 Published
April 27th, 2010
"The missing link is that our electoral law says at the end
of voting, elections results must be announced at the
polling unit. Most of the polling units handle not more than
500 voters, there are very few above that and everybody
contesting election is supposed to have an agent at every
polling unit.
"We also have observers and our law says at the end of the
election, the result must be declared in each of these
units, but it is always a problem declaring the result at
the unit level because of conflicts. In most cases they take
the results, at the end of the voting to the local
government headquarters for collation and it is in that
process that people think there are wrong-doings.
"That has been the problem in Nigeria and that is why we
insist that if you cannot declare the results at that
polling unit, we cancel it, all results must be declared at
the polling unit and that is what happened in Anambra and
Edo."
“If people have a perception that a body cannot do what is
right, even if they do what is right, people find it
difficult to believe. The story of INEC comes with the
feeling that it cannot conduct credible elections in
Nigeria."
"I am convinced that the present INEC can conduct free and
credible elections.” ---Ag
President Goodluck Jonathan
In theory,
democracy is the rule of the majority. In practice, however,
it’s actually the rule of the minority by the minority and
for the minority!
Many would
be taken aback by this radical characterization of democracy
having been conned all along to a contrary definition by the
guardians of democracy. But far from it being a government
of the people by the people and for the people, democracy is
an organized, systemic fraud carefully crafted in the secret
chambers of its priesthood and deployed by minority elites
to legitimize their rule over the majority. And this they
achieve by actually using the majority to periodically
service the system through their votes. The periodic
involvement and participation of the masses of the people
during elections is meant to create the illusion of their
empowerment and to perpetuate the notion that the government
owes its existence to them. It sure feels good to think that
a government exists at your mercy, doesn’t it? But it is
nothing more than psychological conditioning and they’re
prepared to go to great lengths to perpetuate that fraud.
That is why politicians spend huge amounts of money to plead
with the people to come out and vote for them on their own
terms in order to legitimize their rule. But voting is no
more than rubber-stamping the choices already made by the
elites.
For all its
appeal to the people, democracy is an elite game in which
the masses are a little more than political fodders or, if
you like, mere statistical objects. Therefore, the notion of
people empowerment and sovereignty of the electorate usually
touted by the high priests of democracy is a smokescreen
designed to massage the fragile egos of the electorate and
lull them into a false sense of importance and political
empowerment. The notion of people’s political empowerment
and sovereignty is only skin deep and superficial at best,
existing more in the world of fantasia than in reality.
The minority
elites will always have, not only their say, but their way
as well, and lord it over the majority. And that is largely
due to the fact that they alone understand the infinite
complexity of the system which they created in the first
place and manipulate to their advantage using the people.
And the masses are too caught up in their daily existential
grind that they barely have the time to study the system and
comprehend its complexities. In fact, it would take a
four-year degree program to understand modern day electoral,
representative democracy in all its ramifications. Every now
and then the people are herded to the polls to cast their
votes on complex social, economic and political issues they
barely understand. The electorate is thus used as guinea
pigs in the laboratories of politics. And parliamentary
representation is used to reinforce this paradigm to
complete the systematized mass deception.
And that’s
why it matters little whether or not people come out to
vote—a winner must emerge nonetheless even with a single or
few vote(s). Yes a single or few vote(s) can win an election
and put a candidate in the governor’s lodge of a state or
the presidential mansion of a nation as the case may be. We
just witnessed such scenario play itself out in the Anambra
state election where an incumbent governor was returned to
office with total vote count of mere 97,000 in a densely
populated state as Anambra, with millions of potential
voters who didn’t bother to show up at the polls, or if they
did, were summarily disenfranchised altogether. What
difference would it have made anyway? Pretty little! Only a
fraction of that number put Governor Peter Obi back in power
in the name of the entire state population. It doesn’t
matter. Thus by some curious alchemy, a distinct minority
rule is instantly transformed into majority rule. That is
democracy in action! And as in Anambra state so was it in
the US in 2000. GW Bush defeated Al-Gore with just about 500
votes in the state of Florida out of a population of nearly
300 million Americans. It doesn’t matter. Those 500 votes
were enough to put him in the White House on behalf of
hundreds of millions of Americans majority of whom actually
voted for Al-Gore on the record! That’s right. Al-Gore had
the popular majority votes, but by the quaint, outmoded
system of Electoral College in the US presidential election,
a loser was transformed into a winner and the winner became
the loser. That too is democracy in action!
Ambush
And it gets
even more interesting: A vocal minority with deep pockets
brandishing a combination of tools consisting of media
monopoly, threats and intimidation could easily substitute
public interests with its own private interests by
manipulating public opinion and forcing the government to do
its bidding in the name of the majority. And that’s reason
why, for instance, lobbyists and special interests groups in
the United States spend billions of dollars in Capitol Hill
lobbying lawmakers and media campaigns to hijack democracy
and frame debates on issues to their advantage. The lobbying
industry in the United States is one of the biggest
multi-billion dollar industries in the nation with thousands
of firms and hundreds of thousands of employers and
operatives—all dedicated to swaying governmental policies
and legislations their own way leaving the ordinary voter in
the lurch and take whatever is thrown at him/her. That is
the systemic fraud dressed up as “the government of the
people by the people and for the people!” ala, President
Abraham Lincoln.
Yes, few
elites make democracy work for them by corrupt means in the
name of the notoriously indifferent, ignorant, pliant and
silent majority. Nigerian democracy, though young, is by no
means immune to these inherent vulnerabilities as a vocal
few with the right combination of media monopoly, threats,
and intimidation can, and has in fact, been hijacking issues
and framing them to suit their selfish ends. When for
instance, the NLC and ASSU threatened to shut the country
down with protests and demonstrations if the current
chairman of INEC is reappointed for a second term, they’re
hijacking our democracy to serve their own political
interests by purporting to represent the silent majority who
did not vote them into office in the first place. I read the
NLC president, Mr. Omar mouthing the claim that the
“Nigerian people have rejected” Iwu and had mandated it to
“shut down” the nation if Iwu was reappointed at the
expiration of his term in June.
The last
time I checked only NLC members voted Omar into office the
same way NBA members voted their president into office and
the same way every other professional body or trade union
organization voted its leader into office and Nigerians in
general had nothing to do with his position and therefore
does not represent them. Yet he came out purporting to have
been “mandated” by Nigerians to demand the removal of Iwu.
Suppose the president of another organization comes out
purporting to have been “mandated” by Nigerians to demand
the retention of Iwu, what then happens to Omar’s purported
mandate?
Never mind,
that is part of the fraud called democracy where demagogues
ride on the back of the people to prosecute their private
agenda and leave them in the lurch afterwards. Pray, how do
you purport to represent a people who did not ask you to
represent them? How do you purport to act on behalf of a
people who did not ask you to act on their behalf in the
first place? It’s like a counsel jumping up before a judge
in a courtroom purporting to represent a client in a matter
before the court whose brief he did not get in the first
place. Such a counsel is nothing but an impostor and the
criminal laws of our nation have a place for his likes. It
shouldn’t be any less so in our public affairs for those who
purport to act on behalf of the people illegally without
their consent. They’re political marauders seeking political
advantages by false pretences. And you know what gave him
away? He and his band of detractors would never mention
Tinubu’s State Independent Electoral Commission (SIEC) in
Lagos state, which conducted local government elections
under his very nose that returned all the AC chairmen to
power with no other party winning even a council’s seat!
Omar sees and hears no evil in Tinubu’s Lagos!
The Real
Question
It’s hardly
news that Nigeria suffers from chronic electoral maladies
that need to be fixed, and fixed now before our young
democracy is derailed yet again. That is the urgent task at
hand. But why should the question be whether Iwu should be
re-appointed for a second term or not instead of the
question as to why and how did our electoral system come to
be so prone to malfunction and easy manipulation by
political desperadoes in every election since the nation
attained her independence, and what should be done to fix it
permanently? Put another way, why is the focus on Iwu rather
than on electoral reform? Except someone wants to equate
Maurice Iwu with Nigeria’s electoral system I’m at a loss to
see the connection. A wrong question cannot produce a right
answer. Or can it?
Nigeria has
been asking the wrong question all along and its answer has
always been the removal of INEC personnel after each and
every election. And because it is the wrong answer, the
problem endures allowing the malignant tumor to spread
unchallenged to other otherwise healthy organs of our body
politic. Every physician would tell you that a wrong
diagnosis for a terminal disease is actually a prescription
for death. This time around Nigeria must be prepared to ask
the right question and get it right. And that means she must
not allow herself to be distracted or intimidated by special
interests bent on imposing the same old solution on her that
has never and will never work. A correct diagnosis does not
come cheap nor does it deal with superficial symptoms
either. By always taking the path of least resistance in
firing INEC heads, Nigeria has in fact been merely kicking
the can along the road rather than permanently addressing
the problem.
What can we
do to fix our recurrent electoral malfunction? That’s the
question that ought to engage the minds of serious
individuals who genuinely seek to fix the system rather than
taking cheap shots at one man. The notion that once Iwu is
removed all our electoral woes would vanish into thin air or
even minimized at all, is pathetic. It’s the product of
shallow, unthinking minds. With due respect to the apostles
of the Iwu-Must-Go gospel, voodoo thinking is not going to
fix our electoral problems. Only well thought out reforms
will cut it. And unless I’m missing something somewhere,
nowhere in the entire Justice Uwais Panel recommendations
was it stated that the removal of Iwu is a condition
precedent for free and fair elections in Nigeria. The
eminent panelists knew better than to reduce the problems to
individuals.
Systemic
Failures
And come to
think of it, how possible is it for an endemically corrupt
nation like Nigeria to conduct a credible election in all
the states of the federation and Abuja, and the presidency
in one fell swoop? That is too much of a job for a single
agency in a country with chronic infrastructural
deficiencies and bristling with politicians with private
mini-armies. Nigeria lacks the resources to take it all in
one fell swoop. Not even the Americans with millennial
experience in democracy and advanced infrastructures conduct
elections into state and national offices in one fell swoop.
Nigeria has got to do a fundamental rethink and consider
switching to staggered elections over several years not over
days or weeks.
Nigeria is
experiencing monumental systemic failures not necessarily
personnel failures. And systemic failures require robust
systemic overhaul. The Americans did that after the 2000
Bush/Gore election fiasco rather than making scapegoats of
electoral umpires. That is how a responsible and thoughtful
nation reacts to systemic failures not by fire brigade
methods. And that’s a position that is in accord with
commonsense and rational thinking that many Nigerians are
gradually coming to grips with. It’s no surprise, therefore,
that there has of late been a remarkable groundswell of
public support for Maurice Iwu, which had been missing from
the table all along. And this is coming from individuals,
groups and organizations (both home and abroad), who have
made the decision that it is time to raise their voices and
be heard loud and clear regarding the state of affairs of
our nation. Never again would they remain silent and allow
others to hijack their mandates and speak in their names
behind them.
The anti-Iwu
campaign had generated so much heat in the polity that the
Ag President had to weigh in himself to dispel the notion
that INEC cannot be entrusted with the forthcoming elections
in 2011. The line,
"I am
convinced that the present INEC can conduct free and
credible elections,” sounds to me as a ringing endorsement
of Iwu and INEC for the forthcoming elections.
This is the
biggest endorsement that Iwu and his supporters can get from
anywhere in the world. But it doesn’t in anyway belittle the
emerging groundswell of public support for Iwu from ordinary
Nigerians. If anything, Jonathan’s endorsement draws its
strength and lifelines from the show of support demonstrated
by ordinary Nigerians who seem to understand the issues
involved better than the professional imposters and
agitators. Jonathan’s declaration is a shot in their arms.
If democracy
is a participatory system of government that it is where
every citizen has a say in the conduct of our national
affairs, this should be a welcome development. That the
citizens of our great nation are weighing in on a matter
that touches their lives in a fundamental way cannot but be
welcome. The matter of electoral integrity of our democratic
system is so germane to the welfare and wellbeing of our
people that it should not be left to a vocal few to
determine for the rest of us the way to go, because every
citizen is entitled to one vote and one vote only, and no
more. Every vote counts and every voice must count too. Yet
too often we find that the voices of a vocal minority has
been dominating the scene and drowning out every other voice
and this has erroneously been taken to represent the
majority opinion. In other words, the silence of the
majority has been taken as acquiescence. That is the myth
and misrepresentation that these individuals, groups and
organizations now rising up in defense of Iwu seek to
destroy—that their silence should and must not be taken as
acquiescence in the virulent Iwu-Must-Go campaign. They’ve
shown by their actions that they have no part whatsoever in
the misguided campaign and have rejected out of hand any
notion that Iwu is responsible for our electoral maladies.
And in so doing they’ve demonstrated a superior and more
sophisticated understanding of the issues at stake.
Pushback
Yet the
Jonathan endorsement has a special place because of the
weight it carries. Folks, I must confess that the clear and
pointed presidential absolution of Iwu and INEC made my day!
That was all I had been waiting for in the past four years
since 2007, for an official statement of absolution of the
chairman of INEC concerning the outcomes of the 2007 general
elections even amid the din of the anti-Iwu lynch mob and
their press collaborators. And who better to deliver it than
the Ag President Jonathan, himself? The presidential
endorsement of Iwu sends a clear message to the detractors
that official actions will not be predicated on perceptions
and the loud shrieks of lynch mobs in our midst but on
factual and rational basis. That is how a respected nation
conducts business not on hysteria.
This
declaration is, therefore, not only a direct refutation of
the accusations leveled against Iwu by his detractors but a
serious rebuke of those who are baying for Iwu’s blood to
back off. It has completely vindicated many of us who have
been at the vanguard of defending INEC and its helmsman all
along. At a personal level, it feels good to be vindicated
for standing up for the truth when everyone else was ducking
for cover. How I wish many who are now clamoring for Iwu’s
retention at this rather late hour had joined me back then
to defend Iwu. If they had done so the narrative would have
changed and the damage done to Iwu and INEC might have been
mitigated.
When good
people keep silent evil takes hold and that’s the case with
Iwu. A public officer who is not in a position to respond in
kind to the barrage of clearly sponsored, vitriolic media
attacks pointedly directed at him should be able to count on
people of goodwill to rise up to his defense to counter his
vicious attackers and defend our institutions. That’s what I
had set out to do from the outset even though I couldn’t
tell Iwu from Adam. It made no difference to me. He had to
be defended on principle and I wasn’t going to allow lazy
candidates who refused to sell their programs to the
electorate during the campaigns turn around to blame their
defeats on Iwu and INEC. I hold that truth is a divine
element. It’s like a gourd on the sea that cannot be diced,
twisted, or suppressed forever. The gourd will always pop
out from the deep and take its rightful place on top of the
sea!
Judged
against the backdrop of previous transitions and regardless
of any opinions to the contrary peddled by naysayers, the
2007 transition was a watershed in the annals of Nigerian
transitions deserving of national celebration, its
imperfections notwithstanding. It matters not if bad
electoral losers uncharitably brand it “the worst transition
ever!” so long as the relevant institutions have validated
the transition as credible and to a lesser extent, the
international community has likewise accepted its outcomes.
Whether we like it or not Nigeria is now an established
democracy with eleven unbroken years and still going strong.
And her democracy doesn’t have to be perfect to claim that
title because none is. And it makes no difference either
whether democracy has achieved its promise of delivering its
dividends to the people. That is a different matter
altogether that can be addressed at local, state, and
federal levels. Even so we know for a fact that there are
individual states that have made a difference in this
democratic dispensation, including Tinubu’s Lagos state. The
other missing pieces will fall into place as it matures
because democracy is not a finished product but a maturing
process with no end to its maturity and its perfection.
When a
nation achieves a milestone as it did in 2007, it shouldn’t
fight shy of according it due recognition and get muddied up
with the negative agenda of bad losers bent on elevating the
imperfections of the elections into an unwarranted national
distraction. Were the elections perfect? I’ll be the first
to say no, they weren’t and I do not know of “perfect”
elections anywhere in the globe. Do we as a nation need to
fix the several flaws discovered during and after the
elections? Yes, of course and that’s what INEC and the
government are about, and we’ve seen the early results of
those efforts in Edo, Anambra, and Abuja elections. Must we
then condemn wholesale the entire elections and their
results because of certain irregularities? Never, and I
repeat, never! That might be losers’ past time but not the
nation’s. That would be tantamount to throwing away the baby
with the bath water.
If we
condemn the entire elections, what happens to those whose
elections were free and fair and upheld as such by the
judiciary? What happens to their electoral mandates?
Wouldn’t it be unfair to tar their deserved victories with
charcoal? And whose victories do we condemn and whose do we
commend? Is it AC, ANPP, PPA, PDP, or APGA’s victories that
we should commend or condemn? It gets a whole lot trickier
if we go down that road because the results might not be
pretty for the naysayers. Wholesale condemnation of
elections is like a person suffering from a finger infection
committing suicide because the finger infection has brought
shame to his body! Only a certified lunatic would resort to
such a drastic action, and the last time I checked Nigeria
is not a nation of lunatics even though we may have our own
issues like every other nation on earth. But we must not
allow electoral losers to goad us into committing acts of
lunacy.
Would the
nation condemn wholesale the outcome of general elections in
which only two governorships, out of thirty six, and a
handful of parliamentary results were upturned by the courts
and tribunals leaving the rest, including the presidential
validated? I don’t think so, because the nation cannot cut
its nose to spite her face. Going by the loud cries about
electoral malpractices alleged by the defeated candidates
during the elections one would have thought that they would
easily overturn the elections of majority of the governors
and the president. But alas, they couldn’t prove their cases
in court except in two cases of Edo and Ondo states. Given
this abysmal failures and unflattering reality therefore, it
was time for the Federal Government to come out with an
authoritative declaration about the validity of the results
of the 2007 general elections in order to lay the ghost of
the elections permanently to rest. What Jonathan did in
passing a presidential vote of confidence on INEC is
therefore a step in the right direction. It has served to
rehabilitate the man and restore his honor and integrity
both of which had suffered untold harm in the hands of those
laboring under the yoke of BLS.
The Crucifix
Yet I’m not
so naïve as to think that the presidential endorsement of
Iwu would automatically save his job. That may not have been
its intendment. On the contrary it might actually have been
designed to provide a soft landing for Iwu. This is election
time and the Ag President might be compelled by other
weighty political considerations to quietly ease out the
INEC chairman and some of his subordinate commissioners in
the pending review promised by the Ag President. He has, in
fact, dropped the hint to that effect while not being
specific. While I have campaigned and will continue to
vigorously campaign for the retention of Iwu for a second
term for obvious reasons, not the least of which is his
wealth of experience and reform agenda, which as has been
acknowledged by Jonathan himself, has produced positive
results in Edo, Anambra and Abuja elections under his watch,
pragmatic political calculations and the need for fresh
blood might work against Iwu’s retention. Sometimes in
politics the best is not always good enough to meet
political exigencies of the times. In fact, more often than
not, the best is usually sacrificed for the second or third
best. That’s just the name of the game. And that’s why more
often than not voters wind up putting second or third rate
candidates in office only to regret their choices down the
road. For instance, didn’t Americans choose GW Bush over
Al-Gore in 2000 and re-elected him over John Kerry in 2004?
And didn’t they regret having Bush at the White House and
couldn’t wait to throw him out? And didn’t Anambra voters
just re-elect Peter Obi over world renowned economist and
former CBN Governo, Professor Charles Solubo, credited with
revolutionizing Nigeria’s banking industry, which his
second- rate replacement by vindictive President Yar’Adua,
is currently destroying? That’s political realism. It’s a
zero sum game that’s full of cold political calculations but
oftentimes devoid of rationality. Jonathan has put his
finger right on its head: it’s all about perceptions and in
politics perceptions could be stronger than realities.
And so might
it be with Iwu. In that eventuality, he will no doubt be
missed. However, he should take consolation in the fact that
his selfless service to his fatherland has not gone
unnoticed by his fellow citizens who have come out
voluntarily to openly demonstrate their support for him. And
he should hold his head high with the clear successes
recorded in the last three elections, which have been duly
acknowledged at the highest quarters of national leadership.
But make no
mistake about this: The demonization of our electoral
umpires will not end with Iwu whether or not he’s eventually
replaced. The fate that befell Iwu equally befell all of his
predecessors-office, namely, Abel Guobadia, Dagogo Jack,
Henry Nwosu, Ovie Whisky, Eme Awa, all the way back to the
First Republic. And the fate that befell Iwu will equally
befall whosoever chooses to replace him because no electoral
reform will reform the Bad-Loser-Syndrome (BLS) in Nigeria.
The pertinent question to be raised, however, is this: Has
the removal from office of all the previous INEC chairmen
improved our electoral outings in subsequent elections? The
answer is a resounding no. And if we have not achieved
anything with merely tinkering with INEC personnel, what
makes us think that mere removal of Iwu would fix our
electoral problems this time around? Only a dumb people do
the same thing over and over again and expect different
results. It’s time to think smarter and deeper about our
problem as a people that is affecting institutional
performance. The problem is not so much about people in
office as it is about people out of office. Nigerian public
officials are largely corrupt and ineffective because
Nigerians want and demand short cuts to getting whatever it
is they want and proceed to induce public officials with
financial gratifications to do their biddings, which has
since become a culture in our public life. When they get
government contracts, they execute them poorly and bribe
their way through to get them certified. Our motorists
deliberately flout traffic laws and break every rule in the
books hoping to bribe their way through at the police check
points. Nigerian parents do all in their powers to bribe
university officials to obtain admissions for their children
and wards through the back door. Our students in turn go to
school and refuse to learn hoping to get examination ‘expos’
and pass exams on the cheap. And our politicians refuse to
sell themselves to the electorate hoping to get some INEC
staffers to doctor electoral results and the police to look
the other way while they’re perpetrating electoral crimes.
You would be surprised that in Nigeria electoral candidates
of all parties not just the ruling parties plan more on
rigging their way to power than on actually campaigning and
selling their programs for the people’s votes. And when
they’re out rigged all hell is let loose and INEC becomes
their poster child for condemning the results of the
elections.
It’s all
about we as a people and the values we stand for and no one
should single out Maurice Iwu to atone for our national
sins. It takes two to tangle and we cannot absolve the
giver of bribes and hang the taker alone. That is not in our
laws and no one should reinvent the wheel and rewrite our
laws through the back door. If INEC failed, it was Nigeria
as whole that failed as a nation, including, I might add,
the hypocritical master riggers who were themselves
prominent PDP operatives only awhile ago now howling at Iwu
from rooftops while posing as angels. They are Nigeria’s
problem, not Iwu, and it is our job to expose them for who
and what they are—wolves in sheep clothing. It should not
come to the reader as a surprise, therefore, that many of
the same people are finding their ways back to the PDP after
condemning the party for years. You could say, they’re going
back home to their natural environment and all the noise
about rigging will evaporate into thin air once they settle
into their usual roles in the ruling party.
Appeal
Ag President
Jonathan has, by the statement credited to him above,
touched on the fundamental problem of the psychological
orientation of Nigerian politicians. Jonathan
psycho-analysis reveals that for the most part rigging
exists essentially in the minds of bad losers and it is not
altogether real, at least not to the extent the bad losers
have made it out to be. At the risk of repetition, I urge
the reader to read Jonathan again:
“If
people have a perception that a body cannot do what is
right, even if they do what is right, people find it
difficult to believe. The story of INEC comes with the
feeling that it cannot conduct credible elections in
Nigeria.”
If you
didn’t know it, that statement is psycho-analytic. Jonathan
has laid bare the problem with the Nigerian people. The
question then is who are the people that “have a perception
that a body cannot do what’s right”? The answer is of
course, bad electoral losers and their hordes of supporters
which include sections of the Nigerian press. That being the
case one would strongly urge the Ag President to do what’s
right by not sacrificing a good man to please those who see
nothing good in the system. Such a move would be
counterproductive and injurious to our national aspirations.
We cannot continue to sacrifice our best on the altar of
political expediencies. By virtue of his professional
accomplishments and laurels garnered at home and abroad, Iwu
is, undoubtedly, one of Nigeria’s best brains and very few
can measure up to his professional accomplishments in his
field of pharmacology. Our nation must be proud of her
intellectual and professional assets and eschew anything
that would bring them to public ridicule save for proven
cases of wrongdoings. And Jonathan, who is on the verge of
undoing the harm done to our nation by President Yar’Adua in
removing star performers like Ribadu and el-Rufai and
haunting them in exile cannot be seen to perpetuate the same
evil on our nation.
Sometimes a
leader has to show the way and that’s why he’s a leader in
the first place. Jonathan has demonstrated courage by his
statement on INEC. However, we don’t know if it was a
political statement or a genuinely felt conviction. If he’s
truly “convinced
that the present INEC can conduct free and credible
elections,” it is time to act out his conviction, because
those words carry the full weight and authority of the
presidency and could not have been uttered just for the fun
of it or as a mere political ploy to hoodwink some people
into a false sense of security.
Having made
a solemn pledge to do away with business-as-usual of his
boss, Jonathan must send a clear message that our best
performers in office will no longer be sacrificed on the
altar of political expediency to satisfy the morbid cravings
of the vocal few. A leader must not be seen to contradict
himself by passing a vote of confidence on a public official
one day and then turn around to crucify him the next day.
What message does that send to Nigerians and the
international community? Approbating and reprobating at the
same time is not a desirable attribute of leadership.
Final
Remarks
Jonathan
owes his previous and present positions to the results of
the presidential elections, which have been upheld by the
two highest courts in the land. That is both factual and
legal vindication of Iwu and INEC. Our government must
demonstrate respect for our judicial institutions by
respecting their verdicts. That is the real meaning of the
rule of law. In the absence of evidence to the contrary, it
must be accepted as fact that the 2007 elections were on the
whole credible and valid as held by the courts. Perceptions
of electoral irregularities cannot supplant or override that
reality. Put another way, the fate of public officers can
never be based on perceptions of wrongdoing but on solid,
clearly verifiable grounds otherwise good public servants
would be holding offices at the mercy of lynch mobs preying
on innocent victims who cannot fight back in the press.
Jonathan
would be shooting himself in the foot if he gives credence
to the notion peddled by electoral losers that his own
election was rigged and therefore undeserving of the office
he now occupies. That is the clear message Iwu’s removal
will send to Nigerians and the international community. Is
Jonathan prepared to go that route and cast doubts on his
electoral legitimacy, which has been resolved by the highest
court in the land just to curry fleeting public favor? If
he’s prepared to go so far, then he and President Yar’Adua
might as well vacate their offices and go with Iwu. What is
good for the goose should equally be good for the gander and
vice versa. It would be unconscionable for Yar’Adua and
Jonathan to continue to enjoy the fruits of the elections
while throwing Iwu to the sharks as did Pontius Pilate, to
be crucified, because fair is square.
God Bless
our Nation.
Next: The
Trial of Maurice Iwu! Watch out. You won’t want to miss it!
Franklin
Otorofani, Esq. writes from the United States
Contact:
mudiagaone@yahoo.com |
