Imo State is gearing up for a governorship election, scheduled for Saturday November 11,2023. The polls will be conducted alongside similar exercise in Bayelsa and Kogi states. Each of the three states have a distinct challenging political environment, which makes the upcoming elections no picnic. Political warlords abound.
The triple off-cycle governorship polls will be the first set of elections to be conducted by the Independent National Electoral Commission [INEC], after the 2023 general elections. That is already a problem. The governorship elections in Bayelsa, Imo and Kogi will hold against the backdrop of deep distrust of both the electoral commission and the electoral process, by the larger society. At the moment, sadly, not a few among the electorate, across the land, harbour serious suspicion of the intentions and actions of the election management body. Assurances, exhortations and every move by the agency, are largely received presently, with cynicism and suspicion.
For all these, however, the case in Imo state, has emerged most peculiar and fraught with absurd possibilities. On November 11 2023, when the governorship election should be holding, Hope Uzodinma, governor of the state in the last three years, will be on the ballot. He will be one of the seventeen contestants jostling for the prime political seat at Owerri. The governor will be seeking a second term in office, being at the verge of completing his first four-year term.
Now, before the November 11 election date comes up, on Tuesday October 31,2023, that is eleven days before the scheduled governorship election, the Supreme Court has scheduled to sit in Abuja, on a governorship election matter in Imo. Now, pay attention! The governorship case which the Supreme Court will be sitting on, will not be about the governorship election coming up in Imo State on November 11 2023. It will be about the governorship election in Imo State held on March 9 2019.
Every matter before a court, almost all, has a binary prospect. It could go one way or the other. The case over which the Supreme Court will be sitting on October 31 , is not different. It could go left or right. If the apex court goes left, the upcoming governorship election in Imo State will proceed as scheduled. If, however, the Court goes right, Imo State will have a governor, a new (or old) governor, making the scheduled election of November 11 2023 irrelevant.
Now, what is the substance of this jigsaw? In 2019, Chief Uche Nwosu, better known as Rochas Okorocha’s son-in-law was enmeshed in a bitter tussle within the Imo State All-Progressives Congress (APC), over who will fly the party’s flag as governorship candidate. His main opponent was Senator Hope Uzodinma. The tussle was the type in which two contenders exhaust and knock themselves out. The two contenders headed to the election, each claiming to be the rightful candidate of the APC in Imo State. Eventually though, Nwosu was legally recognized as the party’s candidate. In the thick of the tussle for ticket in APC, Nwosu had gone ahead to also secure for himself the ticket of another party, Action Alliance, just in case. He therefore, went into the governorship election in Imo State in 2019 with the ticket of two political parties in his pocket.
At the end of the election, Emeka Ihedioha of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) was declared winner. He subsequently assumed office. Late in the same 2019, in the course of the protracted litigation over the governorship election in Imo State, the Supreme Court established that Uche Nwosu had flown the flag of two parties, Action Alliance (AA) and All progressives Congress (APC) at the March 9 2019 governorship election. The apex court disqualified him. The Court also disqualified AA and APC from being eligible to be part of the March 9 2019 governorship election in Imo State. In other words, the two parties that sponsored Nwosu, were deemed not to have fielded candidates.
In disqualifying the two parties that sponsored Nwosu for the same election, the apex court said it found it incongruent that two parties will field one person as candidate for a particular election. The court also declared that “a political party is not capable of sponsoring two candidates for the same office in the same election”. Unfortunately for it, APC had earlier confirmed Nwosu to be its approved governorship candidate for the 2019 governorship election in Imo State.
Fast forward by one month. In January 2020, in a judgment that still leaves many dazed and wonderings, the Supreme Court, the same Supreme Court, sprang in Abuja and ruled in one of the many cases on the 2019 governorship election in Imo State, that Senator Hope Uzodinma governor was the rightly elected governor of the same Imo State, on the platform of the same APC. The court directed INEC to issue a certificate of Return to Uzodinma, which it promptly did. Thus ended Ihedioha’s tenure as governor, even before it fully started.
So may questions and explanations have been thrown up by various persons concerning the Supreme court ruling that coronated Uzodinma governor. All those analyses and questions, have since lapsed into irrelevance. The only explanation that trumped every other conjecture on the political puzzle, is that Muhammadu Buhari was the president at that point in time and Ibrahim Tanko Muhammad was Chief Justice. With those entities, anything was possible.
Well, Uzodinma settled down as governor and is almost at the end of his first tenure. While that was going on, the PDP and the All-Progressives Party (APP) approached the Supreme Court, with a deft application. Since the Supreme Court had on December 2019 disqualified the APC from contesting the governorship election, the two parties applied to the apex court to go on and enforce its judgment?
That was the prayer of the two applicants, which application the Supreme Court now says it will sit on, come October 31 2023.
Why should it take the Supreme Court three years to come around to make a decision on whether to enforce its judgement or not? The Supreme court is a busy institution and most times, it does not have a full complement of its judges. Even at that, there can be no justification for what it has done on this matter. The tardiness has not helped Imo state, at all, nor has it helped the judiciary.
Of course, the Supreme Court is technically competent (no pun intended) to resolve such contradictions as it threw up in Imo State. Many are waiting to see what the court will do about this matter. Having given a firm, indeed, stern notice, that it will sit on the matter, the Court will further diminish itself if it fails to sit on it, after all. If it does sit, after all, how it navigates its two rulings, which may include possibly directing enforcement of the closure of the gate of a barn after the goat has bolted, will further enrich the administration of justice in Nigeria. The apex court has, for sure, not helped itself in recent time.
The open-ended political ping pong scenario in Imo state, with a bizarre prospect of Ihedioha hands over to Uzodinma who hands over to Ihedioha…. further exposes the apex court to disrespect. Whichever way it goes, the Supreme Court has not been fair to Imo State, on this matter. All the same, it has a duty to bring the 2019 governorship election in the state to an end.