Tragedy and Confusion in Kogi

The death of Alhaji Abubakar Audu on Sunday last week marked the passing of a man who has been one of the most visible political figures in this country since the early 1990s and the single most important political figure in his native Kogi State. Audu, who was Kogi State’s governor in 1992-93 and again […]

The death of Alhaji Abubakar Audu on Sunday last week marked the passing of a man who has been one of the most visible political figures in this country since the early 1990s and the single most important political figure in his native Kogi State. Audu, who was Kogi State’s governor in 1992-93 and again in 1999-2003, left behind an indelible mark of solid achievement having built during his two tenures some of the most important infrastructural projects in the state, including the Kogi State University, Ayingba.
More than his great legacy however, the timing of Audu’s passing will be remembered for a long time in Nigerian politics. Abubakar Audu, candidate of the All Progressives Congress [APC] in the on-going Kogi State governorship election, died shortly after the Returning Officer declared the result of the previous day’s election. The result showed that Audu and his running mate Mr. James Abiodun Faleke polled 240,000 votes as against 199,000 polled by PDP’s candidate Governor Idris Wada. The election was however declared inconclusive because polls were cancelled in 91 polling units due to ballot box snatching. The Electoral Act 2010 mandates that an election be declared inconclusive if the number of registered voters in areas where election did not hold exceeds the gap between the first and second placed candidates in the election.
Even while his family, his party men, his army of supporters and all the people of Kogi State and Nigeria mourned his death, Audu’s death opened an electoral, legal and political Pandora’s box such as has never been seen in Nigerian politics. Although the electoral law envisaged a situation where a nominated candidate could die after the close of nomination, it did not anticipate a situation where a candidate dies in the midst of an election. For that matter, Audu was the candidate that had virtually won the election. As pundits have pointed out, Governor Wada stands no chance of closing the gap in a supplementary election because only 25,000 of the 49,000 eligible voters therein have permanent voters’ cards.
Hot arguments by the country’s leading constitutional lawyers in the newspapers, the airwaves and on the social media in the days following Audu’s death clearly showed that there was a big lacuna in the law. On Tuesday last week, the Independent National Electoral Commission [INEC] took a position. It said the supplementary poll will go ahead on December 5 but APC will be allowed to make a substitution. Unfortunately for INEC and the perception of its independence, its decision was pre-empted earlier that day by the new Attorney General and Minister of Justice Abubakar Malami, who outlined this very same position at a public event. This opened the Minister to charges of interfering with INEC’s independence and it also opened INEC to charges of being a lapdog of the government. In future we advise the Attorney General to keep his opinions to himself where electoral matters are concerned and to allow INEC to demonstrate its full independence to Nigerians.
With INEC having taken a position, it was now APC’s turn to experience chaos. Insofar as an APC nomination in next Saturday’s supplementary Kogi poll is a governorship on a platter of gold, a Klondike-like mad rush ensued to grab the ticket. Audu’s running mate James Faleke quickly staked his claim. His supporters staged demonstrations in Lokoja and in Abuja saying APC must nominate him to replace Audu. Before the week ended Faleke also petitioned INEC and demanded to be declared the governor-elect on complicated legal grounds. While Faleke struggled, a powerful group of Kogi East APC leaders demanded that Audu’s eldest son Mohamed be nominated to replace him. The group held a meeting which was attended by two senators and many Federal and state legislators as well as leaders of the Audu/Faleke campaign organization. Not only will their demand satisfy the late Audu’s faction in the party but it will also preserve the precarious ethnic calculation in Kogi politics.
A  third, important group clamoured for Alhaji Yahaya Bello, who finished second to Audu in the APC primaries. Bello’s supporters, who reportedly include Presidency bigwigs, argue that nominating him avoids the legal pitfall of an election tribunal ruling down the line that the candidate did not emerge through proper primaries, as recently happened to Governor Darius Ishaku of Taraba State. Bello has now been nominated and APC leaders will submit his name to INEC latest on Tuesday.
However, a big spanner was thrown into the works by PDP which went to court and asked that its candidate be declared the election winner because APC’s candidate died and it therefore has no candidate in the election. PDP’s line of legal argument may sound laughable but it makes sense to it because that is the only course of action that will benefit Governor Idris Wada. Neither a supplementary poll nor even a fresh poll with a new APC candidate is likely to preserve him in the Lokoja Government House beyond January when his current term in office expires.
The courts may or may not put the scheduled supplementary polls on hold while the legal knot is untied. If the polls do go ahead, the legal wrangle will most certainly persist even afterwards and could very well go all the way to the Supreme Court. Among the issues that must be untangled are whether INEC was right to continue with the supplementary poll, whether it was right to allow APC to make a substitution, and whether APC made the substitution in the right way. Whatever the final ruling turns out to be, it will enrich this country’s statute books. Meanwhile, the most important thing is for peace to prevail pending this determination. We must not compound the tragedy that occurred in Kogi by losing any more lives or limbs.