Tag: Ighodalo

Last week’s Supreme Court judgement on the Edo State governorship election petition has predictably drawn the ire of Asue Ighodalo, candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in last year’s election. The tone of his concession statement on his loss indicates that he actually expected the unfavourable judicial outcome. It was a prepared statement replete with sentiments that often suffuse American politics when political parties or candidates deal with electoral losses or bad outcomes. Once he lost at the Election Petition Tribunal, his confidence was shaken. When the Court of Appeal dealt him a follow-up blow, his confidence was all but gone. By the time he took his case to the Supreme Court, mainly to salve his troubled conscience and probably to expiate his loss before his supporters, he had already moved on beyond the poll conducted last September.

Mr Ighodalo, a lawyer, was never really a dyed-in-the-wool politician. He knows, and he insinuated it in his anguished statement on the court case, that the Supreme Court judgement probably marks the end of his political career. The party that gave him a platform to contest the governorship is also troubled, and it faces an uncertain future. The relationship between former governor Godwin Obaseki, who foisted him on the party and attempted to railroad him into the State House, and the Oba of Benin, Ewuare II, is irreparable. Mr Ighodalo was simply collateral damage, too far damaged to stand any chance of future accommodation in any and perhaps most quarters. He is in fact so idiosyncratically detached and lacking in charisma that neither he nor a significant part of his support base will contemplate a political future for him. His supporters will not see why they should man the barricades for him or risk their limbs while he plots his way back to his commercial law practice in order to cut his losses.

To put it succinctly, for Mr Ighodalo, it is the end of an era. Unfortunately, he managed to also deny himself a glorious and fitting end to a fairly humdrum political life. Sometimes defeat or death does canonise a man. Had he been less fascinated with elegant and alien compositions, he would have seized the moment and the gumption to recommend himself to the public he claimed to serve. He knew that the Supreme Court judgement was final, as he confessed, and could, therefore, not be altered or even mitigated in any form or by any means. He should have, therefore, proceeded from that point of finality to say a few lofty things about democracy, the Edo electorate, the justice system he and other election losers love to denigrate, the Benin monarchy his camp still appears to be at odds with, and long-suffering Nigerians as a whole that have had to endure insufferable politicians lacking sportsmanship. Rather than deliver these sentiments in the stirring and foreign phrases he lathered his concession statement with, he chose to damn the courts with faint praise, berate Nigeria’s democratic experiment, and paint a gloomy picture of the future.

Take a close look at Mr Ighodalo’s statement. “Though I accept the finality of its (court) judgment,” he began cautiously, “I do not and cannot pretend that what was delivered amounts to justice.” If the judgement amounted to injustice, surely he would have one or two incontrovertible proofs of their lordships’ jurisprudential truancy. Alas, what he had were nothing more than elegant phrases. “What happened in the September 2024 Governorship Election was not a contest,” he continued magisterially. “It was a robbery. Coordinated. Deliberate. And now, tragically validated by the highest court in the land. While I will not and cannot obstruct any judicial pronouncement, no matter how flawed, I must never fear to speak truth to power.” For a political leader who tried not to ‘obstruct justice’ but saw robbery and coordinated and deliberate and tragic validation of rigging by the Supreme Court, how else would he define obstruction? He was in essence saying that their lordships approved those crimes. Yet, the ‘crimes’ were not proved beyond a shadow of doubt. Edo and the rest of Nigeria were supposed to simply take his word for it, for, in his mind, he is a man of ‘courage’.

Read Also: Edo governorship dispute: Supreme Court didn’t do justice, says Ighodalo

Then the incitement followed. After establishing a highly dubious premise, and sensing the superficiality of a huge section of the electorate, not to talk of the deadly polarisation corroding the country and predisposing it to anomie, he lashed out at everyone, particularly the courts and those he alleged rigged the process. “Like you,” he baited the Edo public, “I feel a deep sense of betrayal. Not just by those who rigged the process, but by the very institutions we trusted to protect our democracy. You came out in hope. You voted for competence, for progress, for prosperity. And now, we are told that your voice does not matter. That your freely given mandate can be trampled without consequence. I feel your pain. I share your anger. And I will never forget your courage.” Not only was there nothing noble in his words, his thoughts were even more disquieting, arrogant and deplorable. Who told him he was more competent than his main opponent, or that during his desultory campaign marked by ecclesiastical rascality and personal abuse, he was able to project any admirable virtue?

The next two paragraphs were dedicated to unadulterated Americanisms, perfused with all the hooey directed at his adoring supporters to join him in continuing the struggle to ‘reclaim the soul of Edo’, a soul his principal, Mr Obaseki, traduced, betrayed, and imperiously trampled under feet for eight convoluted and antidemocratic years. Mr Ighodalo thinks his state is already enveloped in darkness; but it is unclear, for a man who revels in phantasmagoria, whether his baleful wish is not father to his gloomy thought. “Yes, dark days may lie ahead,” he concluded airily without taking pains to lead any argument to substantiate his belief. “The weight of this illegitimacy will, unfortunately, echo beyond the halls of the Supreme Court. I fear Edo will feel it in the absence of leadership, in the poverty of policy, and in the daily suffering of her people. But we are neither a fearful nor a broken people. We may be wounded. But all wounds heal.” Where on earth and by what science did he get the impression that all wounds heal?

These, in short, are the sentimental drivel of a disillusioned politician who has lost touch with Edo Staste realities and with the country’s justice system. Mr Ighodalo took casuistic delight in pummeling the courts for his own inadequacies, and he displayed neither shame nor remorse in his party’s gross inability to prove their case in court. Instead, he declaimed upon medical and metaphorical wounds his magic wand told him would ineluctably respond to his lexical medications. And for a man and his principal so inured to profiting from their own counsels, he even deigned to advise the victorious governor, whom he described as ‘undeserving of holding power’, to ‘lead with conscience and govern with humility’. He ended his pained concession statement by invoking history to deliver judgement which Nigerian courts, perhaps in his view suffering from astigmatism, could not. For a man who lacks both the humility and nobility to accept or acknowledge losses and setbacks, he will be shocked what that verdict would be.