First published in 1971, the famous novelist, Chukwuemeka Ike’s ‘The Naked Gods’ vividly portrays the self-demystification in a fictive Shonghai University of Academics who had hitherto been apotheosized by a society which at the time placed much stock by high intellect and sound learning. But in the acrimonious and bitter struggle for the position of Vice-Chancellor of the institution in the soon-to-be independent country, otherwise highly revered scholars threw all morality and decorum to the winds and proved to be as ethically depraved and decadent as any other category of society.
In the run-up to the last general elections and even in the aftermath of that landmark event in our political evolution, a good number of our Christian clerics of various denominations but especially the Pentecostals cast off their cloak of sacrosanct spirituality and donned the garb of partisan politicians prophesying victory in vain for candidates of their jaundiced prejudices all in the name of God. But did the Almighty not warn severally in the scriptures that his name should not be taken in vain?
I think it was Joseph Schumpeter, the great Austrian economist, who once observed that when the average individual operates as a member of a crowd, he tends to drop to a lower level of intellectual and mental performance. Can it be denied that, in this season of unprecedented ascendancy of Information and Communication Technology and the attendant tyranny of the pervasive social media lynch mob, most of us, as individuals or groups, and no matter how brilliant, have succumbed to the lure of group think no matter how ridiculous and lacking in rigour our thought processes? The economist, John Galbraith, described it as the malaise of ‘conventional wisdom’ which may most often be quite misleading.
It would appear that the Catholic Bishops Conference of Nigeria (CBCN), an otherwise highly regarded body of clerics, who added considerable value to society through rigorous and objective social, economic and political critiques, has given in to the seductive lure of political partisanship. We recall with nostalgia the patriotic, nationalistic and courageous stance of the CBCN against military dictatorship particularly in the aftermath of the annulment of the outcome of the June 12, 1993, presidential election. In the 2023, presidential election, however, the judgement of most members of the hierarchy of the Catholic Church have been tainted and swayed by the fact that a leading presidential candidate in the election, Mr. Peter Obi is reported to be a Catholic. His critics when he was governor of Anambra State alleged that he exhibited open partiality to the Catholic Church to the detriment of the other main faith, the Anglicans, resulting in tension, rivalry and hostility between the two. In recent times, such icons of the Catholic leadership hierarchy as John Cardinal Onaiyekan, the Archbishop Emeritus of Abuja and Archbishop Mathew Hassan Kukah of the Sokoto Archdiocese of the church have, in recent times expressed brazenly partisan views devoid of the logical rigour and empirical verity they are usually known for.
With the delivery on September 6 of the much awaited judgement of the Presidential Election Petition Tribunal (PEPT) in the petitions filed against President Tinubu’s victory by candidates of the Allied Peoples Movement (APM), Labour Party (LP) and Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), respectively, one would have expected a sober, insightful and well-reasoned response to the judicial verdict by the CBCN. It is unfortunate that what we had at the opening ceremony of the 2023 Second Plenary Assembly of the CBCN was a regurgitation of Ill thought out generalizations continuing to seek the delegitimization of the election and the PEPT judgement, mischievous innuendoes and misleading insinuations. It is no surprise that the Archbishop of Owerri, Lucas Iwejuru Ugorji, an Igbo like Peter Obi, who is the current President of the CBCN, was the spokesman at the opening of the event. The overlap between his Igbo ethnicity and Catholic religious faith, attributes he shares with Obi, no doubt coloured the good cleric’s perception of political reality with distorting bias.
For instance, Archbishop Ugorji was quoted to have averred gravely that “continuous disregard to the will of the people who, for once trooped out to vote their desired candidate, was a threat to the nation’s democracy which was currently in a dangerous position”. What does the cleric mean by saying people trooped out “for once” during the 2023 election to vote for their desired candidate? Did people not come out to vote for their desired presidential candidates in 1999, 2003, 2007, 2011, 2015 and 2019 before now? Have people not voted for their desired choices in scores of other executive and legislative elections at the state level since 1999? Which ‘desired candidate’ is Archbishop Ugorji talking about? The one of his biased imaginations?
There were three major contestants in the 2023 presidential election – Asiwaju Bola Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Waziri Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and Mr. Peter Obi of the Labour Party (LP). Each of them won in at least 12 states including the Federal Capital Territory (FCT). In such a closely fought election, how did the Archbishop come to the conclusion that someone of his choice was the desired candidate and the will of the people has been disregarded because of such a person’s non-emergency? Were the petitioners against Tinubu’s victory able to convince the PEPT that he was not the choice of the majority of voters who gave him 8,894,726 votes in the election with Atiku recording 6,984,520 votes to come second and Obi coming third with 6,101,533 votes?
The judgement of the PEPT which lasted for over twelve hours and was televised live has been widely praised for its thoroughness, meticulousness, lucidity, logic and clarity. Ironically, Dr. Olisa Agbakoba (SAN), an undisguised Obi supporter, sent a text message to an Arise News television anchor that the judges should have summarized their findings and the delivery should not have taken more than one hour. But as Mr. Dave Ajetomobi, a former Chairman of the Ikeja NBA, rightly observed, the judges “refused to summarize their findings so as to foreclose speculations by the fanatical supporters of a candidate.”
In spite of the clearly demonstrated knowledge, experience, industry and competence of the PEPT to a global television audience, the CBCN constituted itself into an alternate court and declared that the election was “flawed by threats, intimidation, violence, the spilling of blood, poor logistics arrangement, inducement, impunity as well as the lack of transparency, manipulation of results, abuse of the power of incumbency, alleged ‘glitches’ and outright rigging”.
It is indeed most pitiable when a supposedly revered body of clerics like the CBCN is unable to rise above the pedestrian, jejune and almost illiterate level of reasoning of the average member of the notorious ‘Obidients’ movement. For, in this election so cavalierly disparaged by the Catholic clerics, Obi and his LP won over 95% of the votes in the five South-East states in addition to winning such South-South states as Delta, Edo, Akwa-Ibom and Cross River. In the North-Central, the LP won in Nasarawa and Plateau while the party also won in Tinubu’s redoubt in Lagos as well as the FCT, Abuja. Obi directed his campaign mainly at his Igbo kinsmen as well as diverse segments of the Christian community and those were where he secured his victories. Conversely, his narrow ethnic and religious electoral appeal alienated him from predominantly Muslim states in the North-East, North-West and North-Central preventing him from securing the requisite spread of support to win a presidential election in a complex and diverse polity line Nigeria.
Indeed, if the votes of the LP and New Nigeria Peoples Party (NNPP) were added to that of the PDP, from which Obi and Rabiu Kwankwaso broke away, they had a total of 14,582,586 votes which suggests that the APC was unlikely to have won had the PDP not fragmented into the LP and NNPP. Beyond this, five governors who remained in the PDP refused to campaign for the party’s presidential candidate and the PDP failed to win in any of the states controlled by the G5. One would have expected a body of spiritual giants and intellectual titans like the CBCN to have been able to take all relevant factors into consideration to credibly analyze and arrive at informed conclusions on the elections.
Commenting on the inability of INEC to upload the results of the presidential election on its IREV portal as it had earlier promised due to what the commission described as unanticipated glitches, the CBCN averred that this disappointed most Nigerians and that it affected the outcome of the elections. The PEPT specifically stressed that the petitioners presented no evidence before it to disprove INEC’s contention that the said glitches were unanticipated and not deliberate. According to the CBCN, “Despite the billions of Naira of tax-payers money appropriated for the provision of the BVAS technology as a game-changer in our general elections, the Judges in their ruling tried, among other things, to suggest that it was wrong to expect INEC to keep its promise or obey the electoral regulation of transmitting election results electronically in real time from the polling units”. It will be disrespectful to say that the clerics lied. But here they peddled an untruth.
The judges were of the view that the Electoral Act gives INEC the discretion to transmit results by whatever means it finds appropriate and realistic. The CBCN should disprove the PEPT by citing specific laws compelling INEC to transmit results electronically. Nowhere, contrary to the CBCN, did the PEPT say that it was wrong to expect INEC to keep its promise. Rufai Oseni, one of the anchors of Arise television Morning Show, had wondered why INEC had apologized for its inability to upload results onto its IREV electronically in real time if it was not legally obligated to do so. No less could have been expected of the Commission. It had promised in its guidelines to upload the results on its IREV in real time but could not do so due to unexpected glitches and apologized as a decent organization should. But its guidelines are not superior to the Electoral Act which does not compel it to transmit results electronically. That is incontrovertible.
Again, the PEPT had submitted that the petitioners did not demonstrate with evidence before the court that the results eventually transmitted to INEC’s IREV portal differed substantially from the results manually recorded on prescribed forms and signed by electoral officials, party agents and security operatives at the 176,974 polling units across the country. In any case, the court found it inexplicable that the petitioners did not present any of their polling agents across these thousands of polling units to give eyewitness accounts in court of the alleged widespread malpractices before the judges!
It is clear that what the CBCN wanted was a victory for its desired candidate at the PEPT which such a candidate did not achieve at the polls on the field. Anything short of this, the body of partisan Catholic bishops will continue to question the integrity and credibility of the judiciary even right up to the Supreme Court. But the respected clerics should remember that three landmark judicial decisions enabled Peter Obi to emerge and serve as governor of Anambra State for eight years from March to November, 2006, February to May 2007, and June 2007 to March 2014. It is unfair and dishonest to create the impression that if judicial decisions do not go Peter Obi’s way now, then it means that the judiciary is corrupted and Nigeria’s democracy endangered. When the men in cassock allow ethnic and religious biases to becloud their reason, pervert their judgement and make them unwitting purveyors of manifest falsehood, they strip themselves naked in the marketplace.
Contrary to the CBCN, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria, Dr. Joseph Nwobike, in assessing the judgement, told the Nigerian Tribune that “I must confess that the judgements delivered by the Tribunal are unassailable. The basis for the resolution of all the issues of law and facts formulated by the parties are consistent with the body of judicial precedents on all the points. The decisions are therefore correct…I will want to appreciate the learned justices for the rare industry applied in writing and delivering the judgements. The decisions will for a long time to come serve as a veritable guide for lawyers, administrators and politicians involved in electoral processes in Nigeria and perhaps beyond.”
And the 85-year old Chief Robert Clarke (SAN) submitted that “These two judgements are the best judgements I think this country has ever had; it is a good thing that these two judgements today are being broadcast live so that you and I and those who aren’t knowledgeable in the law will understand what is at stake in the country. These two judgements have greatly enriched the jurisprudence of this country despite or in spite of what the Labour Party might say and I can tell you that I can boast of learning tonight what I normally teach my young lawyers that you can win or lose on your pleadings. The two judgements, especially Atiku’s case, show you that pleadings were the cause of the loss. In Atiku’s case, the pleadings were rough and inadequate”.
