And Destiny Beckons...
Alex Otti. This is the name of the man that will be governor of Abia State. That was what the Court of Appeal said. And that was why the former banker will surely keep a date with destiny. Justice Oyebisi Omoleye, who led the five-man panel, said that the candidate of the All Progressives Grand Alliance, APGA, scored 164, 444 valid votes to defeat Okezie Ikpeazu of the People’s Democratic Party, PDP, who scored 114, 444 votes.
The journey has been tortuous and at times, it seemed the whole thing would end up as a waste of time and resources. But he was dogged in his pursuit and determined in his drive to recover a mandate he rightly believed was stolen from him. And if the trend of what has been happening in other cases is anything to go by, Otti is set to fulfill his destiny of becoming the governor of Abia State.
The journey to the Appeal Court judgment started almost nine months ago, during the election of April 11 last year and the supplementary election of two weeks later, April 25, when against every rule in the books, the Returning Officer cancelled results of elections in three local governments of Obingwa, Osisioma Ngwa and Isiala Ngwa. The implication of this was that Otti scored fewer votes than Ikpeazu, the PDP candidate. But Justice Omoleye reckoned that a Returning Officer (Benjamin Ozumba) only had powers to declare election results and not to cancel them. Besides, the results were even canceled after they had been uploaded on the website of the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC.
“In the Electoral Act, the Returning Officer has the right to only declare results of elections and not to cancel elections. This panel discovered that the earlier results uploaded to INEC headquarters correspond with the correct valid registered voters in the three LGAs, while that awarded to the respondent shows over voting and therefore null and void.’’
Justice Omoleye did not stop there. She struck out the preliminary objections by Governor Ikpeazu’s counsel to the effect that the appeal lacked merit. The Appeal Court also turned down the objection raised by the PDP that the members of the panel were wrongfully constituted and affirmed the arguments of Otti’s counsel. The Court of Appeal maintained that the lower tribunal was wrong not to have handled all the issues raised before it on their merit.
“It was wrong for the court below to insist that because the appellant failed to appear in person, his matter will not be given due attention. For not appearing in person, the first appellant did not abandon his case,” she said.
A Journey so Tortuous...
Otti has had to deal with so many obstacles. The battle for the ticket of his party, APGA, for the Abia governorship race, was fought both on the field and in the courts. It was a known fact that APGA has been fighting a war of attrition for years. Factions which had emerged within the party did not help matters. When, therefore, Otti emerged as the candidate of the party for the gubernatorial elections, it was not going to be a smooth ride. One of the aspirants, Mazi Ufomba, had gone to court, joining Chief Victor Umeh, the APGA national chair, challenging the emergence of Otti. The duo prevailed in the courts and the real battle began.
Speaking to THISDAY in an exclusive interview, Otti said it has been a real battle but he was also prepared for it. He said even before the election, it has been a battle but he was encouraged by the fact that he was convinced that Abians deserved more than they were getting under the PDP government.
“It has been an interesting and challenging time going back to the pre election period up until this moment. But I have always been encouraged by my conviction that Abia State deserves better leadership than what the PDP was offering. I believed that if we did nothing to wrest political power from the charlatans who have raped the state for the last sixteen years then we have waived our rights to complain. Like the great philosopher, Plato, would say,” Otti stated.
He did admit that he saw what could be called frustrations as challenges. He said he and his team have seen a lot of that in the journey.
“Starting from the campaign era, we were denied public spaces to meet and sell our programmes to the electorate. We were even physically attacked in many instances. We had opponents who did not play by any rules; people who used the instruments of state to encumber the electoral process to their advantage. But my confidence and faith in God were unshaken through it all. The support of the people, the hopeless state of things and the fact that our children had no future if we did nothing kept me going.”
The Legal Nuances...
The Otti legal team said the Court of Appeal agreed with their submission and averred that the Tribunal had misunderstood the case.
“The court of Appeal agreed with our submission,” one of the lawyers explained. “The tribunal misunderstood the case and held that there were reruns in these areas and that we participated. It closed its eyes to exhibits showing over voting and other irregularities. It ruled that having gone through a rerun, all exhibits tendered by us were not to be considered. It therefore did not look at documents tendered by our team to show substantial Non compliance and over voting.”
‘Not Beyond Reasonable Doubt...’
Earlier, in a judgment that lasted 85 minutes, Justice Usman Bwala the chairman of the tribunal had said that the petitioners, Otti and his party, APGA, had failed to prove their claim to have won the election beyond doubt. The judge said the petitioners had, on one hand urged the court to nullify the election on grounds that it was marred by irregularities and massive fraud and on the other hand, sought that they should be declared winners of the same election.
Bwala had, like the appellate court, agreed that the Returning Officer was not allowed under the law to cancel the said results in the first place; hence the subsequent reversal by him had no effect. But he still dismissed the petition because the petitioner had not been able to prove its case beyond reasonable doubt.
The Blueprint against
Bad Governance...
Alex Otti, who was until he threw his hat into the ring, the managing director of Diamond Bank, perhaps knew he would one day seek the mandate of people of his home state to govern them. He was said to be a man of the people who used his banking connections to help many people of the state. He was also aware of the fact that the people of the state had become fed up with the way the affairs of the state were being managed by the PDP, especially under the former governor, Theodore Orji, who is now a Senator. That was why he decided to work with his consultants to produce a blueprint on how to get the state back on track and this he presented to the electorate and they bought into it.
“Abians were already fed up with consecutive governments that have continued to squander the collective wealth of the state. Civil servants had not received their salaries for over a year, hospitals were places where you go to contact diseases rather than get cured. Our schools have no roof; teachers are not trained and not paid. The infrastructure of the state is not different from what it was immediately after the civil war. So we did a need assessment working with our consultants to develop realistic solution to the problems and presented a solution to the electorates in a format they can relate with. That is the bedrock of the movement you saw during the campaign and the massive support to vote out the party that was responsible for the plague Abians were subjected to.”
Otti, though, still has the Supreme Court hurdle to cross. But he can feel the crown. He can smell victory and a four-year sojourn at the Umuahia Government House beckons
No comments:
Post a Comment