Finally, the bullet that finally knocked off the pastor’s request/demand was the recommendation that additional states be created when any suggestion, worthy of any consideration at all, should have canvassed confederation, and a return to the old regions, or something similar, which would then act as the federating units
“INEC was not truthful on this point. INEC knew that a supplementary election was unnecessary in the circumstances. The electoral body was, and is still, in possession of records which show that in the affected 91 polling units, there were only 38,000 permanent voters cards (PVCs) issued. Of that figure, only 25,000 collected the cards. And at the November 21, 2015 election, only 19,000 persons were accredited in the affected units. The margin of win by Audu/Faleke ticket would, undoubtedly, have accommodated any of these figures with Audu/Faleke still leading by majority of votes. It can, therefore, be rightly concluded that the phony supplementary election was falsely devised to hoodwink the people of Kogi State and play the script of some powerful political interests at the expense of the will of the people of Kogi” – Olarinde Yesufu, a legal analyst, writing on the topic: Kogi – Inaugurating Bello as governor will be unconstitutional in The Nation of 21st Jan, 2015.
It goes without saying that the above epigram does not speak to today’s topic but it galls to high heavens reading the very pedestrian argument of Dr Oluwayomi David Atte, a University of Ibadan- trained development scholar you’d expect to be much more liberated, trying to justify INEC’s premeditated, but thoroughly illogical declaration of the Kogi governorship election as inconclusive, on the laughable excuse that Faleke is not known in Kogi. Even if this outlandish claim were true, and not merely playing to the ‘come and chop’ tradition of most Kogi State politicians always talking from both sides of their mouths, where was he when Faleke emerged the deputy gubernatorial candidate to Prince Audu? Does he know better than the late Audu who, with considerable justification, can be described as the godfather of Kogi politics far ahead of the likes of Idris or the simple hearted Wada? Was Atte away on Mars or where can we locate his objection to that selection if he wants to be taken serious? Of course, he must have been too patronising of Prince Audu to have the liver to complain. It’s a shame that the likes of Atte, Clarence Obafemi and Dino Melaye, have, with their volte face, further demonstrated how effete the average Kogi politician, many of who were implicated in Obasanjo’s shoot down of a decent Chief Sunday Awoniyi who, it was, who first described PDP as an aggregation of very venal people, is. It is obvious to the unbiased that INEC was arms twisted to do what it did as the same thing happened in the last Bayelsa election without any such unreasonable decision. One can only hope that APC will not, by its own hands, snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. It is germane to mention that in the case between Wada, Faleke and INEC, the trial judge specifically said that its decision had nothing to do with INEC’s failure to declare the election result or on the substitution of candidates.
With all due respect to their eminences, Bishop Matthew Kukah of the Sokoto Catholic Diocese and Pastor Bakare of The Latter Rain Assembly, it can be safely concluded that the way they venerate, and purvey, elements of former President Goodluck Jonathan’s recondite policies and actions in office, can only be a consequence of our Lord’s teachings about the Christian love. “And one of the scribes came, and having heard them reasoning together, and perceiving that he had answered them well asked him: which is the first commandment of all?” To which Jesus answered: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord. And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul, and with thy entire mind and with all thy strength: this is the first commandment. And the second is like, namely this: thou shall love thy neighbour as thyself”. “There is none other commandment greater than these” – Mark 12: 28-31. While Bishop Kukah has severally exonerated the former president on all he did in office, Pastor Bakare, like most members of his core group in the Jonathan National Conference of 2014, has continued to present the recommendations of that talkshop as a silver bullet to all of Nigeria’s problems regardless of its dramatic, but shadowy origins, its skewed membership and the fact that neither the president nor his political party, the PDP, considered it important enough to be made a campaign issue.
The pastor has again come out calling on his friend, President Mohammadu Buhari, to adopt the conference decisions as the way forward for Nigeria, conveniently forgetting that despite the president’s party giving the confab a wide berth, Nigerians in their millions, still voted him as their president while sending Goodluck Jonathan out of office. If only for this, I expect Pastor Bakare to understand that Nigerians know exactly what they want.
The pastor hoisted his latest call on the following grounds:
(1) That promise of true federalism is contained in Article 14 of the Nigerian Charter for National Reconciliation and Integration, which was unanimously adopted and signed by the delegates to the 2014 National Conference;
(2) That although the report may have been produced under a PDP government but it is not a PDP document. It is a Nigerian people’s document;
(3) That it will be comparable to Buhari’s adoption of some of Jonathan’s policies, e.g the Integrated Personnel and Payroll Information System, IPPIS and the Treasury Single Account, TSA, and,
(4) That the need for diversification also brings to the fore the question of viability of states in relation to the need for economies of scale.
Let me now take them serially:
As implied in Chief Obafemi Awolowo reference to Thesis and antithesis at the UPN 1983 congress in Abeokuta, Ogun State, a critical analysis of Pastor Bakare’s grounds renders his plea dead on arrival. Concerning no.1, the pastor cannot in all honesty claim that the recommendations of a politically- manipulated national conference can, in any way, be superior to the tomes patriotic Nigerians have, in the past, came up with after some sober interrogation of our multifarious problems as a country. That of Obasanjo was a gem until inordinate ambition killed it.
It is in his no.2 argument that Pastor Bakare very, uncharacteristically, missed it. How really pan-Nigerian was the Jonathan conference? In the certainty that he knows all about that conference, let me remind him and inform Nigerians of the following: the Jonathan Conference was borne out of crass political opportunism. It was not only initiated, but kick started and controlled, throughout, by Afenifere, aided by those they selected from other parts of the country. They actually corruptly interfered with some state nominations. In the specific case of Ekiti, Chief Deji Fasuan, nominated by the governor, Dr Kayode Fayemi, as the state’s leader, was substituted by them and their traditional ally, my friend, Dr Kunle Olajide, brought in. I am not sure Senator Durojaiye, very experienced as he is, did not suffer the same fate. I knew, as a matter of fact, that Dr Fayemi, visited President Jonathan to protest this callous infraction but to no avail. It was under this crass manipulation that Ogun State came to have the highest number of delegates, countrywide, at 19. They donated a member of their group to kick start the entire process and were, in fact, not far from its very leadership. They then proceeded to include all manner of organisations whose delegates’ selection they influenced. So, Pastor Bakare, how truly pan-Nigerian was the Jonathan conference?
Concerning no.3, I expect that if nobody knows it at all, Pastor Bakare should know that these and other adopted policies were neither the ideas nor the outcome of cheap political opportunism but programmes which emerged after long and thorough interrogations by appropriately qualified professional appointees of government who not only have the expertise but are most likely to have seen them in practice in the civilised world. They were not constructed as some deu ex machina aimed at freeing some people from any political Siberia.
Finally, the bullet that finally knocked off the pastor’s request/demand was the recommendation that additional states be created when any suggestion, worthy of any consideration at all, should have canvassed confederation, and a return to the old regions, or something similar, which would then act as the federating units. Without a shred of doubt, restructuring Nigeria is an urgent desideratum, but certainly not on the model arrived at the Jonathan National Conference.
NATION
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