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More Reasons Why Maurice Iwu Prevailed On Super Tuesday By Prince Femi Omoyole
Apart from the many legalisms cited by the tribunal in its dismissal of the petitions against Iwu’s declaration of Yar’Adua as president, I have many reasons of my own why I believe that Yar’Adua stood the best chance of winning the presidential poll. Those reasons are to be found aplenty in the events that occurred in the period before the elections, and they had absolutely nothing to do with Maurice Iwu or any rigging or irregularity. Let us now candidly examine those reasons in seriatim.
Atiku’s problems and eventual fall stemmed from his bitter split with OBJ which set off a chain of adversities that included his grave but contested indictment for corruption by the EFCC, his expulsion from the PDP, the censure from the National Assembly for corruption, his unwise protracted battles over some spats he should have just ignored, and his take-no-prisoners tactics to boot. The INEC and Iwu he loves to blame for all his woes acted within extant legal authority to disqualify him pursuant to the written advise of the then AGF Bayo Ojo and a damning ruling by the Court of Appeal. Nigerians may have humored him at his many rallies but we all knew that he lost the election before it began because he no longer possessed what it took to have won it against Yar’Adua and a formidable PDP. Atiku’s pet PDM 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. PDP even went to court with a near successful claim that he was no longer vice-president; and 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 anti-establishment rhetoric 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 in the countdown to the appeal Atiku says he will file. Maurice Iwu, again, has nothing to do with AC members jumping ship in Atiku’s many hours of need. Tinubu is now even urging him to cease and desist from further challenge of Yar’Adua. So, why would anybody still call for Iwu’s sack for declaring a result that has now passed the most strenuous judicial scrutiny ever?
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. Add the other ANPP governors and apparatchiks who decamped to PDP in droves and under circumstances that politically wounded Buhari. And 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 core north; and there was no credible evidence that Buhari or the ANPP had sufficient numbers or spread anywhere in the south to even have a fighting chance. So, how could he have won the presidency? And where is ANPP today? Majority are in Yar’Adua’s government. So, as Buhari also contemplates filing his appeal, he needs to bear all these realities in mind and consider whether he is merely engaging in a frivolous pursuit of an election his party (not Maurice Iwu or INEC) lost for him way before the first votes were cast.
Orji Kalu was very clever to acknowledge early in time that his party did not yet have the structures to win the presidency. PPA was just a new party borne in protest over the lack of internal democracy in the PDP. It bears repeating that Orji has even praised Iwu for ensuring that the elections proceeded to conclusion and has now again congratulated Yar’Adua for prevailing at the tribunal. It is unfortunate that the tribunal in Abia has upturned PPA’s victory but the fact remains that the two reasons cited by the tribunal – secret cult and lack of resignation, have nothing to do with what Maurice Iwu did or did not do. And to Iwu’s eternal credit, the tribunal in Abia ruled that the election proper was free and fair. This is in addition to similar pronouncements for Jang of Plateau and Mamman Ali of Yobe, not to talk of the governorship tribunal in Nasarawa which even went further to award costs as a deterrent to frivolous judicial challenge of election results.
Back to the presidential polls, AC and ANPP’s poll agents accepted and signed off on the REC-collated final results sheets before Maurice Iwu went to press with it. So, how can Atiku or Buhari or anyone else for that matter 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 Atiku’s claim that he was excluded by Iwu from the ballot failed simply because all Nigerians (including those who testified for him) knew for a fact 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 were part of the larger evidence that bolstered Iwu/INEC’s position that the outcome of the election reflected the popular will and thus was in substantial compliance with statutory mandates.
If aspects of the election were irregular, I would say they are too minuscule to constitute grounds for disturbing the overall outcome. In some few isolated cases such as Benue, the tribunal held the election to have been free and fair in seven out of nine LGAs that make up David Mark’s senatorial district and only cancelled two LGAs merely because the presiding officer there had initially held the polls to have been inconclusive. This had nothing to do with Maurice Iwu because he was not the one that declared the result in Makurdi that was at issue. 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, and the reason is nothing more than that the overall result is merely a reflection of party strength, structures and spread. 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 Ali) and El-Rufai, who was busy demolishing Ali’s house in Abuja and thus distracting him from ensuring his wife’s victory. Add that to 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. So, where did Iwu figure in all these mess? See what I mean? You can’t win any general elections without winning in your party first. OBJ’s anointment of Yar’Adua brought a mass capitulation of other aspirants, including a formidable Babangida and Odili, and that alone paved the way for Yar’Adua to win handily inside the PDP. Conversely, Atiku and Buhari were fighting to survive inside their own parties at the same time they were also arrayed against a cruising Yar’Adua.
Elections are not won on the pages of newspapers, by protracted court battles or demonizing of umpires but with lots and lots of money, organization, and quantum of party spread and strength in electoral wards and precincts. Maurice Iwu is not the person that empowered the PDP. Atiku helped to empower the PDP from way back in 1998 until it grew to proportions that finally overwhelmed him and Buhari in 2007. This is the plain truth.
Prince Femi Omoyole fomoyole@yahoo.com |