Ever since the conduct and announcement of the outcome of the 25th February 2023, presidential election, there has been a sustained, persistent and concerted attempt, particularly and overwhelmingly by intellectuals from a part of the country, to impugn the credibility of the elections as well as denigrate the integrity not just of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) but also the judiciary once it was obvious that institution would be the final determinant of the winner of the intensely contested election.
Apparently following in the footsteps of former President Donald Trump and his fanatical supporters who persistently and insistently asserted that the 2020 presidential elections in the United States were ‘rigged’ and ‘stolen’ without a scintilla of credible evidence, the ‘Obidient’ movement in particular repeatedly echo their idol, Peter Obi’s claim without credible empirical demonstration that he won the election on the platform of his Labour Party (LP).
Trump and his supporters had continued to claim that the election was stolen even after no less than 50 legal challenges they had mounted against the results in several states were thrown out by US courts. They provide a role model for the ‘Obidients’ and their candidate despite the fact that Peter Obi indisputably came third in the February 25 polls.
If members of the ‘Obidient’ mob on social media, actuated by ethnic sentiments and emotive irrationalities, take anarchic and patently unreasonable positions on the elections making wild and unproven claims, what do we make of the no less erratic and aberrant behavior of some otherwise accomplished intellectuals in their response both to the results of the elections and the verdicts of the appellate courts on petitions by Peter Obi and the PDP presidential candidate, Waziri Atiku Abubakar, seeking the nullification of the exercise?
When President Bola Tinubu of the APC was announced the winner of the February 25 presidential election with Atiku and Obi coming second and third respectively, respected novelist and global intellectual, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, had written an open, widely disseminated letter to President Joe Biden subtly urging the US to withhold recognition for the newly elected Nigerian President which she claimed was not marred by technical faults but was deliberately manipulated to achieve victory for Tinubu. She offered no proof for her authoritative assertions beyond citing instances of certain ‘cousins’, friends and other relatives who narrated to her stories of malpractices they claimed to have witnessed in polling units where they voted.
One would have thought that someone like Chimamanda who was not even in Nigeria when the elections were held, and who is a respected writer and thinker should have been more restrained and circumspect in jumping to authoritative conclusions based on what she was told by less than a score of acquaintances who were not present at the vast majority of the over 176,696 polling units across the country where voting took place.
Chimamanda was again on global television, the CNN after the Presidential Election Petition Court (PEPC) gave its judgement dismissing the petitions of Atiku, Obi and their parties against the outcome of the election. Obviously trying to leverage her international clout to rubbish the decision of the PEPC rather than deploy empirical facts and impeccable logic as one would expect from one of the world’s contemporary leading minds, Chimamanda told her interviewer, Christiane Amanpour, who inexplicably refrained from asking her guest probing follow-up questions, that the judgement was “shoddy and shabby” even though she had admitted she had not finished reading it!
In her words, “I am in the middle of reading the judgement and it’s stunning how shoddy it is. The elections were manipulated in a way that is very shabby and shoddy and the judgement is shabby and shoddy. I didn’t expect it to be very thoughtful but I am shocked at how very lacking in thought it is”.
But it is not enough for Chimamanda to assert ex-cathedra that the PEPC judgement was ‘thoughtless’ or ‘shabby’. She has to demonstrate for us through rigorous logical, textual analysis of the judgement and empirical facts that the judgement was shoddy or incompetent. This was a judgement that was televised globally as it was delivered and has been commended by some of the country’s best and brightest legal minds. Surely, Chimamanda’s fame as a fiction writer cannot be ‘a magna carta for mandibular waka about’ (apologies to the late Gbolabo Ogunsanwo). Her unwarranted arrogance and insulting condescension towards the Nigerian judiciary without cause shows a woman who lacks grace and class despite her scholastic attainment.
Featuring on a television programme not too long ago, the renowned human rights lawyer, Mr Femi Falana (SAN), stressed that rather than cast aspersion on the character and integrity of judges because of their judicial decisions, Nigerians should advocate and clamour for fundamental changes in the extant electoral laws that judges have no choice but to interpret and apply. Incidentally, Falana is a severe critic of lapses that occurred in the conduct of the February 25 presidential and National Assembly elections. Even then, the point cannot be disputed that there can hardly be perfect elections anywhere in a community of fallible mortals.
But then, Chimamanda was not done. A few days before the Supreme Court delivered its October 25 judgement on the election petitions of Atiku and Obi against Tinubu’s election, she was the inaugural lecturer of the Africa World Lecture series of Princeton University in the US and Peter Obi was present at the event. Turning herself into a one-man electoral commission, Chimamanda told her audience: “I want to recognize the presence of a man I deeply respect and a man who I think is a beacon of hope not just for Nigeria but for Africa. And he’s the man who many of us know won the election in Nigeria”. She also averred “We had an election in February that was deeply flawed and we have a person who we’ve been told is a winner who did not win the election and this has been shown over and over, there’s evidence for this”.
This is the height of intellectual fraudulence and dishonesty. Chimamanda was deliberately lying to her audience, the majority of whom may be unfamiliar with the political realities of Nigeria. A central thrust of both the PEPC and the Supreme Court judgements was that the petitioners’ counsels were tardy and lazy in bringing before the courts credible evidence to demonstrate their allegations that the elections were rigged. The courts noted that neither Obi nor Atiku, for instance, called even one of their polling agents who were on ground in various polling units across the country and must have witnessed the alleged electoral refractions to give first-hand testimony in court. They rather relied on witnesses who gave what was no better than hearsay evidence before the courts. It is instructive that the apex court spent less than 10 minutes in dismissing Obi’s petition indicating its utter lack of merit.
No less acerbic, scurrilous and lacking in substance was a former Minister of Education in Nigeria and noted international bureaucrat, Mrs Oby Ezekwelisi’s response to the apex court’s decision on the election petitions. Reacting in a post on her official X handle to the Supreme Court judgement, she wrote, “Now we all know the true definition of a Criminal Enterprise Gang. Some would ask, “Where’s now the hope?” because what else can citizens who seek a Good Society now do in the light of judicial enthronement of criminality as an official norm? Well, take heart in this fact. History shows that every Criminal Enterprise carrie’s the seed of its eventual destruction”.
Beyond hurling insults and making baseless insinuations and innuendos, Oby Ezekwesili does not take on the Supreme Court judgement on facts or logic. The apex court gave reasons for its ruling against the petitioners in the seven issues formulated for them to adjudicate on. They gave reasons for their position on each of these issues and it is up to those who oppose them to provide superior arguments in the public domain rather than resort to cheap abuse and insults.
The apex court refused to admit the purported fresh evidence that Atiku sought to tender as regards Tinubu’s Chicago State University diploma citing both statutory time limitations as well as the fact that there was no reason for the petitioner not bringing such evidence up at the level of the PEPC as required by law. The Supreme Court is a policy Court and not a court of evidence as lawyers tell us. There was sufficient time to have done so right from when candidates submitted their personal details to INEC which published them for public scrutiny before the respective party primaries in accordance with the law.
In any case, even if the fresh evidence had been tendered at the PEPC and been part of the hearing, of what probative or utilitarian value would it have been as Dr Reuben Abati, himself a lawyer, recently asked on Arise TV ‘The Morning Show’ programme on which he is one of the anchors? Atiku and his team had chosen to make a mountain out of Tinubu’s CSU diploma molehill even after the school’s register had stated clearly in his deposition under oath that Tinubu was admitted into the institution as a male student in 1977 and graduated in 1979 with flying colors while also making public his transcripts.
Mischievous and ethnically motivated intellectuals like Chimamanda and Ezekwesili refuse to furnish the public with a persuasive, fact-based analysis on what pathway Obi, whose campaign was targeted at his Igbo kinsfolk like these two women as well as Christians opposed to the APC’s Muslim-Muslim ticket, could have won a national election in a complex, plural, multi-religious polity like Nigeria. Yes, he scored over 95% of the votes in his native South-East, won in the largely Christian states of Edo, Delta and Cross River in the South-South, won in cosmopolitan Lagos and Abuja with large clusters of Igbo and Christian votes while also winning in Christian dominated Nasarawa and Plateau states in the North-Central.
He equally performed impressively in Southern Kaduna although Atiku won that state in the presidential election with Tinubu coming a close second. But Obi’s votes in the electorally fertile North-East and North-West was negligible and with Tinubu’s victories in Benue, Kogi, Niger, Kwara in the North-Central, Obi lost to the President in the overall vote count in the zone. Just as Atiku won only two states in the South, Osun and Akwa-Ibom, Obi did not score up to 25% of the votes in any of the 19 states in the far North.
Neither Obi nor Atiku could realistically have won a nationwide presidential election with their parochially skewed electoral support base.
The performance of Obi and Atiku was unlike that of President Tinubu who won the highest number of votes in his native South-West, the North-Central and the North-West while coming a close second in the North-East which Atiku won and the South-South. It was only in the South-East that Tinubu performed abysmally, winning less than five per cent of the votes. Nobody can emerge winner in a presidential election in Nigeria without achieving an outright victory in at least three of the country’s six zones and scoring 25% of the votes in no less than two-thirds of the 36 states and the FCT.
In his comments on the presidential election in an interview in South Africa, Nobel Laureate, Professor Wole Soyinka, stated emphatically that Peter Obi did not win the polls but came third and that the leaders of the LP were very much aware of this truth. What they were engaged in by loudly and ceaselessly proclaiming victory in an election they so obviously lost despite an unexpectedly impressive performance was what Soyinka called ‘
‘Gbajue’ a Yoruba term for what he could rely on ‘the force of lies’.
It would appear to me that in their unreasonable, irrational and anti-intellectual outbursts, the likes of Ezekwesili and Chimamanda are deploying what the Yoruba call ‘Ogboju’; an attempt to force a syrup of falsehood down the throats of a vast majority of Nigerians through sheer intimidation, harassment, threats, insults and absurd illogic.
Their ethnically inspired diatribes detract from the stature of these women as enlightened, cosmopolitan and intellectually honest members of the professional elite. This attitude and disposition diminishes their Igbo ethnic group and makes the path to their much desired Igbo presidency in the near future a Herculean task.
