By: Chinedu Ekeke:
I have read the judgement of the learned justices of the Appeal Court and
can confirm that it is flawless. But the rented protesters, including
those who contracted them, hadn’t read a line of the judgement they were
protesting. One then wonders why a people who have the option of appealing
at the Supreme Court will take to intimidation and blackmail. Do they
intend to instigate violence as a tool to sway the justices of the Supreme
Court to their cause?
For the avoidance of doubt, let me summarise the reason for the judgment.
The Appeal Court’s argument is that INEC, which was defending its
declaration of Ikpeazu as Abia governor in the suit, was the same body
which presented to the Election Petition Tribunal with evidence of
accreditation in the election.
The INEC official who was subpoenaed by the tribunal said the
accreditation report she brought was conclusive, and that every
accreditation that took place in that election was captured in that
document. When this witness said these, Ikpeazu’s lawyers did not
cross-examine her to fault her claim.
And in law, once you don’t fault a witnesses’ claim with
cross-examination, you have agreed with her testimony. It was based on
that evidence which Ikpeazu’s lawyers acquiesced to with their silence
that the Appeal Court judges established a case of over-voting in some
areas in the election.
Now, here are the figures. Accreditation in those areas, according to
INEC accreditation report was 93,369.
Number of votes from those areas was 160,252.
The unanswered question then became how 93,369 people manufactured
160,252 votes. It was evident that people sat in their living rooms and
manufactured election results and then allocated votes to candidates as
they wished.
Because voting can only be exercised by those who went through
accreditation, the learned justices determined that the results from
those areas were concocted, fictitious and fabricated. The votes are
unlawful. And our laws have it settled, that when over-voting is
established, the election is nullified and voided. A null and void action
is without validity, it lacks force of law.
As at the time the election held, it had already produced a clear winner
in Alex Otti. The learned justices then held that there would only be a
need to call for a rerun if there was no clear winner. Alex Otti met the
constitutionally required 25% of votes cast in two-third local
governments of the state, as well as garnered majority of votes cast.
In all the noise I’ve heard from the custodians of a stolen mandate and
their cheerleaders, none has boasted of having won the April election.
Listen to the arguments, they all have implicitly owned up to having
rigged. And rather than plead that we don’t jail them, they are pushing
for a rerun, as if robbing Abians of their mandate wasn’t bad enough.
Although their arguments have majorly come off as incoherent, yet I’ll
try to interrogate some of the falsehood they’ve been selling to the
world:
That the cancellation of the lawful results will be a disenfranchisement
to voters in those parts of the state. Well, every declaration on
election matters by any court or even INEC disenfranchises people.
There’s no way every registered voter will vote in an election.
The declaration of the appellate court was to achieve punitive ends. It
was meant to discourage election rigging in the future as declaring a
rerun will empower a vote rigger who, having stolen another man’s mandate
and having used same to appropriate the state’s resources, now seeks to
benefit from his robbery.
Aware that he was never the winner of the election and knowing there’s a
chance the courts will sack him, a beneficiary of electoral theft would
naturally go populist, while his lawyers at the same time labour to lure
the courts into conceding him a rerun. That is the game of Abia PDP which
all lovers of justice should condemn.
That the disenfranchised people in those areas are over 350,000 in
number. This is laughable, because first, I heard Mr A.C.B Agbazuere, the
state’s Commissioner for Information say on Channels TV that the number
of disenfranchised people was 200,000; later Charles Ajunwa, former S.A.
to immediate past governor T.A.Orji published in This Day newspaper that
the disenfranchised people were over 150,000.
Finally I heard Eziuche Ubani, another Commissioner in the state claim on
Ray Power that the number being disenfranchised was 350,000. For them,
depending on the speaker’s level of comfort with falsehood, the more the
number is exaggerated, the more they stand a chance of winning public
sympathy.
To puncture this claim, we will need to know how many people voted in
Abia during the 2015 presidential election. First, all core Igbo states
were hugely supportive of President Goodluck Jonathan. Secondly, his
wife, Patience grew up in Umuahia since her own mother hailed from there.
It therefore stands to reason that Abians came out en masse to give
Jonathan their votes; yet he got only 368,303 votes while Muhammadu
Buhari got 13, 394. The total was about 381,700 votes. This is the true
voting strength of Abia state, not the over-bloated pre-Card Reader
figures bandied around by Abia PDP.
Now, Abia has 17 Local Governments. If Only 3 local governments have more
than 350,000 votes as the PDP claims, where was the votes from the rest
14 local governments including Aba North and South, Ohafia and Bende all
of which have the highest voting strength? How come President Jonathan,
in spite of the love Abians have for him, could only poll 368, 303 votes?
You see, no matter how fast falsehood sprints, truth will overtake it at
a point.
That accreditation of voters was not with Card Reader alone. This
argument was advanced by the noisy lawyer, Mike Ozekhome, in a bid to
flaw the appeal court judgement. It is not certain that Mr Ozekhome was
on earth when the governorship elections held in Nigeria. If he were
here, he wouldn’t have boldly made that statement on national television
without any scruples.
I will assume the lawyer was out in space exploring novel areas in
electoral jurisprudence when INEC issued a guideline for the governorship
elections, insisting that ONLY card readers would be used for
accreditation. INEC went further to insist that if any card reader failed
at any polling unit, the device would be replaced, and if the replaced
one failed again, the election would be postponed to the next day so
another card reader would be brought for accreditation.
That way, INEC made it impossible for anybody to write fake results under
the guise of card readers not functioning well. It is worth repeating to
Mike Ozekhome that INEC gave no room for manual accreditation.
So it is evident that the learned justices of the appellate court were
right to decide the matter on the strength of the evidence by INEC which
gave the concluded accreditation figures in the areas where unlawful
votes were exorcised.
That the justices of the Appeal Court should have called for a rerun. Of
course, Alex Otti will win Okezie Ikpeazu any day in Abia state, but does
it serve the course of justice that someone who won election be made to
go through another round of elections while the person who stole his
mandate is allowed to benefit from his crime? At what point do we as a
society put a stop to incentivizing crimes?
In any case, the learned justices of the appeal court unanimously stated
that ‘’ordering a fresh election will only arise where a clear winner did
not emerge after the deduction of the illegal votes.’’
There was a clear winner, and he should be allowed to exercise his
mandate. Those who disagree with the judgement should face the court, not
the streets.