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I n recent weeks, the Governor of Imo State and Chairman of the Progressive Governors’ Forum, Senator Hope Uzodimma, has been on the receiving end of a sustained onslaught. Its chief architect is the Minister of the Federal Capital Territory, Chief Nyesom Wike. On the surface, this looks like another episode in the rough-and-tumble of Nigerian politics. Beneath it, I fear, lies something far more consequential for the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) and, ironically, for the very President on whose behalf the Minister claims to be campaigning. The dispute reportedly began with the resistance of APC governors to the so-called Rainbow Coalition, the brainchild of the Minister. The coalition is said to be designed to support the re-election of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu while sponsoring candidates on the platform of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) for other offices.
Governor Uzodimma, it appears, earned the Minister’s ire for daring to oppose this arrangement and for supposedly seeking to fence him out of the presidential campaign. On its face, a coalition that promises votes for the President sounds like a gift. In practice, it is a Trojan horse. A campaign that asks voters to elect an APC President while electing PDP governors, senators and legislators is a campaign at war with itself. It tells the party’s own aspirants, foot soldiers and financiers that their loyalty counts for little. It also sets up parallel structures in the states, each answerable to a different master. No serious party can sustain such an arrangement without bleeding at its base.
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The governors, who carry the burden of delivering their states, understood this, and their resistance was both principled and strategic. It will be recalled that Governor Uzodimma occupies a central place in the Renewed Hope campaign as the National Secretary of the Presidential Campaign Council. It is in this context, I believe, that his harassment must be understood. There is a further layer. According to the Minister, Uzodimma nurses an ambition to become President of the Senate, an ambition the Minister openly says he opposes. Although Uzodimma has denied it, the noise has refused to die down. Even the current President of the Senate reportedly took a swipe at him on the same ground at the inauguration of the Presidential Campaign Council. To my mind, even if Uzodinma desires to be the Senate President, it is a legitimate ambition. There is no legislation that prohibits that. It must be said plainly that the choice of the presiding officers of the National Assembly is, in the first place, the business of the senators and their party. It is not the business of a Minister who sits in the executive arm and who does not belong to the ruling party. In fact, if any person or group have influence in the process, it will be the leadership of the party comfortably controlling the majority of the elected senators. Leadership tussle for an independent arm of government, two years before that Assembly is even inaugurated, ought to worry every believer in separation of powers. The accusation of abandoning the office of the Governor for the Senate seat is even baseless. My simple question is this: what is wrong with a man leaving one office to seek another? It is neither sinful nor criminal. It is a matter of personal choice, and ultimately a matter for the party and the electorate to decide. Of interest to me is the dignified silence of Uzodinma in all these; for the wise, this has implications. That reminds me again of the Yerima story. Remember? “You are a fool, I am not a fool, I am a commissioned officer. I have integrity….” The rest is history. The intrigues themselves bother me less than their likely consequences.
This development has the tendency to weaken the APC at both the national and sub-national levels. The situations in Anambra and Osun states are indicators of what such gymnastics can present. The ruling party in the two states supporting the President have their own candidates for the National and State Assemblies with the campaigns taking divisive tendencies than a unifying one for APC. Worse, it threatens the ruling party’s control of the National Assembly. Should that control slip, the President, for whom Wike is purportedly campaigning, will himself be endangered. A President who cannot count on the legislature is a President whose agenda is held hostage. We have been here before. In June 2015, barely weeks after the APC took power, the leadership of the National Assembly emerged against the expressed preference of the party. The consequences of that episode haunted the first term of that administration: delayed budgets, frosty executive-legislative relations and a party that spent years fighting itself. The lesson is that control of the legislature is never automatic, even for a party with a numerical majority. It is earned through cohesion, and it is lost through division. The history of the PDP itself is equally instructive. A party that once boasted it would rule for 60 years began to unravel when its governors split and a faction walked out. Within two years, it had lost the presidency. Internal quarrels, left unattended, are rarely contained; they metastasise. The other side of this story is even more disturbing. It concerns the Imo West senatorial ticket won by Governor Uzodimma at the party’s primary. There have been allegations and counter-allegations of forgery of results, matters which remain very much under investigation. The worrisome turn is the recent judgment of the Federal High Court, Abuja, which voided Uzodimma’s candidacy and directed INEC to recognise Senator Rochas Okorocha as the party’s candidate. Shortly after, a video went viral of Okorocha paying a courtesy call on the Minister, in a manner that many read as a visit of gratitude.
The Minister has consistently boasted of his power to install and remove political office holders. Is this another instance? And if so, how does a man who is not a judge achieve such feats? Pardon my naivety. But I am reminded that justice is rooted in perception. When a politician who boasts of making and unmaking office holders receives the beneficiary of a court victory in what looks like a thanksgiving visit, the public will draw its own conclusions. That is precisely why those who wield executive powers must keep a respectful distance from the bench, and be seen to do so. Over a century ago, Lord Hewart warned that justice must not only be done, but must manifestly and undoubtedly be seen to be done. That principle is not a mere courtesy; it is the foundation of public confidence in the courts. Where litigants come to believe that judgments can be secured through political patrons rather than through the merits of their case, the losers stop going to court and start looking for patrons of their own. That is the road to the erosion of the rule of law, and our judiciary, which has laboured hard to rebuild its image, deserves better than to be dragged along it. As I warned in my last intervention, the emerging scenario is that the APC may eventually be reduced to what the PDP has become under Wike’s influence. If the Minister truly means well for the APC, he ought to join it. His unwillingness to do so suggests a hidden agenda for the future. It has been said that, through these activities, he desires to become the power broker not only of the National Assembly but of national politics in 2031. Some even suggest that his ultimate ambition is the office of Vice President. Whether or not that is so, his conduct in recent times gives such speculation considerable oxygen. The continued crucifixion of Governor Uzodimma is an assault on APC governors as a body, and it must be seen as such: an injury to one is an injury to all. The leadership of the party must appreciate the emerging threat and contain it before the party loses focus and control. The good news is that the party has said it is not replacing Uzodimma as its candidate, and that it will appeal the judgment. This is quite understandable. Any attempt at substitution, as some Imo constituents have warned, will likely lead to the loss of the seat, with collateral effects on other contests. A stitch in time saves nine. Beyond the appeal, the leadership of the party has work to do. It should, first, clarify the structure and command of the presidential campaign, so that no individual, however influential, operates a parallel campaign for other parties’ candidates. Second, it should engage the President directly, since the threat to his legislative majority is ultimately a threat to his second term. Third, it should insist that disagreements among its members and allies be resolved within the party’s organs rather than on television and social media. A party that cannot discipline its quarrels cannot discipline its campaign.
Finally, the judgment itself is, to my mind, shocking. Contemporary jurisprudence, as settled by the Supreme Court, is that the nomination of candidates is an internal affair of political parties. It is a political question best settled by the parties themselves, not by the courts. Since the Supreme Court’s decision in Onuoha v. Okafor, our courts have consistently held that the question of who should be a party’s candidate is a political question. It is not justiciable. The rationale is sound: a party is a voluntary association, and the courts cannot compel it to present to the electorate a candidate it does not want. The courts have repeatedly declined invitations to substitute their judgment for that of the parties on matters of membership, leadership and nomination. I am conscious that the Electoral Act opens a narrow window for an aspirant who participated in a primary to challenge its conduct. But that window does not license the courts to choose candidates for parties. There is also the matter of time. Pre-election matters are, by the Constitution, to be determined within strict timelines, and the appeal must be heard and decided expeditiously. With the senatorial election scheduled for early next year, the appellate court has both the opportunity and the duty to restore clarity before the ballots are printed. I believe that, at all times, the judiciary must continously resist the attempt to be dragged into the arena of political nomination. It is the major spot dragging the reputation of the judiciary into the mud. It is hoped that the Court of Appeal will sanitise this ugly development. For the APC, the greater danger heading into 2027 may not come from the opposition at all, but from those who claim to be its friends while declining to be its members.
