Agbaso, INEC and Imo governorship

That mandate was brazenly snatched away from him by the chairman of the so-called Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), Professor Maurice Iwu, and his accomplice, the then Imo State electoral commissioner, Barrister Austin Okojie. For two long years now, enemies of democracy, using legal technicalities and other methods, have tried desperately but without success to […]

That mandate was brazenly snatched away from him by the chairman of the so-called Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), Professor Maurice Iwu, and his accomplice, the then Imo State electoral commissioner, Barrister Austin Okojie. For two long years now, enemies of democracy, using legal technicalities and other methods, have tried desperately but without success to frustrate and discourage Chief Agbaso from continuing to pursue the validation of his mandate. Those who stole it and others who have since been profiting from that brazen act of executive brigandage have, during the past 24 months, remained cosy in their unlawfully acquired positions as court after court declined jurisdiction to hear Chief Agbaso’s case.

But all that changed when the Court of Appeal sitting in Abuja decided, on February 26, 2009, that it had jurisdiction to hear Chief Agbaso’s appeal. The court was undeterred by the spirited attempts made by the legal representations of both INEC and Chief Ikedi Ohakim to use technicalities to once again scuttle Chief Agbaso’s bid to be heard. The court held, with remarkable resoluteness, that the twin issue of whether INEC had power under the law to cancel the April 14 elections in the circumstances and in the manner in which it did had not been pronounced upon or even addressed by any court.

Since that ruling, against which both the camps of INEC and Chief Ohakim have now filed appeals at the Supreme Court, all sorts of pressures, manoeuvres and inducements have been orchestrated by those enemies of electoral justice in a futile bid to weaken Chief Agbaso’s resolve to pursue the recovery of his mandate. But Chief Agbaso remains as resolute as ever in the confidence that he is pursuing a legitimate cause and one wholly espoused by the preponderant majority of the good people of Imo State and of Nigeria.

However, for the sake of those gullible few who may have been persuaded by the false propaganda that are being daily dished out to the unsuspecting public, it may be necessary, again and again, to re-state the hard facts of the Agbaso struggle. It will also enable those who are putting out those misleading information and defending the indefensible to examine and re-examine their consciences. The facts of the case are as follows:

– A valid governorship election was conducted by INEC in Imo State on April 14, 2007.

-That election was duly concluded in all the polling centres and wards in the state and the results of the election as polled in all the polling centres and wards of Imo State were counted, and all the ward results duly collated and entered into the appropriate forms EC8A and EC8B.

-Copies of the polling booth and ward results as entered in the relevant Forms EC8A and EC8B duly authenticated by INEC returning officers and political party agents were given, as required by the Electoral Law, to all the accredited party representatives and to the police and SSS personnel.

-The ward results were also duly collated in 26 out of the 27 LGAs of Imo State and entered in the appropriate Form EC8C and were duly verified and certified both by the INEC appointed returning officers and by party agents at the various LGA collation centres well before INEC purportedly cancelled both the election and the results collated at the end of it.

-The copies of all the authenticated results entered in the appropriate forms EC8As, EC8Bs and EC8Cs issued to party agents and to the police and the SSS personnel at the ward and LGA collation centres are regarded as primary evidence in law and are all as valid as the originals of the forms in the custody of INEC.

Those results show that Chief Agbaso won that April 14 election by a landslide, scoring well over 70% of the total popular votes cast at the election and well above the mandatory 25% of the votes cast in at least two-thirds of the LGAs, which the law requires him to score in order to be declared duly elected as governor.

– The results issued to the various party agents at those collation centres still remain in the custody of all the parties, including APGA and those issued to the APGA agents showing that Chief Agbaso indeed won that April 14, Imo State governorship election, are available to Chief Agbaso to be tendered by him before any court whenever he is called upon to do so.

Those are the hard facts of Chief Agbaso’s very straight-forward case. Not one person has so far said or written that Chief Agbaso did not win the Imo State governorship election held on April 14. Not even INEC has said so. All that INEC has said and has continued to claim is that the elections were marred by violence and so were cancelled. But even on that issue of alleged violence, INEC had itself destroyed its own case with two very interesting and revealing pronouncements made by the then Imo State resident electoral commissioner, Barrister Okojie, in his celebrated press conference announcing his illegal annulment of the validly held April 14 election.

Firstly, in arguing his case for the annulment on the basis of alleged violent disruptions, Barrister Okojie very meticulously mentioned and specifically listed all the polling centres and the wards they belonged to where he claimed violence had marred the elections. What he didn’t realise when he made that broadcast was that, even assuming but without conceding that his claims were correct, the total number of registered voters in the listed polling areas where he alleged polling was disrupted would still not have affected the victory won by Chief Agbaso were the total sum of the votes of all those registered voters added to the votes polled by the PDP candidate who came a distant second to Chief Agbaso at that election.

Secondly, in INEC’s desperate bid to protect some vested interests, the resident electoral commissioner stunned the world by validating the Imo House of Assembly elections while invalidating the governorship elections, according to him in his broadcast, after consulting with his boss in Abuja. The ultimate absurdity of that warped decision was that both the House of Assembly and the governorship elections were not only held contemporaneously but also the ballots for both elections were cast into the one and the same ballot box. This, for INEC, needless to say, has become its albatross: it’s like a big, long bone stuck in its throat unable to be dislodged.

Ever since the events in the aftermath of that unlawful annulment, INEC has been at pains, with little success, to wriggle itself out of that hole which it had intended for Chief Agbaso but which it itself inadvertently fell into. That is why its legal team has used every legal technicality in the books to prevent the real issue of its unlawful annulment of a validly held election from being looked into by the courts.

Chudi Onuzor writes from Owerri, Imo State