler role in a volatile polity like Nigeria that does need such distractions.

 

Prince Femi Omoyole fomoyole@yahoo.com