Bayo Adelabu, which Mandate Please?
Nigeria politicians are irrationally optimistic. So unreasonably optimistic which a friend calls ‘incurable optimism’. There is nothing wrong g in being positive and being optimistic about a project but this should be balanced with the truth and facts on the ground. Some things are so clear that one knows where he stands but Nigeria politicians live in self-denial and delusion, expecting to get water from a stone.
First, it was Atiku. The former VP and his supporters mostly from across the Niger, most of these internet rats with no PVC lived in self-denial until the highest court in the land dismissed their case with 3 terse short sentences which were perhaps the shortest Supreme Court judgment in history.
This was an election that was so clean and clear but Atiku’s cohorts including his marabous and lawyers kept deceiving him and assuring him he has a diamond cast case. A case they knew was standing on false feet, a case that could not stand without crutches and crutches they couldn’t supply.
They premised their case on a tripod namely, the server, the certificate and election malpractices.
The certificate issue was well settled before the case, why bring it up? As for the server, the body that is purportedly owning the server says they don’t own one and you cannot show us where the sever is. And lawyers say it is trite in law when you assert you have to prove. All you could do was to produce a doctored result showing votes for only Atiku and PMB as if there were no other contestants in that election.
They went to Kenya of all places to bring an Internet expert to Nigeria when Nigeria is the most internet-savvy country in Africa. What nonsense. As for malpractices, there was no way they could have proved that in a country as big as Nigeria unless o widespread violence occurred.
All these coupled with the fact that there has never been a reversal of presidential elections in Nigeria. This is not peculiar to us; many countries try to avoid this because of unpredictable violence that may follow such judgment.
Yet the lawyers and marabouts dragged Atiku to his judicial and political Golgotha.
You need to see the smile on the face of his leading counsel after the Supreme Court dismissed their case, you would think Ozekhome was the counsel to Buhari. Such is life. They have made their money and left Atiku to leak his wounds.
Now Oyo state and this is even more absurd and weird than Atiku’s case. Why would anybody contest this election result in the first instance? What type of technicalities are they looking for to truncate the decision of the people?
My readers may recollect that I had sympathy for Adelabu during the campaign but since it became clear that Seyi Makinde won the election, I congratulated him.
What is anybody contesting in an election they lost 5 to 28 local governments. An election they lost 357,982 to 515, 621? A mandate electorate gave to Makinde with 59% votes?
That election was the only one PDP won in my word since the inception of this dispensation. When I saw that, I extrapolated and concluded it was up. PDP cleared all the polling booths along our axis and when I phoned contacts to ask for results, my hunch was confirmed, it was Makinde Hurricane all through,
I was therefore not surprised when results returned Makinde as the Governor with such a margin. Is this the election they are expecting a tribunal to overturn? Which mandate are they reclaiming? A mandate they were never given Ab initio? I ask because I read somewhere this morning where Adelabu was talking about a stolen mandate ‘freely given to him’. Who took whose mandate in an election your party had the governor and the president?
How do our minds work in this part of the world? No wonder the type of retrogressive leadership we have had for years. A presidential mind that would suddenly endorse a candidate he had castigated to be corruption personified, a candidate he had said believe that all problems are solvable with money.
Where is fairness, where is the truth? Where is integrity? Where is Godliness which we all profess? It appears these words are not in the dictionary of most of our politicians.
There is nothing to contest in this election and that was why the lower courts did not bother itself with the trailer load of documents brought by APC. The lower court judges like their seniors in the supreme Court rightly thought that that election was clean and clear enough and returned Makinde as the supreme court returned Buhari.
Their case has been made worse by the Governor’s superlative performance so far. They should leave Makinde to enjoy his earned victory and allow Oyo people to reap democracy dividends from the guy they voted for
I am old enough to witness how they started the political shenanigans of 1964 or thereabout. Let them be educated that Oyo State is the political headquarters of the Yorubas. We don’t want a repeat of wild-wild west.
The cobra is sleeping, please don’t touch her tail.
Jide Omiyale (SME Expert and Amateur Political analyst)
