By Onyebuchi Ememanka
An article written by Ferdinand Ekeoma, which appeared published in Daily Sun, Tuesday, February 21, 2017 made an interesting read for me, for several reasons. The writer is my friend and I dare say, a fine gentleman. Contrary to his description of himself in the article as a media practitioner, he is not just a media practitioner but also a media aide to Alex Otti, the defeated governorship candidate of the All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA) in the 2015 general elections in Abia State. Therefore, his article and the contents thereof are quite understandable. One of the chief difficulties of a media aide is that he does his best to present his principal well, even when the odds are stacked against him.
I ordinarily would have ignored the article for what it really is, namely, another fable from the stable of a defeated politician, who has refused to accept defeat and seeks to become governor two years to the end of the tenure of the man who beat him in the elections. Even after losing out in the courts, he continues to seek avenues to stage a comeback to Government House, Umuahia.
This rejoinder is motivated by patent falsehoods and emotional outbursts contained in the article under reference. The falsehoods are majorly captured at the second paragraph of the article and I shall quote verbatim for ease of reference – “One can say, without any fear of contradiction, that if there is any man, who has come to equity with absolute clean hands, as far as the Abia governorship legal tussle is concerned, that man is Alex Otti. Abians need no tutorial about what happened in Abia during the 2015 governorship elections; they know who their choice was, they know who they voted for, they know who remains their hero…”
The above quotation amply describes how much my friend, Ekeoma, struggles with the understanding of how elections work. The quotation is replete with fallacious conclusions and hasty generalisations, which have no foundation in logic or common sense. In summary, the article is an exercise in vainglorious hero-worshipping, glorification, deification and needless aggrandisement of his boss. I am sure my friend got his principal smiling with such effusive outpouring of accolades. However, contrary to the views expressed in the article, elections are creations of the law. The same law that creates the electoral process makes ample provisions for all incidental matters that pertain to the conduct of elections. These include the roles of the electoral commission, its officers, their powers and obligations as well as the limits of such powers.
There is only one way to know and determine the winner of an election and that is when the duly recognised officer of the electoral commission declares someone winner. Under our laws, this is the only acceptable means of determining the winner of an election. Tales told by drunken men inside drinking joints cannot supplant the provisions of the law. Indeed, crowds at campaign rallies do not translate to votes anywhere in the world.
This is where Ferdinand missed it. Perhaps, he was carried away by the stories told by people to the point that he forgot the key roles played by demography and population distribution. Perhaps, again, he was also carried away by the crowds he saw in Aba without knowing that Aba accounts for just two out of 17 local government areas in the state with a high incidence of stranger population. Aba people have never really been heavy voters because during elections, more than half of the population will travel to their respective states to vote. At the end, on Election Day proper, what you will see at the polling stations will be less than 25 per cent of the people who were shouting during campaigns. This is well known fact. Otti won in areas with very little voting population, while Ikpeazu swept the polls in areas with high voting population.
So, the issue of Abians knowing, who they voted for, makes no sense at all. You can only know the results of an election when they are declared officially by the body authorised to do so by the law. Nothing more, nothing less. The reference by Ferdinand to the purported cancellation of results in the three LGAs of Obingwa, Osisioma and Isiala Ngwa North is another pointer to the fact that he does not really understand how the Electoral Laws work. Cancellation of results is not governed by the whims and caprices of an electoral officer but by the clear provisions of the law. By the provisions of the Electoral Act, once results have been declared at the unit levels, such results become sacrosanct and can no longer be tampered with by any electoral officer. Therefore, the purported cancellation of these results by the State Resident Electoral Commissioner was illegal and clearly ultra vires his powers. Even the National Chairman of INEC then, Professor Attahiru Jega, made that point clearly. The REC was, therefore, right in reversing the clearly illegal cancellation.
One other issue that caught my attention is the reference by Ferdinand to his boss, as a man who has come to equity with absolutely clean hands.
Otti’s hands are not clean at all. Let me refresh his memory a little. Alex Otti was a member of the PDP and sought to be governor on the party’s platform. He is also a native of Atani in Arochukwu LGA of Abia State, though he was born and bred in Nvosi, Isiala Ngwa South LGA. It was in Atani Arochukwu, his home, that he registered and joined the PDP.
When it was clear to him that the party was minded to follow the dictates of the Abia Charter of Equity by ensuring that the ticket is zoned to Ukwa Ngwa land since the other zones of the state had produced governors, Otti quickly abandoned his ancestral home. He quickly changed his nativity from Arochukwu to Isiala Ngwa South and wrote letters to that effect. He wrote to the PDP then asking for a “change.” In Igboland, a man has only one ancestry. A man’s ancestry cannot be changed by a mere letter motivated by political expediency.
When the party went ahead to state clearly that they were zoning their ticket not just to UkwaNgwa land but also to Abia South, thereby technically keeping Otti away from the ticket, he dumped the party and moved to APGA where he used his massive war chest to muscle his way through by practically purchasing the party ticket against all known provisions of the party’s constitution.
How Ferdinand describes a man with such desperate political tendencies as having clean hands is very curious indeed. The truth is that Otti is battling with the nemesis of his political desperation. He refused to play by rules and is being haunted by the ghosts of the treacherous politics he played and an uncertain political future that stares him in the face.
This fact cannot be wished away by public relations stunts, such as the one orchestrated by my friend, Ferdinand.
While Otti and his co-travelers continue to hallucinate and to flog a dead horse, the people of Abia State have since moved on to new issues. They are now enjoying a brand new resurgimento orchestrated by the developmental feats of the Ikpeazu administration.
Even the Abia State House of Assembly, which my friend claims was divided into two equal halves is one united legislative body, working very closely with Governor Ikpeazu to give legislative teeth to his development agenda. The members of that August Assembly have all moved on to more serious issues of governance while Otti and his aides keep living in the past with jaundiced analysis of the 2015 elections.
• Ememanka is a lawyer and Special Adviser to Governor Ikpeazu on Public Communications.