PEOPLE & POLITICS

The Awka whirlwind

By

Mohammed Haruna

kudugana@yahoo.com

As probably with most Nigerians, the name Chris Uba hardly rang a bell with me before the July 10 abduction of the governor of Anambra State, Dr. Chris Ngige, which Uba was said to have masterminded. I had heard stories of his political shenanigans, not only in his native Anambra State, but in much of South-East, as a young upstart who was being propped up by the authorities in Abuja to fight their proxy wars against well established and well respected politicians in the region. However, I never thought much of those stories until sometimes last month when I realised, first hand, what the young man seemed capable of.

Actually, the incident that was to lead to the confirmation of the young man’s capacity for political mischief occurred in the headquarters of the Independent Electoral Commission (INEC) in the heat of the storm generated by the PDP primaries for the National Assembly candidates in Anambra State. I was an eye witness to that incident.

The incident occurred in March during one of my occasional visits to Dr. Hakeem Baba-Ahmed, INEC’s secretary and a friend and brother. Hakeem literary runs an open door policy in his office and we were just rounding up a general discussion on the political events of the moment when a group of PDP National Assembly candidates led by Chiefs Ben Obi and Joy Emordi, stormed in to his office unheralded to protest what they alleged was an attempt by Chris Uba, using the presidential connection of this elder brother, Andy, to rig them out of their victory over the younger Uba’s candidates. Obi and Company had stormed into Hakeem’s office, they said, to serve INEC notice that they will fight anyone, including their own party and INEC, who conspired to deprive them of their victory at the primaries. Chris Uba, they alleged, had boasted to them openly that the final word on who gets the PDP National Assembly tickets – or any other ticket for that matter – did not lie with delegates but with the party headquarters and what he – Uba – says at the headquarters about Anambra and the South-East goes.

I was actually about to depart Hakeem’s office that day in question at the time Obi and Company stormed in. As I made to depart, Hakeem suggested I stayed back to watch the drama as a political analyst and a media consultant of sorts to INEC. I stayed back somewhat reluctantly, but in the end I was glad I did.

For more than two hours Obi and Company, on the one hand, and Hakeem, on the other, traded tackles about the capacity of INEC to withstand manipulations by the PDP headquarters and from the presidency. By the time they finally departed, I had a distinct impression that they had little or no faith in the independence of INEC inspite of all the assurances by Hakeem that INEC will give them a fair shake.

Come election time into the National Assembly on April 12, and it seemed apparent that Hakeem was right after all that Obi and Company will get a fair shake from INEC. For, inspite of Chris Uba’s alleged boast and the game of snakes and ladders that the PDP headquarters played with the rival claims to the party’s National Assembly tickets, Obi and Company finally got the tickets and contested and won the elections.

Or so it seemed. Soon enough it turned out that Obi and Company’s victory was short-lived, for when it was time to swear in the National Assembly members, it was not Obi and Company who took the oaths. Instead, those who did, as we all now know, were Uba’s candidates, including his other elder brother, Ugochukwu, and this inspite of a court injunction that they should not be!

Naturally, Obi and Company have since gone to court to contest what they obviously regard as daylight political robbery. Because the matter is still in court, it would be prejudicial to comment on it. All the same it speaks volumes about Chris Uba’s belief in his political infallibility that he would tell Newswatch the other day that he saw nothing wrong with short-circuiting a political process to achieve one’s political objectives.

Asked by Newswatch how come his candidates, including his brother Ugochukwu, who lost the PDP primaries and didn’t even contest the general elections, were the ones now sitting in the National Assembly, he replied, “The point is that there is a constitutional provision that the party has the right to field candidates of their choice for election. How the person emerges is not an issue. If the party considers a particular candidate to be more likely to win an election, it will forward the name to INEC. It is done all over the world.”(Emphasis mine).Remember the young man had allegedly boasted that his word was final with the men at party headquarters.

Newswatch: We learnt that you manipulated the entire electoral process because you are bent on installing your brother, Ugochukwu, as the next Senate President.

Uba:   It is not a bad ambition. Everybody has to be ambitious. If my brother Becomes  the number three man in the country, it will be a thing of joy for me.  And that is my target.

Either out of sheer arrogance or out of limited intellect or both – I understand the young man is a college drop-out or worse – Uba did not even bother to deny to the charge of manipulating the elections in Anambra. Instead he launched himself straight into defending his aim of installing his brother as Senate president, apparently by means more foul than fair.

As things turned out, he fell short of achieving that feat. It would appear, however, that it wasn’t because he changed his mind about his brother’s qualifications for the job. Rather, it was apparently because his mind was changed for him by the grand masters of political puppetering in Abuja who obviously had different ideas about who should be the Senate president. I am reliably informed that once it became clear to the young man whom his masters wanted to be the country’s No 3 citizen, he plunged into the assignment of fixing things with the zeal of a Zealot. He was, I understand, a central figure among those whose job it was to ensure that the courts and INEC did the right things by Chief Adolphus Wabara.

At first, the group had a bit of a problem with INEC which equivocated initially about issuing a certificate to Wabara as the purported winner of the April 12 Senate elections in his senatorial district. Much has been made of the letter written by the INEC secretary to Wabara dated May 30, because the letter was seen to have anticipated the Abuja Federal High Court judgement of June 2 declaring Wabara as the winner. However, it appears that those who have made much hue and cry about the letter either did not know that the court did indeed issue an injunction on that same May 30 asking INEC in effect to declare Wabara as a winner, or they conveniently ignored the judgement. Wabara, himself repeatedly made this point about two judgements, not one, in his recent interview with Newswatch. (June 30, 2003).

It seems it was because the INEC’s May 30^th letter said its declaration of Wabara as the winner was subject to the outcome of the court case of the rival claimant to the seat as well as on the outcome of INEC’s own intention to challenge the May 30 order, that the same court issued a second judgement on June 2 ordering INEC to stop its equivocation. For good measure the court issued a threat to charge INEC with contempt if it did not recognise Wabara’s victory without any qualifications.

Uba, I am reliably informed, played an even more significant role than the PDP Chairman, Chief Audu Ogbeh, the Secretary, Chief Vincent Ogbalafor and more than even the President’s Fixer-in-Chief, Chief Tony Anenih, in making sure that Wabara got his Senate certificate in time to be eligible to contest for its leadership. All four participated actively in leaning on INEC officials to carry out the court’s injunction.

Obviously, a man like Uba who could install just about anyone as a federal legislator whether they won their party primaries or not, a man who could also help install someone as Senate President regardless of any questions hanging over the legitimacy of their election, is not a man to be toyed with.

And as if to strengthen the man’s apparent faith in his own immunity from the consequences of his political chicanery, even the guardians of judicial independence, i.e. the men and women of the National Judicial Council (NJC), led by the Chief Justice of the Federation, Honourable Justice Uwais, said they didn’t see anything wrong with the controversial handling of the Wabara episode by the courts.

Here was an election that was conducted on April 12 and whose result couldn’t have take more than three days to announce. More than one month later a candidate approaches a judge and asks the judge to declare him a winner, when in fact INEC had already declared his rival as the winner. Inspite of the fact that the ordinary courts were barred by law and by the Constitution from doing so, the judge decides to entertain the petitioner and drops hints to INEC that it should change its decision about who won the election. Then, when INEC cleverly rejects the hints by qualifying its declaration of the petitioner as the winner, the judge throws away all pretenses to neutrality three days later and not only orders INEC to categorically declare the petitioner the winner but also threatens to charge INEC with contempt if it did not.

Somehow, it seemed not to have occurred to the judge sitting in Abuja that INEC was also headquartered in the same town and was, in any case, a phone call away and could be summoned to find out, first hand, if indeed the petitioner was right that INEC had either not declared a winner at all (the May 30 judgement) or had declared the wrong person as the winner (the June 2 judgement). Yet in the face of all these questions begging for answers, the guardians of our judicial system still gave our honourable judge a clean bill of health.

Now, Chris Uba may be a school drop-out, but even a school drop-out cannot fail to notice that if our courts and even their guardians would avoid asking rather inconvenient questions on issues where the executive arm of government and the ruling party seem to show an interest, then anyone could do anything and clean get away with it, provided, of course, he has the right connections.

Uba, evidently not only had the right connections, he also had the money to do as he wished. After all, it was not for nothing that his people gave him the chieftaincy title of Eselunuego (Eselu for short) which, as he himself proudly explained to Newswatch, means “Somebody sitting on top of money and the money is still scattered underneath him on the ground. When I answered Eselu I didn’t know that God will bless me with so much money and material wealth” !

With his political connection and his wealth, it was only a question of time before our young political fixer graduated from deciding who represented the good people of Anambra in the National Assembly to throwing out a hitherto compliant governor from office, whose feet seemed to have started becoming too big for his own shoes.

Equally no one should be surprised that the authorities, far from expressing outrage at Uba’s blatant gangsterism and bringing him to book, have been doing all they can to sweep it all under the carpet. First, Chief Olabode George, the PDP chieftain who is the chair of the party’s committee investigating the matter tells us its all “a family affair”. Second, Mr. Yohanna Madaki, the party’s National Legal Adviser, seconds Chief George and tells us that the party’s constitution will be used to resolve the matter. Third, the PDP governors rise from a crisis meeting on the matter and reassure us that there will be family reconciliation after the storm. Fourth, the party’s Secretary-General, Chief Vincent Ogbulafor, tells readers of The Comet (July 19), in effect, that except for his timing and strategy, Uba really did no wrong. “We recognise that in politics”, he says, “Godfathers exist… Whatever they spend in delivering him as the governor should be negotiated and settlement faced”. Fifth, the police chief tells us that his men, led by an AIG, who were used to execute the sordid job, actually went in to put the governor  under protective custody!

To cap it all, our president who felt obliged to read the riot act to the soldiers who threw out the elected leader of neighbouring Sao Tome and Principe at about the same period, could apparently not see the parallel between what was happening in Sao Tome and the rascality of July 10 in Awka. And so instead of reading the same riot act to the Awka rascals, the president could only tell us, after more than a week of strange silence, that he had no foreknowledge of the whole sordid affair!

Obviously, if it depended on the authorities in Abuja to sort out the mess in Awka, nothing will happen. Fortunately or unfortunately, it doesn’t. What has happened is that in April, the ruling party sowed the wind by thinking it could use the foulest means possible to fix the general elections in its own favour and clean get away with it. But then, as the saying goes, he who sows the wind, will reap the whirlwind. Awka, I dare say, is probably the first harvest those who sowed the wind of April are starting to reap.