Since APC came into power in May, virtually all the judgments given by the election petition tribunals have been against PDP. The governorship poll in Rivers State was annulled by the election tribunal and the Court of Appeal upheld this decision on Wednesday. Chief Nyesom Wike, the governor of the state, has vowed to pursue his case up to the Supreme Court to get justice, but his chances are not bright.
The latest PDP state to lose at the election petition and the Appeal Court is Akwa Ibom. Governor Udom Emmanuel is equally heading to the Supreme Court to seek justice. Several PDP federal lawmakers, notably former Senate President David Mark, have also lost their cases at the tribunals. The election in Bayelsa was declared inconclusive and the fate of the PDP governor is uncertain.
The Justice Musa Danladi Abubakar-led tribunal ruled that Ishaku was not properly nominated as PDP’s governorship candidate, pointing out that the party did not conduct its primary in Jalingo, the state capital. The tribunal upheld the testimony of the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, Head of Election Monitoring that the commission was not aware of any primary conducted by the PDP in line with the provision of the Electoral Act which produced Ishaku as the party’s candidate.It is against this background and other developments that many were very critical of the November 7 judgment of the Taraba Election Petition Tribunal annulling the election of Ishaku and ordering that Hajia Aisha Alhassan, the candidate of the APC, should be sworn-in on the grounds that Ishaku was not properly nominated by the PDP in the governorship primary. Besides Taraba, the only other state still in the hands of the PDP in the 18 northern states is Gombe. The others are effectively APC – controlled.
According to the tribunal, the defence by the PDP that the primary was shifted to Abuja because of security challenges in the state was untenable. The tribunal Chairman said Ishaku was not validly nominated as the PDP candidate and, as such, was not a candidate, ab initio, in the April 11 governorship election in Taraba. It was the first time the election of a governor would be cancelled on the doctrine of a “wasted vote” based on a challenge by a petitioner who didn’t contest the primary along the same party line.
There have been mixed reactions as the Taraba people who favoured Ishaku in the election expressed concern on the judgment of the tribunal. As expected, the judgment gave vent to Alhassan’s renewed battle to unseat Ishaku. She immediately reactivated her campaign with a new slogan: Mandate. And the governor said: “I have appealed against the election tribunal judgment, and I am also appealing to all the citizens in my state to be calm because I still have a lot of confidence in the judiciary, and the Appeal Court will do what is correct and right.”
Ishaku polled a total of 369,318 votes while Alhassan polled 275,987 in the first and second elections. Now, at the appellate court, Ishaku and his party have filed an appeal asking the court to reverse the decision of the tribunal that upturned the victory of the governor. In the appeal by the PDP, which listed Alhassan, APC and INEC as respondents in that order, the appellate court will look at 17 grounds of appeal to make its decision.
Fresh election option
It is not for nothing that the Taraba Election Petitions Tribunal judgment is generating adverse reaction. The spurious reason adduced by the tribunal reason for nullying the governor’s election, in the estimation of many analysts, is an indication that the APC-led Federal Government is determined to take all PDP states, and put Nigeria on the path of a one-party nation. Chief Mike Ozekhome (SAN), for instance, lent credence to this thinking when he said the tribunal should have ordered a fresh election in the state instead of ruling that the APC candidate in the April 11 election (Alhassan) should be sworn-in as governor.
“Section 140 Subsection 2 of the Electoral Act says that where a tribunal believes that a person was not qualified to be elected into the governorship office of a state or for massive irregularities, it shall not declare the person with the second highest number of votes to be returned to the position, but shall order a fresh election,” Ozekhome said. He said that the election tribunal committed a grave error in asking that the APC candidate be sworn-in, expressing confidence that the “error” would be rectified by the Court of Appeal.
Speaking on the constitu-tionality of the verdict, Ozekhome said: “The entire judgement returning Senator Aisha Alhassan as the governor in place of Darius Dickson Ishaku is a monumental shame, a complete ruse and a total disaster bereft of any research or intellectual depth. To be sure, it is true that Section 87 (1) of the Electoral Act, 2010, as amended, provides that a political party seeking to nominate a candidate to represent it at an election must hold primaries. But, by virtue of Section 87 (9), anyone who complains that any of the provisions relating to nomination or selection of a candidate by a political party has not been complied with shall apply to the Federal High Court or the High Court of a state for redress. This, therefore, makes Darius’ alleged non qualification to contest the election, not being the product of any political party, in the absence of a primary, to be a pre-election matter.
Supporting this assertion is Shuaib Alaran, who said: “I have not had the opportunity of reading the tribunal’s judgment in full, but from the media reports, I think I will disagree with the consequential order of the tribunal that since the sitting governor was not validly nominated by his party, the candidate who scored the second highest votes becomes the winner of the election. To my mind, I think the appropriate order of the tribunal should have been the one calling for a fresh election with the exclusion of the PDP. My reliance is on Section 140(2) and (3). By virtue of those provisions, where the tribunal finds that a candidate who won in an election was not validly nominated by his party, the proper order is to direct the INEC to conduct a fresh election”.“Even if we agree that such matter can be taken up as a post election matter at the tribunal, going by conflicting decisions of appellate courts, how can one excuse the final order made by the tribunal to the effect that the certificate of return be retrieved from Ishaku and given to Aishat who should be sworn in immediately?”
Contradictions
Ozekhome and Alaran have a soul mate in another lawyer, Kenneth Agba, who faulted the tribunal’s voiding of Ishaku’s election, not because he (governor) did not win majority of votes cast at the polls; not because of irregularities during the election, but because he was properly nominated by his party, the PDP.
“The tribunal’s ruling is just one of the many contradictions, inconsistencies and double standards that have characterized the APC-led administration since it came into existence, and even exposed its hypocrisy. It is coming not quite long after the Benue Election Petitions Tribunal upheld the election of Samuel Ortom of the APC as governor, overlooking the same reason for which Ishaku’s election has been annulled. Ortom was a member of the PDP and actually participated in the party’s primary, which he lost to Terhemen Tarzoor. While he was slugging it out in the PDP, Senator George Akume frustrated all efforts to conduct the APC primary, dangling the governorship ticket before Ortom, if only he would defect from PDP”, Agba stated.
“Ortom defected when he could not secure the PDP ticket. When the APC gathered all the aspirants on its platform in Abuja and asked them to elect a candidate from among themselves, Emmanuel Jime, a former member of the House of Representatives, emerged the consensus candidate. But with the intervention of party personalities, the party fielded Ortom, not Jime.
“The cases in Taraba and Benue share some similarities, but quite strangely, different endings. The PDP in Taraba said it moved its primary to Abuja, away from Jalingo, the state capital, for security reasons (the same reason the tribunal gave for moving its sitting from the state to Abuja). “The APC in Benue chose the federal capital, not Markudi, the state capital, for a meeting of aspirants to choose its candidate, for no justifiable reason. If Ishaku’s election cannot stand because he was not properly nominated by his party, the PDP, then Nigerians need to be told why Ortom’s election was upheld, even when he was not properly nominated by the APC. There must certainly be a reason why the same law applies differently, depending on who is at the receiving end or, more succinctly put, the party that is benefiting from it and the one that is losing. The ruling of the Taraba election tribunal must be viewed against the background of the now familiar proclivity by the opposition to use the courts to achieve, through the back door, what it cannot achieve through the ballot box”.
Suspicion
Meanwhile, another school of thought believes the main legal argument the tribunal judges stood on to pass such a weighty judgment is curious and tenuous. To those in this school, INEC did not complain that Ishaku was not validly nominated. The PDP did not complain that someone had imposed Ishaku on the party. No aggrieved member of the PDP had gone to court complaining that he had been robbed of victory in the primary. “It was the petitioner who had complained that her opponent was not validly nominated. And from decided cases, outright victory could not have been awarded to her if it was true that her opponent was not fit to be a candidate of his party,” a public affairs analyst, Idang Alibi, who spoke the minds of those in this school, said.
The issue
The issue, as it were, is not about the PDP losing power in Taraba or in any other state in Nigeria for that matter. It is all about our country and the sustenance of democracy. Should Nigeria slide into a one-party state and the opposition killed, we all know the consequence – dictatorship – that we all fought against under military regime and Obasanjo civilian government. Having put in the public domain the APC agenda to kill the opposition, it is left to Nigerians to accept or rise up to fight.
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