Tag: Inec

The National Chairman of the All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA), Edozie Njoku has been in a leadership tussle with factional chairman, Victor Oye. In this interview with reporters in Abuja, Njoku chides the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) for refusing to recognise him as leader of the APGA despite a Supreme Court order. ERIC IKHILAE reports

Why has APGA remained perpetually in a leadership crisis? 

Let me answer that very simply. Any party in a country with a rule of law, who has gotten to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court has given a judgment and maybe you say the judgment is ambiguous, and it has gone to be enforced by a lower court, and the lower court has said, party move out of the office, you are not the chairman, and INEC don’t recognize him and INEC is still recognizing. INEC is in a better position to answer this question because it refused to obey a Supreme Court judgment that settled the crisis in the party. Why is it interested in prolonging the crisis in the party? 

Are you laying the blame on the INEC chairman?

There is a court judgment there from the Supreme Court and the lower court enforcing it, and he’s not obeying it. The question should be, why is he not obeying it? 

What is Mahmood’s interest? Is he a member of APGA?  He should obey the court order.

When Timipre Silva was removed as the APC governorship candidate in Bayelsa State, he immediately obeyed the order. Is there any order less ambiguous than this order of court? But he obeyed Silva’s order and as soon as Silva won in the Court of Appeal, his name was reinstated. Why don’t you follow that same trend? 

But this crisis predates Prof Mahmood’s tenure. The APGA has always had a leadership crisis; there was a time when it had three national chairmen. You were heading one of the factions…

No, I had gone to the UPP.  It was Umeh and Okwu. Then, I had left APGA.

Is reconciliation still possible in APGA?

When we won in the Federal High Court, I’m sure you saw it in the media and it was on Arise TV, I said it and I told them that my recommendation to the party was for myself and Oye to step aside to allow us to build the party, by bringing in someone else as the national chairman. But, they all said I was a madman.  Till I have now won in the Supreme Court. Yes, we’re very open to reconciliation.

Are you still open to the idea of the two of you stepping aside?

That was then; not any more. I have won the legal battle as the national chairman and I intend to carry on and fight the battle to the end. There is going to be reconciliation. What we need is the recognition to do reconciliation.

There is a perception out there that the APGA has some kind of working agreement with the APC and President Tinubu. What’s your response to that? 

If we had a legitimate leadership and it decides that working with the APC will be in the interest of the majority of its people, why not? At the moment, the party has not been built up to the standard in which we in the NWC want to build it; it’s more or less looking like an Igbo party with inverted commas. This is because it has a very big support in the grassroots of the Southeast. 

But the question is whether that engagement or whatever they are doing is illegitimate. As far as the Supreme Court is concerned, they don’t have the right to do that. They are using Prof Mahmood to hang on to power. In the true sense of it, they should not be the ones discussing that engagement because the people are not with them. As you can see from the election, they don’t enjoy the support of the people.

What’s your relationship with Governor Soludo?

I don’t have any relationship. I’ve spoken with him for about an hour once and he’s sworn to different people that over his dead body will I be national chairman. But, we’ve never met; I’ve not sat down with him before.  Even a very big businessman in Anambra State tried everything to bring us together to negotiate. But, he turned down the offer. 

He knows the reason why he doesn’t want to meet me.

Soludo is the only governor currently elected on the APGA platform. What could be the reason why he is against your chairmanship of the party?

He mentioned something about a Catholic bishop going as far as saying that the APGA is an Anambra party. Now, to rephrase your question, to what extent is some religious cabal responsible for Soludo’s obstinate position in the APGA leadership crisis?

You see, I wanted to be very clear on what you were saying. My clearness on that is that there is a very big misconception that even we as Nigerians must grow beyond.

There are 36 states in the country. Until Peter (Obi) became governor, we had nobody. That Alex Oti and Stanley Amuche did not become governors in 2018 on the APGA platform was because of the role that the then-Governor Willie Obiano played.

The party is different from the governor. The governor used the party, no matter what anybody thinks, as a vehicle to get to where he is.  So, he should use his position to destroy the party.

One thing people must learn is to stop taking stipends from the governor. Work with him and be straightforward with him; treat him with decency, even if you don’t like him.

But the party must be run like a party.  If he wakes up from his sleep and feels that he doesn’t like my way, he doesn’t have anything to do with the price of garri. We have won at the Supreme Court and I’m the national chairman of the party.  So, it’s not up to him alone to decide who he works with; he’s not the party. 

The APGA is supposed to be a national party because the secretary is from the north.  Why is the crisis restricted to the Southeast? 

No, the crisis is not restricted to the Southeast.

But the people that went to court…

Look at the names of the people who got this judgment. Otunba Latif, Ogida, and Alh. Rabiu is the one who got this judgment. It’s not me.

Your tenure will be ending in May; I don’t know whether you will be interested in re-contesting. The current atmosphere in the party may lead to a succession crisis…

When we get to the bridge, we’ll cross the bridge.  But the most important thing now is that we’re a country of the rule of law; the judgments should be obeyed. If by then he gets all the judgments against me, then we’re out. You understand? And he has all the resources to do that. But judgments should be obeyed.

That’s the point I came to explain here, that judgments should be obeyed. No matter the sentiments behind it, because we’ve been through a lot with different governors to be able to achieve all these judgments. Is it not the work of God? 

So, if the judgments have been gotten, and what it is, it’s for the world to come out and say, obey the judgments because if he has won at the Supreme Court, I wouldn’t be sitting down here talking about what I’m saying. If he had won in this one, I wouldn’t come here and be saying what I’m saying. I would have gone back to my bed and slept.

But the fact that we have won makes it incumbent on him, even if he’s the president, to obey the order. I was not happy to see the CBN governor when he was there lamenting about orders not being obeyed.

So, now, he must learn to obey orders because he will not be there forever. That’s the crux of what I’m saying. I’m not just talking about APGA. The party has its problems, which I believe we will sort out internally. But the most important thing is to obey the orders.

What is your assessment of the current state of the nation?

I just got back from England on January 2. As you know, I’m from the Southeast. I just lamented where we find ourselves as we talk about the state of the nation. I’m sure the president of Nigeria is also lamenting about the state of affairs in Nigeria today. In 2012, we used to take our ATM (from Nigeria) to buy things in England. You could go to the ATM and get money; just as recently as in 2012. We used it to use our ATM card to shop in England and you will get the money at even a slightly better rate than the black market.

Three years after that, when Buhari now came, they stopped and started rationing it; the maximum you could take was 200 pounds. Now, it’s non-existent.  But that notwithstanding, most Nigerians can’t afford to travel abroad, so that should not be a norm.

Coming back to Nigeria, you see the level of poverty we have. You see the price of petrol. You see the price of food. You see the price of everything. You ask yourself, how does a normal person survive? If you take a taxi from here to where we were, it’s about a 10, 15-minute drive. In England, it will be about 12 pounds. Do you understand? And then that man will use the 12 pounds, some of it, to repair his car. 

But here, the guy told me N8,000 and I’m pricing him N7,000. Do you understand?  So, our problem is so endemic. If you look at a new hotel within four years, it will be run down. It will be so people in the eye, that it will eventually run down. You employ someone who’s begging you, telling you that his life depends on the job.  In three years, you see his outlook in life has changed. 

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You go to a church, you see young children eating biscuits, and drinking coke inside the church. It was never like that when I was young.  You see, leaving a church, you see children running up and down. Go abroad, you see people standing in the line. But, here, you will see a big man jumping the queue to pay before somebody else at the supermarket. You will equally see your driver driving through red lights.  You see all kinds of things. Then, you ask yourself, where did Nigeria go wrong? So if you’re asking about the economy, nobody can ever, that’s a question that should not even be asked because we see daily that it’s in a mess.

You cannot blame President Bola Tinubu; you cannot blame anybody because Nigeria has gone to a stage whereby even our moral standards have all been eroded. A country where the Supreme Court can give a judgment and one man sits in his office and says, I slighted him; I will never give it to him. It’s not his father’s own. It is God that gives power. Eventually, he will give me that, and I will get that recognition because it’s God who gives power, not man.

So, what’s the way forward?

The way forward is that I’m running to be the national chairman of the APGA and my focus is on how to rebuild the party to become a forward-moving party. The question of the way forward in Nigeria would be better addressed by the ministers and the president.

But, in your opinion, what is the way forward in Nigeria?

I have not finished taking the logs out of my eyes, why should I take out the one on Mr. President’s?

In a ruling on March 24, 2023, the Supreme Court corrected a clerical error in its October 14, 2021 judgment, recognising Chief Edozie Njoku as the Nation Chairman of the All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA). But the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has continued to deal with Chief Victor Oye as the party’s chairman, despite the apex court’s decision, thereby raising doubt about the Prof Mahmood Yakubu-led umpire’s neutrality in the leadership crisis that has ravaged the party since 2019. Assistant Editor Eric Ikhilae writes.

Since 2019 when some members of the All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA) purportedly suspended its Chairman, Chief Edozie Njoku, the party has been in crisis. APGA’s stakeholders and supporters however,  heaved a sigh when, on October 14, 2021, the Supreme Court handed out its judgment,  ordering parties to return to the status quo.

Rather than allow peace to reign, a former Chairman of the party, Chief Victor Oye, whose tenure ought to terminate in 2019 with the emergence of Njoku as the new Chairman, capitalized on an error in the Supreme Court judgment to continue to lay claim to APGA’s Chairmanship.

Upon a motion filed by Njoku, drawing the Supreme Court’s attention to the error in its October 14 , 2021 judgment, the apex subsequently effected the necessary correction by deleting Oye’s name, which the court said was erroneously inserted.

By a letter dated November 7, 2022, Justice Mary Odili (now retired) who presided over the panel that delivered the judgment, stated that the appearance of Oye’s name in the judgment was an error.

She said: “I indeed recall your letter dated 6th May 2022 to me, as the presiding Justice of the panel and the other four Justices, which requested for correction of the 14th October, 2021, Supreme Court judgment, wherein the name of Chief Victor Oye was erroneously inserted instead of the name of Chief Edozie Njoku.

“It is to be placed on record that I corrected the mistake by replacing Chief Victor Oye’s name with that of Chief Edozie Njoku on paragraph 1 of page 13 of the 14th October, 2021 judgment.

“The correction was made having cognizance that on the day of delivery of the judgment being 14th October, 2021 by a slip of the pen and tongue the name of Chief Victor Oye was brought in.

“This error was pointed out to me by other members of the panel, who reminded me that Chief Victor Oye was not a party to the appeal or the proceedings which emanated from the Jigawa High court.

“However in the course of the trajectory of errors, the name of Chief Victor Oye kept recurring in the record of the judgment instead of the right party to the proceeding, Chief Edozie Njoku.

“By this clarification, it is expected that Chief Victor Oye was not a party to the proceedings and the proper for whom the judgment and orders referred is Chief Edozie Njoku.”

Despite this clarification by the apex court, Oye continued to lay claim to being AGPA Chairman, with the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) according him recognition despite persistent protest by the Njoku-led executives of the party.

In an effort to make INEC see reason why it should cease to recognise Oye,  Otunba Kamaru Ogidan and Alhaji Rabiu Mustapha, two executive members of APGA, who were elected along with Njoku (as the Chairman) at the party’s National convention held in Owerri, Imo State on May 31, 2019, filed a suit before the High Court of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT).

Ogindan and Mustapha by the suit, marked FCT/HC/CV/4068/2023 sought to enforce the October 14, 2021 judgment of the Supreme Court recognising the party’s leaders who were elected at the May 31, 2019 convention.

They prayed the court to among others, restrain Oye from further acting as APGA Chairman and for INEC , listed as the second respondent in the suit, from further relating with Oye in the capacity of the Chairman of the party in view of the Supreme Court judgment.

The plaintiff equally prayed the court to compel INEC to recognise Njoku as APGA’s Chairman.

Oye however, challenged the competence of the suit and also filed a preliminary objection.

On June 6, 2023 Justice Madugu rendered judgment in the suit, in which he among others rejected Oye’s claim to the leadership of APGA.

The judge also referenced the judgment of the Supreme Court in which Njoku was found to be the actual Chairman of APGA.

Justice Madugu said: “I must make it clear and unequivocal that the the first respondent, Chief Victor Ike Oye has no locus to act or parade himself as the Chairman of APGA.

“This is evident from the judgment of the Supreme Court delivered on the 24th March, 2023.

“The excerpt from page 24 of the said judgment is hereby reproduced in verbatim:  ‘It cannot seriously be disputed that the chairman allegedly suspended at Owerri, Imo State and who the third respondent (Alhaji Rabiu Garba Aliyu) sought to replace as Acting Chairman in the suit he filed before the trial court, against the appellant, Chief Jude Okeke and INEC, was Edozie Njoku.

‘The name of Oye was not included or even mentioned in the case that was filed by the third respondent, either as a person or as the Chairman of the first respondent (APGA) suspended or replaced at the Owerri Convention of 31st May 2019.’

Justice Madugu, in the judgment, held in favour of the plaintiffs – Ogidan and Mustapha and declared Oye’s claim to APGA’s Chairmanship as unlawful, restrained him from further parading himself as the party’s Chairman and restrained INEC from further dealing with Oye as APGA’s Chairman.

The judge held that “the actions of the first respondent (Oye) posing and parading himself and occupying the party’s secretariat as the National Chairman of APGA, contrary to the judgment and order of the Supreme Court made on the 14th October, 2021 and corrected on the 24th March, 2023 is in disobedience and in clear violation of the judgments of the Supreme Court.”

Justice Madugu issued an order of injunction “restraining the second respondent, whether by itself, agents, privies, assigns, authorized representatives or whosoever described from accepting, recognizing and dealing with the first respondent.”

The judge, who declared all that had been done by Oye as illegal and void, held that the two respondents in the suit ( Oye and INEC) “must comply with the decision of the Supreme court made on the 14th October, 2021 and subsequently corrected on the 24th March, 2023 which has also been served on them.”

Again, INEC failed to abide by the judgment, but chose to appeal.

According to Njoku, INEC has refused to recognised him as APGA Chairman, but has continued to deal with Oye.

Ogidan and Mustapha later returned to the High Court of the FCT, with a motion seeking the committal of Oye and INEC Chairman, Prof Mahmood Yakubu to prison for allegedly disobeying an order of the court.

They claimed that Oye and Yakubu ignored the order for parties to maintain status, made on May 10, 2023 during the pendency of their suit, and proceeded to conduct wards, Local Government Areas, states congresses and national convention to choose candidates for the last general elections.

Oye and INEC denied the  claims by Ogidan and Mustapha; challenged the competence of the case and prayed the court to dismiss the committal proceedings. But, in a judgment the motion for committal, marked: FCT/HC/M/10786/2023 delivered on  November 9 last year, Justice Madugu held that Oye and Yakubu were in contempt of the order of the court made on May 10, 2023.

The judge said: “I have carefully considered the averments in the affidavit of the parties and submissions of their counsel.

“The cardinal issues that call for determination in this matter is whether or not there is evidence, showing that the first and second respondents (Oye and Yakubu) are in disobedience of the order of the court made on 10 of May, 2023, which is the subject matter of this contempt proceeding.

“The order which was made on 10 of May, 2023, reads thus: ‘It is hereby ordered that the parties herein should maintain status quo ante bellum pending the hearing of the notice of preliminary objection filed on the 9 day of May, 2023 by the defendant/applicant.

‘For the avoidance of doubt and for the purpose of clarity, parties herein whether by themselves, agents, privies, assigns, authorized representatives or whosoever acting on their behalf are restrained from holding the planned congresses, national convention or any other meeting or gatherings in whatever name called, of All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA), pending the hearing of the notice of preliminary objection filed on the 9th May 2023 by the first defendant/applicant (Oye).”

He added: “This order further restrained all parties from holding planned congresses, national convention, or any other meetings or gatherings of the All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA) until the resolution of the preliminary objection,” he said.

In the ruling, the judge observed that “upon a careful review of the evidence and arguments presented by all parties, it is evident that the 1st respondent organized and congresses and the national convention of APGA, notwithstanding the court order issued on 10th May 2023.

“To have acted contrary to the subsisting order of this court, without having same set aside or without the expiration of the order’s lifespan, create a complex legal conundrum that necessitates the committal proceedings at hand.

“The first and second respondents (Oye and Yakubu) have committed contempt by disobeying the subsisting order of this court made on May 10, 2023 and I so hold. This impunity cannot continue. This political insanity has to stop.

“The acceptance of candidates by the second respondent (Yakubu) that are products of the congress presided over by the  first respondent, Chief Victor Oye held on 31st May, 2023 in defiance of the order of this court made on 10th May, 2023, is undoubtedly an affront to the order of this court.

“Having established the disobedience of the  first respondent and second respondent to the order of this court made on 10/5/2023 and since the purpose of committal proceedings is to ensure that the orders of the court are upheld and respected, I hereby adopt a lenient view and order that the first and second respondent should purge themselves of contempt within 14 working days effective from today, the 9th day of November 2023.

“Case is hereby adjourned till 29th November 2023, to enable the respondents purge themselves of the contempt or face the wrath of the law,” Justice Madugu said. But, rather than simply comply with the leeway provided by the court for them to purge themselves of the contempt, Takubu, acting again with Oye appealed the ruling and got a stay of execution pending the determination of their appeal.

Njoku has argued that Yakubu’s failure to comply with the various court decisions given in his favour evidently betrays INEC’s biased position on the leadership dispute in APGA.

He wondered why INEC has chosen to take side in an intra-party dispute which has nothing to do with the commission.