After delivering a devastating message on politics and politicians two Saturdays ago, Kogi State voters were expected to follow through with a tutorial to the country on how best to manage an electoral conundrum consequent upon both the death of one of the candidates in the election and lack of constitutional clarity. Alas, just when it mattered most, they wilted. But whether the wilting was caused by a lack of political depth or lack of principles is hard to say at the moment. By a substantial margin of 240,867 votes to 199,514 votes, the Kogi electorate had given the All Progressives Congress (APC) ticket of Abubakar Audu and his running mate, Abiodun Faleke, a commanding lead over the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) ticket of Governor Idris Wada and his deputy, Yomi Awoniyi. Some 41,300 votes were said to be outstanding, nearly half of which were cancelled or unlawful votes that had no business being regarded as outstanding. The rest of the votes had not been cast at all. Out of the 41,300 votes potentially left to be cast, sources within INEC had indicated that approximately 25,000 were backed by permanent voter cards (PVCs).
By any mathematical proposition, the real (as opposed to the registered voters) outstanding votes could not exceed the number of PVCs collected in the 91 polling units spread across some 18 local government areas of the state. But it was this elementary and unvarnished fact that INEC mystified to declare the Kogi governorship election of November 21 inconclusive. It was this electoral shenanigan that also put the otherwise thoughtful APC at sixes and sevens, its thinking process paralysed. And it was this bald reasoning incorrectly deduced from uncomplicated facts and figures that the state’s ethnic groups and senatorial districts seized upon to return to their atavistic past.
Kogi State has sadly become a riddle. It defied all speculations, as this column hoped and foretold, to vote Prince Audu, using their head rather than their heart. The PDP reminded the electorate that Prince Audu was corrupt, having been dragged by the EFCC to court for allegedly embezzling or misappropriating more than N10bn of the about N20bn the state collected as statutory allocation in his four years in office. But Kogites ignored the rambling narratives of the PDP and the shoddiness of the EFCC, recalling in contrast that the two PDP governments which succeeded Prince Audu in 2003 to 2015 collected more than N500bn and had nothing to show for it. President Muhammadu Buhari had also remorselessly declined to attend the campaign rallies of the APC in both Okene town and Lokoja. But Kogites simply sneered at the hidden meaning of the president’s absence, and embraced both Prince Audu and his party the more. Then many armchair commentators and analysts finally weighed in and without real evidence predicted that either Prince Audu would lose or the election would be too close to call. This column wondered where they got their facts, for the objective reality on the ground favoured Prince Audu and Hon Faleke by an undisputed margin.
In the end, the APC ticket swept the poll taking 16 local government areas to PDP’s five. Its lead, at the time INEC declared the election inconclusive, was unassailable and incontestable. INEC’s decision to hold a supplementary election and accept a substitute APC candidate are gratuitous and legally and logically unsustainable. INEC, speaking in sync with the Attorney-General, Abubakar Malami, ordered a supplementary election in the affected 91 polling units for December 5, and the replacement of the late Prince Audu. In their opinion, though the law does not explicitly provide for this scenario, an extrapolation had to be done to solve the exigent riddle. Banking on the correctness of the INEC and AGF positions, Prince Audu’s political associates from Kogi East senatorial district indicated unanimously that they would want the APC to allow Prince Audu’s son, Mohammed, a barrister, to replace the late candidate. They offered no precedence, nor suggested why they thought such monarchical disposition would bode well for a state like Kogi brimming with experienced and ambitious politicians across all political parties and from all senatorial districts, including Prince Audu’s Kogi East. If the APC should decline to put the younger Audu forward, as indeed it has done, then whoever wins the final ballot would be impeached, they threatened.
Unprincipled and vacillating, Kogi PDP leaders have also seized upon INEC’s missteps to lampoon both INEC and the AGF, and have called for INEC to declare Governor Wada winner in the absence of Prince Audu. By their strange logic and science, they have delinked Hon. Faleke from the APC ticket. Their strange knowledge of the law in the PDP does not debar them from the sinister request of openly and grotesquely undermining the law and opening themselves to general ridicule. Kogi East, which produced Prince Audu, is also anxious to sustain their hegemony rather than recognise the inviolability of the shifting dynamics of Kogi’s electoral politics.
However, of all the subterfuges that followed the death of Prince Audu and INEC’s declaration of the election as inconclusive, the most baffling comes from the APC itself. The party was expected to recognise clearly the victory the Audu/Faleke ticket afforded it. It was also expected to defend the victory and, in line with the relevant provisions of the law, anchor a campaign to compel INEC to declare the election conclusive, resist candidate substitution (with the attendant implication that someone else could unlawfully inherit the APC votes), and champion the moral rebirth of the country by using the Kogi impasse to sanitise the crass ethnocentrism, sectarianism and troubling power games inundating and undermining the peace and stability of Nigeria. Instead, the party paradoxically appeared eager to fritter the hard-won victory of November 21, and more enthusiastically pander to primordial politics. They have settled for Yahaya Bello, who was runner-up to Prince Audu in the state’s governorship primary. It unfathomably makes sense to the deep minds of the APC that a stranger to the Audu/Faleke ticket would be made to benefit from the electoral success of November 21 and 22. Mr Bello, like the Speaker of the House of Assembly and the Chief Justice, are Ebira from Kogi Central, the Igala’s worst enemies.
The APC’s National Working Committee (NWC) is reportedly bitterly divided over the Kogi stalemate, and though it finally but heedlessly settled for Mr Bello as the substitute candidate, that division will not only refuse to abate, it is an ugly indication of the fissures, riotous politics and volatile fault lines in the ruling party. APC, it is clear, is not what it is cracked up to be. Judging from the crises that have engulfed it since May when it took office in Abuja, it appears to lack discipline, cohesion, character, and now reason. Having got off on the wrong foot nationally, and in the process trivialised governance, the party does not appear to possess the integrity and sound judgement necessary to build a great and enduring party, nor to rule a complex and increasingly challenged country. Its reasoning on the Kogi stalemate is horrifying and appalling. If they are unable to inspire the country by a brilliant solution to the Kogi crisis, how can they be trusted to midwife real and visionary change? How can they be relied upon to build a new social and political order for the country? Given their amateurish approach to the Kogi crisis, and the elevation of intra-party competition above justice and fairness, perhaps with an eye on 2019, could the country expect them to tackle major political and legal challenges with fortitude, dispassion and brilliance? On the Kogi crisis, the APC has behaved appallingly by turning itself into a party without depth, without reason, without a core, and without a soul. It needs to urgently rediscover itself if it is not to self-destruct, if it is to arrest the imminent disintegration the struggle for power within its ranks is making inevitable.
The balance of opinion and the weight of informed legal interventions in the Kogi impasse are decidedly in favour of enabling Hon Faleke to embody the victory wrought by the APC two Saturdays ago, as the two boxes below show. If INEC will not reverse itself but would prefer the courts to adjudicate, the APC must be clear-headed enough not to submit to the messy ethnocentrism and sectarianism complicating the Kogi stalemate. Grafting Mr Bello from Kogi Central onto the APC governorship ticket, as they have done, is legally and morally unsustainable and certain to complicate the state’s political dynamics as well as exacerbate the grief of Kogi East. It is now certain that the frustrations of those who looked up to the APC for real change are set to grow, compounded by the party’s dithering at the national level, the amateurishness it is manifesting in Kogi, and the obvious lack of motivation, purpose, direction and grit evident in its actions so far. More and more, the electorate will begin to fear that nothing is holding the APC’s centre together, that it is drifting, and that it may end up a flash in the pan. It may be okay to see and worry about the intensity of the Kogi crisis; but it is even more apposite to see the Kogi stalemate as a barometer of the weaknesses and lack of cohesiveness of the APC, and of the impending disaster staring the party in the face.
