Aloy Ejimakor Speaks on National Issues

Aloy Ejimakor is a Nigerian jurist based in the United States. He is the President of Nigerian Patriots in Diaspora (NPID) and also of Organisation of Nigerian Lawyers in Diaspora (ONLID). He traveled to Nigeria recently and granted an interview to members of the Press. Below is the text of the interview

As a lawyer and President of the Organization of Nigerian Lawyers in Diaspora (ONLID), what are your views on the recent call by the NBA, following the Ekiti case, for removal of Professor Maurice Iwu of INEC?

I don’t think it is appropriate for a hardcore, federally-chartered professional association to involve itself in passing the buck over the much overplayed shortcomings of the 2007 election. If such were the case, the Nigerian Medical Association, the Nigerian Society of Engineers, Pharmaceutical Society of Nigeria and all other professional associations might as well jettison all decorum and jump into taking sides in what has become an object of vicious power play between duplicitous politicians. Appointing or firing of INEC Chair is also a political (not judicial) item, clearly reserved for the pleasure of the President and consent of the Senate. And INEC is not a judicial body with some nexus to the NBA. So, what’s the beef with the NBA? That Maurice Iwu will continue as INEC Chair for now and even beyond his tenure after June 2010 is strictly a ‘political question’, not a juridical one and must thus be determined by whether the President decides to capitulate to the designs of the opposition or remain firm in exercising his sound political discretions in not wagging the dog. That is besides the Senate which is, by the constitution, required to find serious cause before confirming such removal. Where is the immediate cause or misconduct the constitution required? For starters, the NBA must advance proof that Professor Iwu pre-meditated some change in ink color in Ekiti for the sole purpose of disadvantaging the AC. If nullification of a result declared by INEC is a misconduct for which an INEC Chair shall be fired, the framers of our constitution would have said so. I suppose the same thing said for the NBA is also applicable to the NLC, in addition to the fact that NLC should be taken even less seriously because of its open romance with the Labour Party and the AC.

And there is more: The NBA ought to have known that the color of ink to be used is expressly within the sole discretion of INEC; and that it was by an INEC internal procedure that a certain color was brought in ordinary use. In other words, it was neither required by statute, nor by other mandatory federal regulation having the force of law. But since the Court of Appeals is the final authority on the Ekiti matter, it is now left to society to wonder whether a higher court would have upheld or remanded the Ekiti case on further appeal. We must not pretend that our courts are suddenly infallible when it comes to nullifying election results declared by INEC. Now let us consider this question: Is it reasonable for NBA to hold Maurice Iwu strictly liable for a spontaneous and innocent decision of INEC ad-hoc field officers to switch to another ink color? And to the point of calling for Iwu’s sack over this petty matter? Is the NBA saying that Professor Iwu, by some telepathy from his Abuja office, divined the change of ink color in order to advantage the prevailing candidate? And since the Court of Appeals did not explain how the in-field change of ink color constituted ‘substantial non-compliance’, can NBA now explain it to Nigerians and also demonstrate the fraudulent intent attributable to Iwu that may justify his removal. This is not to say that Iwu can be removed on grounds of failing to use the right ink color or even for any finding of ‘substantial non-compliance’. The constitution clearly provides that the INEC Chair can only be removed for ‘misconduct’, not for getting ink colors wrong. Pray, if every result INEC declared is supposed to stand or upheld for peace to reign, why did the founding fathers of our constitution create election tribunals? Why didn’t the founding fathers simply provide that: “We hereby enact that for every election nullified, ‘Iwu Must Go’”? Why is the NBA not calling for the firing of every judge or justice whose decision is overturned by a higher court? This is bait and switch, smoking mirrors, warts and all.

Further, this thing about NBA always taking on the government of the day and institutions that determine the rules of devolution of political power in Nigeria is assuming such a dimension that is fast rising to the level of overawing government and intimidating its high officials. I suspect that the real target of the NBA is not Professor Iwu but a President Yar’Adua that continues to be seen by fringe ranks of the NBA as a sitting duck and a disagreeable Obasanjo imposition. This is part of the reason some credible Nigerians have charged that the NBA, as presently led, appears to be fronting for the opposition and disaffected politicians within the ruling party. Despite Ekiti and others like it, it appears that NBA was suckered in by elements of the opposition and scheming PDP apparatchiks looking to make hay and supplant Yar’Adua in 2011, including an Atiku who continues to see Professor Iwu as the sole obstacle to his evident ambitions to becoming President in 2011, perhaps on the indecent assumption that the President might be too ill to run or worse. True or not, I would rather NBA curtail this unwise politicking and concentrate more on those fine, apolitical ideals that underpinned its founding, including law reforms; constitutional amendment, awaiting trials; discipline of lawyers; professional ethics; continuing legal education; and like lawyer-related pre-occupations.

How do you reconcile your views on INEC/Iwu with what the Supreme Court held in the case of Governor Amaechi of Rivers States?

In Amaechi versus Omehia, the issue before the court was a plain legal question, not the collateral equitable question that ultimately carried the day; and that has nothing to do with any irregularities attributable to INEC or Maurice Iwu. If at all, Amaechi’s issues had more to do with PDP’s struggles with internal party democracy and the inequities arising therefrom. As Chair of INEC, Professor Iwu is charged with abiding by the law, not over-reaching himself to act as a court of equity that must right every electoral injustice. INEC’s first instinct is to recognize only a candidate sponsored by a political party. The stretched equitable considerations that led to Omehia’s fall are strictly within the purview of superior courts, not an INEC that is a mere non-adjudicatory agency with the limited mandate of umpiring elections. So, to most legal analysts, Amaechi was poised to more likely prevail on the clear legal questions raised by his substitution and that any companion ruling was supposed to be restricted to an order for a fresh ballot that would now have Amaechi’s name on the ballot as the PDP candidate. The other issue, wholly equitable and unaddressed by the briefs before the court, was whether the votes cast for Omehia in the election could be held in equity to have been cast for Amaechi? That was the point where the Supreme Court turned activist and ‘equity-prone’ by departing from a pure court of law and looked to its equitable jurisdiction to issue that part of the ruling that awarded the governorship to Amaechi. The rationale offered by the court is so far unknown to Nigerian black letter law as presently enacted, but may be consistent with equitable principles underpinning our inherited tradition of common law. Let me explain. There is nothing in the Nigerian constitution or the Electoral Act – the two substantive laws by which electoral disputes are resolved - that expressly mandated that ‘where a substitution fails by court order, the victory garnered by the ‘interloper’ candidate shall be awarded to the candidate so wrongfully substituted’. The only situation where such victory could be legally awarded in accordance with some stretch of the law is one in which the wrong candidate was declared elected, such as in the case of Obi versus Ngige - in an inter-party contest, not intra-party. To be sure, what the law contemplated both in its express provisions and spirit was for a failed intra-party substitution to lead to new elections where the offended candidate will have the opportunity of standing as the candidate of the offending political party. The legislative history of our electoral laws and settled judicial precedents amply support this proposition. And the reason is simple. Nigeria has a political party system and our laws do not yet recognize independent candidates (like America) nor elections without vested candidates (like Britain). It therefore follows at universal logic that any vote cast in our elections is assumed at law to have been cast not only for the political party but also for the candidate. This means that the votes cast in the gubernatorial elections in Rivers State were not just for PDP standing alone but also for Omehia, as a natural person, who assumedly contributed to the victory at issue. Conversely, if Amaechi was never substituted, he could have lost the election, not as a consequence of any voter disdain for the PDP, but as a rejection of Amaechi – the natural person, not the candidate. Therefore, our electoral statute demands two broad requirements for validation of votes in an election. One is that there is a candidate (identifiable in his physical characteristics as an intelligent being, as opposed to a chicken or cow or even a tree); and the second, is that such candidate must be sponsored by a political party. In the case at bar, the intelligent being who met both requirements was Omehia, not Amaechi. In other words, the votes cast in the governorship elections can never be divisible (at law) or separated from Omehia, the physical person just as the same votes cannot be separated from PDP, the sponsoring party. Both of them – candidate and party, are joint owners of the votes or entitled to them by the entireties, analogous to being tenants by the entireties in real property law, in which case each tenancy or entitlement is inseparable in their entireties from one tenant or the other. Keep in mind that, as far as those votes are concerned, PDP and Omehia are more like Siamese twins. Therefore, without more, the judgment would have been unassailable had it simply ordered new elections with Amaechi as the new PDP candidate. The judgment courted controversy by going as far as declaring Amaechi the duly elected governor in an election that did not have his name on the ballot. So, the objections raised by those criticizing the judgment can be sustained on the plain construction of the black letter law. That some people still point to Amaechi’s case as another malpractice that counts against Professor Iwu goes to illustrate the gathering demerits of such postulations.

Coming from America, which adheres to rule of law, do you believe that President Yar’Adua is sincere with his policy of adherence to rule of law?

Yes, the President is sincere on all counts; and here is why: This is not the first time Nigerian leaders have expressed some commitment to rule of law. But this is the first time Nigerians have seen a credible and noticeable presidential effort geared to converting the doctrine from a mere populist slogan to a cultural revolution of sorts. The difference lies in the fact that previous attempts failed to take hold because they remained mere slogans, sadly lacking in any bonafide and concrete measures on the party of the government of the time to make it a way of life for Nigerians and our institutions. Today, President Yar’Adua seems to have departed from that tradition as amply demonstrated by some of his actions to date. Consider the President’s ram-rod reluctance to intermeddle in matters reserved to the judicature and the many other hot-button judicial issues of the day where the President left no one in doubt that he preferred to let matters play out within the settled procedural framework. In all of these situations, the President never pussy-footed and you don’t have to look far to notice the gathering diplomatic windfalls for Nigeria, coming from even the most cynical and hostile of nations. In America, Yar’Adua’s sincerity on rule of law has sunk in and is credited with an extraordinary degree of respect Nigeria is known to now enjoy at the highest levels of the US administration; and it is credited with the upsurge in direct foreign investments that are bound for Nigeria in recent times.

Ejimakor can be reached at alloylaw@yahoo.com

Aloy Ejimakor's Interview, February 2009

Aloy Ejimakor is a Nigerian jurist based in America. He is the President of Organisation of Nigerian Lawyers in Diaspora (ONLID) and also of Nigerian Patriots in Diaspora (NPID). He traveled to Nigeria recently and granted an interview to members of the Press. Below is the text of the interview.

As a Nigerian in the Diaspora and having witnessed elections as it is done there, how would you rate the performance of the INEC in the conduct of elections?

Well, INEC may be called names by some people who have a stake in continually waxing negative on Nigeria and her finest institutions. But for me, I would say that back in 2007, INEC did a great job with the difficult task of conducting elections in a very complex nation of over 140 million people. Throughout the time-line to 2007, the pressures on INEC were just too much. Elements of local and foreign intermeddlers who passed off as either monitors or observers were engaged in a well-coordinated, well-financed campaign to discredit the elections even before the first ballots were cast. And to succeed, they resorted to personalizing their attacks around the person of Professor Maurice Iwu, mostly because Iwu’s brand of stubborn patriotism did not sit well with them and the forces they represented. This is besides the other distractions collateral to the war of attrition between the former president and his vice, the hidden ambitions of the then senate president and so on. That Iwu and INEC overcame all these and gave Nigeria her first truly democratic transition since Independence is something that Nigerian patriots like me celebrated in the Diaspora with foreign friends of Nigeria who all together acknowledged Iwu’s single-minded resilience as a gutsy umpire for the most populous black nation on earth. As for the flaws that the naysayers have tried to so much overplay, I will say these: I believe that the problem of organizing elections in Nigeria goes beyond INEC as a single institution amongst the many others like the police and the SSS that are also deployed to critical functions on election day. And if we decide as citizens that nobody is going to interdict our ballot boxes; that election-day law enforcement will rise to deal with instant electoral offenses; that our politicians will refrain from engaging thugs to cause electoral mayhem; and that everybody else comes together to say: for once we are going to have the most credible elections of all time, it will happen and all the Iwus and INECs of this world cannot frustrate that desire. But if we decide that, as voters and politicians, we are going to be mired in election malpractices just like exam malpractices and other sharp practices that are rife in this country, the most pious assemblage of umpires headed by the Pope himself will not succeed in giving us an election anywhere near being credible. In other words, it is our dubious ways as a people and the mindset that we must win by hook or crook that give us marred elections. Professor Iwu (and those that will succeed him) and our current and future INECs are just the fall guys for what I like to call “embedded societal proclivity to beating the system”.

So what are your suggestions on curbing electoral malpractices in Nigeria?

First of all, we need to strengthen the institutions that support INEC and that includes having some continuity in the leadership of INEC beyond June 2010 (when the term of the current leadership is billed to sunset). Continuity becomes more compelling because the next election in 2011 would have to be held much earlier than before. Continuity is also supported by the following factors: recommendations of the Electoral Reform Panel that elections be held early enough; the clear wishes of vast majority of Nigerians; and the political liability that comes if the President is seen to be too eager to placate the opposition by replacing an experienced INEC leadership too close to the next election. The Presidency has shown political courage by tending towards re-appointing former INEC Commissioner, Igbani and I don’t see why Chairman Iwu will not be re-appointed on the same theory. In other words, if it is true that Professor Iwu’s tenure will expire in June 2010, it will not make any sense in replacing him with a new Chairman, especially since replacing him might give the unwitting impression that the President capitulated to those who saw his mandate as illegitimate, besides the more important point that such eleventh hour replacement will further complicate the same issues we are trying to overcome. The President has the prerogative to re-appoint Professor Iwu, even so on an interim basis, and it is the position of vast majorities of the Nigerian Diasporan organizations that the President will not kowtow to those who wished otherwise just because they lost an election an Iwu happened to have conducted. Coming to the other institutional factors, we must bear in mind that INEC does not function in a vacuum of institutions but rather in the midst of many institutions. INEC does not have the powers to arrest electoral offenders, the police does. INEC does not have the national intelligence mandate to detect early conspiracies portending threats to our elections, the SSS and to some extent, the NIA does. INEC is not well-funded and that must stop forthwith because its functions are ever so central to our very survival as a democracy. In the immediate future, we might have to consider the efficacies of giving INEC some ad-hoc coercive powers on election day in order to enable it to, on its own, immediately take electoral offenders into custody and bring them to book without any let or hindrance.
Additionally, we need a permanent regime of voter education and I understand INEC is doing something right now about it by bringing Electoral Institutes into the realm, thanks to reforms brought by the same Professor Iwu. Further, the media needs to get beyond negative reporting on Iwu and INEC and turn to educating Nigerians on the many reforms undertaken by INEC in recent times. A more informed voter would be more vigilant in guarding his vote against ballot snatchers. Further, Iwu’s determination to reduce the use of ad-hoc staff is part of the larger reforms in the general direction of making our line and staff umpires more responsible for what happens on election day in terms of discharging the statutory functions reserved to INEC. These reforms make it imperative that we urgently look anew at the methods and magnitudes in which INEC is presently funded. As regards methods, I will suggest that INEC, like the judiciary, be funded on a first-line charge basis, meaning that it gets to draw from the Federation Account directly as a mater of law. That is bound to make it more independent. As regards magnitudes, the funding must be generous, untangled and devoid of political considerations. I give Professor Iwu the credit for long suggesting these reforms along with his fine thesis on electronic voting. But for now that INEC cannot draw directly due to constitutional constraints, the National Assembly can resort to its appropriation powers to ensure that no expense is spared in the funding of the next elections until such a time we get around to amending the constitution to make matters clearer. And finally, Nigeria has come full circle to the point that we don’t have any business with asking foreign nations to help fund our elections. If foreigners are not allowed to fund our political parties, why would we accept their strings-laden freebies to fund our elections? This is a national security matter which came to the fore when these foreigners demanded access to the biometrics of Nigeria’s registered voters. And they nearly succeeded but for Professor Iwu’s uncanny intellectual grasp of matters of national security and statecraft.

As President of the Organisation of Nigerian Lawyers in the Diaspora (ONLID), what is your take on the recent judgment on the voting rights of Nigerians in the Diaspora?

This question comes under the general purview of what is often referred to as the ‘Diaspora Voting Rights’. This idea developed out of the ‘Absentee Ballot’ system which is prevalent in America, whereby Americans living overseas can cast their ballots at any of the American diplomatic missions closest to them. So, based on this premise, we in the Diaspora felt that our universal suffrage suffers as a consequence of our sojourn abroad and absence of a clear legal path to whether we can cast our ballots at our locations overseas or not. And because INEC was also not clearly statutorily empowered to take extra-territorial ballots, a crack team of Nigerian Diaspora proceeded to bring legal action in this regard. Now that a competent court has given verdict in recognition of Diaspora Voting Rights, I see no reason why anybody would want to be opposed to the idea. I only see a new opportunity for the National Assembly to either enact a law to define the procedural angles; and when time comes for constitutional amendment, to consider whether it is even better to give it the force of constitutional protection.

As a lawyer of many years standing, what is your take on the conferment of Senior Advocate of Nigeria, SAN? Would you say it has deepened the country’s judicial system?

No, it has not deepened Nigeria’s judicial system, not even any where near doing that. First of all, it is not and never will deepen the judicial system because that was never the purpose. The original intent (in Nigeria, not in Britain where it originated from the doctrine of ‘Queens Counsel) was to recognize comparative excellence in the practice of law but as applied, it has instead created privileges in the practice of law, and that is in opposite to any deepening of the judicial system. Further, it is a vestige of our colonial past and a rather sad mimicry of the ‘Queens Counsel’ royal honours conferred by the Queen in Britain and in which case you even don't have to be lawyer to earn it. Recall that Nnamdi Azikiwe, a non-lawyer and other non-lawyer Nigerians were also conferred with the same title of Queens Counsel, equivalent to Nigeria’s SAN. That means that it was more of a residual national honour the British royalty employed throughout the Commonwealth to confer some privilege (or drive a wedge, if you will), not for recognition of any identifiable, objectively measured legal scholarship but most probably for other reasons that included advancement of affinity with the British Empire and its Crown. So, the historical origins of 'SANship', if you will, can be found and justified only on the notion of Lordship (or overlordship) of a unitarily Royal Britain – of Privileges, of Peerage, of Earls, of Lords, of Commons, of Nabobs, warts and all. Nigeria is a republic, not a unitary royal kingdom, and thus must be seen to be a society averse to anything that might confer undue advantages, especially within our adversarial framework where everybody is expected to have a fair shake when matters are in court. The practice whereby the SANs are given special privileges in court detracts from the ‘fair shake’ concept by creating the impression that certain legal or procedural advantages come to litigants once they have a SAN in their kitty. That never deepens the judicial process. That never helps matters with our quest to have equality before the law. The pure jurisprudence of America, where I have practiced for over a decade, will never allow it; and if Nigerian judiciary wishes to progress on the path of pure adherence to rule of law, it may be time to consider abolition of this practice. The number of appeals you filed in the Supreme Court, being one of the major qualifications for becoming a SAN, is far from being the best parameter for measuring legal scholarship or superior trial advocacy, especially considering the well-known fact that a lot of frivolous appeals are filed in the Supreme Court all the time. The only fair way is to allow litigants or the society to use their own judgment to decide which lawyers are better than the others when time comes for cases and controversies. We, as lawyers with vested interests, should not be the ones indirectly or unwittingly telling litigants that some lawyers are better than others.

The recent visit of Former Vice-President, Alhaji Atiku Abubakar to his former boss, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo has generated a lot of controversy in the body polity. What is your take on this?

First of all, Alhaji Atiku Abubakar is supposed be one of the major opposition leaders, not by the strength and spread of his party, but by the sheer dint of his many battles with the former regime and the war of attrition he launched on President Yar’Adua’s mandate and INEC. So, if Atiku now wishes to reconcile with Obasanjo or PDP which did most to ruin his political career, that can only be justified at the personal level because any reconciliation that rises to the level of a new political marriage is, frankly, a betrayal of the entire opposition and the forward-troopers who bore the worst brunt of the spats between Atiku and Obasanjo. What happens to Lai Mohammed? What happens to Usman Bugaje? What happens to Tinubu, the AC and its ranks? And for Obasanjo and PDP, what happens to Professor Iwu and INEC that were so much alleged by Atiku to be on Obasanjo/PDP payroll? The justification found by Atiku in the ‘reconciliation’ between De Klerk and Nelson Mandela is not in pari materia because De Klerk remained in the National Party and in stark opposition to Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress years after the sunset of apartheid. Further, any consideration by Atiku that he needed to reconcile with Obasanjo must have been, in the first place, encouraged by the stout defense INEC and Iwu raised against him while he unleashed his barrage of attacks against Yar’Adua, PDP, INEC and Professor Iwu; and as regards Professor Iwu, I would say so unfairly. Atiku talked about reaching for peace after war but neither the PDP nor any of its apparatchiks offered any evident and effective rebuttal to Atiku’s deployment of sections of the domestic and international media to array negative attacks against them. That means that the second constituency that might be left in the cold on this new path to Atiku/Obasanjo/PDP romance is INEC and Chairman Iwu and some ‘non-stakeholding’ faceless Nigerians who never meant to but were still the only ones that mustered the stout defense of the system that constituted the so-called ‘war’ that compelled Atiku to now seek reconciliation. Finally, if this reconciliation has elements to it that intends to replace Yar’Adua with Atiku as the PDP flag bearer in 2011 on the premise that Yar’Adua may be too ill to run, then it is in utter bad taste. But if it involves some arrangement whereby Atiku will refrain from attacking INEC, Professor Iwu, Yar’Adua and aspects of our national institutions ceaselessly and call his troops home, then some decent Nigerians might come to terms with it.

Attorney Ejimakor can be reached at: alloylaw@yahoo.com

Peter Obi: A Governor’s Dilemma

Peter Obi: A Governor’s Dilemma

By: Jimmy Osifo

Governor Peter Obi of Anambra state caught a pathetic picture of an individual under siege, but who desperately needs a rescue from his quandary. His statements in his recent press briefing on “the 2010 Governorship election in the state (Anambra)” exposed him as such. The Governor’s dilemma is understandable when one considers his experience with the 2003 election conducted by Dr. Abel Guobadia’s INEC, where his mandate was stolen by Dr. Chris Ngige of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP. Peter Obi’s saving grace was the Appeal Court judgment which restored him as the Governor of Anambra state.

In the press statement which was reported in some national newspapers of Tuesday February 17, 2009, Governor Obi stated emphatically that the only obstacle between him and the Anambra State Government house in the forthcoming 2010 gubernatorial election is presumed likely bias of Professor Maurice Iwu, chairman of Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC. He called on the Federal Government to “sack Iwu now” before the election. There are pertinent questions arising from the Governor’s Awka pronouncements. Peter Obi needs to be asked if Iwu is the Resident Electoral Officer in Anambra state, whose responsibility it is to conduct the gubernatorial election in the state? Does Governor Peter Obi have it on a good authority that Iwu has instructed the state Resident Electoral Commissioner (REC) to influence the outcome of the election to his detriment? Do the electoral laws vest on INEC the final authority to decide election winners without the courts? Has Peter Obi suddenly lost confidence in the judicial process that restored his 2003 mandate? Why is Peter Obi pushing the cart before the horse? Given his previous experience, one would have thought Peter Obi will be more pragmatic by ensuring the presence of vigilant polling agents and intelligence gathering in the likelihood of his election fears happening. Deep down in his heart, I think Governor Obi knows why he is adopting this panic strategy. We shall come to that in a short while.

Governor Peter Obi depicts the do-or-die character that is typical of the Nigerian politician, who will always desperately want to “serve the people”. In his apparently beleaguered state, he has unconsciously insulted the intelligence of the over 150 million Nigerians when he advocated we “ask Ghana to loan us their chief Electoral Officer for the purpose of election in Anambra state”. Is the Anambra State Governor suggesting that the Nigerian IQ is inferior to the Ghanaian? Does Peter Obi reason that there are no competent individuals to conduct credible elections in Nigeria? Is His Excellency crediting only the Electoral Commission in Ghana without also evaluating the positive contribution and cooperative attitude of the Ghanaian politician and the enabling environment provided by levels of Ghanaian government? Has he also thought that if such attitude and same environment is guaranteed our Electoral Commission by our politicians and levels of government, elections outcome will not be different? How does Governor Obi think? What has driven him to this level of inadequacy complex?

As I was saying, the Governor Obi we know should be more intelligent than the statements credited to him in his press briefing. We do know too that the Governor is really, stressed. The press briefing was simply a frantic strategic option at redeeming a waning hope to a dampened camp. His lack of coordination in his answers to questions posed by some journalists reflected his unsettled mind. The truth that must be told is that the Anambra people are holding Governor Obi to account for his four-year stewardship, but there is a difficulty on the part of the Governor in finding a correlation between his ambition to be returned for a second term and his failure to deliver political dividends to Anambra people in his first term in office. Put tersely, Peter Obi has not done well to deserve another term. He knows this. And the journalists in his press conference too, know. Hence, in desperation, he has become hysterical and un-coordinated.

Journalists in attendance at the press conference asked Governor Obi why his administration has failed to conduct Local Government election in his state since the expiration of the tenure of the last office holders. The Governor’s response to the question as reported in The Nation newspaper of Tuesday February 17, 2009 was not only awkward but undignifying. First, His Excellency declared that he knows the best “voting option”(?) that will suit Anambra political temperament, Option A4. “Local Government election without Option A4, he said, would likely precipitate mayhem…if you put ballot boxes anywhere in the state, they will carry it and run away”. What is Governor Peter Obi trying to rationalize? Is it his failure as the chief security officer, with stupendous security vote, to provide an enabling environment for the conduct of a Local Government election in his state? Is Peter Obi saying Iwu or INEC or his Ghanaian chief Electoral Officer will run away with the ballot boxes?

Amusingly, the same Governor also said that conducting Local Government election is a waste of the state’s financial resources “because there is already a process of selecting people into leadership position in Igbo land by the Umunna (kindred, community and village selection process)”. What Peter Obi did not however explain is how this Anambra peculiar brand of democracy works with the provision of the 1999 constitution on election of officials and local government administration in Nigeria.

Peter Obi’s real fear is the reality of losing the power and fortunes his office has brought him so far. He is truly embattled in all fronts. His perennially troubled APGA party’s popularity in Anambra politics has dwindled due to Obi’s misrule. There are indications that the party will not risk his candidature in the forth-coming election. The son to the Governor’s deputy is the next prospect for his position as APGA candidate. Obi’s approval rating among Anambra people is at its lowest ebb ever. His panic efforts at winning the people over by paying arrears of salaries and allowances owed workers in the state is not persuading. Several of his political appointees and top aides are deserting him in droves. Then, what was Peter Obi’s motive for his press conference? Was it an alarmist advocacy strategy to graduate his Umunna political concept in Anambra State? However, Governor Obi has unknowingly, succeeded in giving us insights to the murky terrain of Anambra politics and his leadership failure. INEC must have to grapple with this reality in its conduct of the 2010 election in the state. Nigerians must take note.

Jimmy Osifo is a public affairs analyst josifo@yahoo.com