Labour Party: You cannot put something on nothing

“Some people even suggest that the gunmen who went to attack a checkpoint at my hometown on Saturday12th November but were gunned down was part of the mob reaction” – Anambra state governor, Charles Soludo
It will be nice if, in view of the above, the Presidential Election Petition Court (PEPC) will please stop these ruffians – with ‘crab mentality’ – from coming to the court lest Obidients, IPOB and sundry Unknown Gun Men turn the place to a killing field.

Peter Obi, his Obidients and their sundry associates have, since INEC declared Ashiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu winner of the February 25, 2023 Presidential elections, shouted themselves hoarse over what they like to call a ‘stolen mandate’. Readers of this column will remember that I have long ago written on these pages that Peter Obi, the Labour party presidential candidate who would later place a distant third in the elections – behind the winner and Alhaji Atiku Abubakar of the PDP – had no path, whatsoever, to victory. I had equally written that there was no way he was going to secure 25 per cent of votes in more than 16 states. My third prediction, cognizant of the fact that he would, as is the practice in the Southeast, be credited with a minimum of between 85 – 99 per cent of votes there, was that it would still be of no moment in his illusory hope of winning the election because the entire voting population in the entire 5 Southeast states would, at best, equal that of one single state in the NorthWest or the Northeast where he is almost practically an unknown.

And it happened!

President open letter
But give it to him – thanks to his Christian brethren and Igbo ubiquity – he ended up scoring the millions I had imagined were far beyond his ken.

But even that could only place him two million plus votes behind the winner, Ashiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu.

They have since made all manner of claims as to how Obi’s votes were under- reported and credited to the APC.

Nigerians have since asked that they place that before the tribunal, complete with a tabulation of the votes he scored in the 36 states and the FCT.

It is fascinating that one of the States where Obi claims that this happened is Lagos state. On the contrary, however, what is in the public space, sourced from the blog of somebody who is unlikely to be anti – Labour party, and which shows that Obi did not win Lagos state, is as follows:

In my article: ‘The Peter Obi Revolution That Atrophied Midway’, 26 March, 2023, I wrote: “Talking about a miracle reminds me of an interesting WhatsApp post I saw during the giddy days of a supposed Labour party victory in Lagos.

It reads as follows: “LindaIkejiblog Official INEC Result for Amuwo Odofin LGA in the Presidential election”.

Whoever shared it commented as follows:“Amuwo Odofin!!!

Please check the number of Regisrered Voters – 322,600 and the number of Accredited Voters 57, 530.

Add Obi’s 55, 547 to Tinubu’s 13, 318! Don’t even bother with the rest! We are beginning to see how Obi “won” Lagos”.

But I bothered with the rest. I did the additions of all party votes, and the following is what I got:

“Total number of registered voters – 322.600.

“Total number of accredited voters – 57,530.

Votes:

APC – 13, 318

PDP – 2, 383

LP – 55, 547

Others – 1, 161

Total votes cast – 72, 409

Reg. voters -57,530

Over voting 14879″.

What does the Election Tribunal do in cases of over voting? It automatically cancels the election.

Therefore, if you take away LP’s 55,547 votes from its overall tally in Lagos, it becomes obvious that Labour did not win in Lagos.

The Amuwo Odofin incident must have been repeated elsewhere in the state.

But how hollow Labour party really is showed up in the subsequent elections when, the youths, the bishops and the pastors, have abandoned the sinking Titanic.

In the Southeast where Obi had high 80’s & 90’s in the Presidential election, 4 out of the 5 states completely deserted him just as he woefully lost to APGA in Anambra where he was governor for 8 years.

Now we hear he is raising issues on Rivers and Imo state results.

The respondent’s lawyers should equally ask questions, not only on the entire Lagos state election, but on all Southeast states because that is an area where election officials, native to the region, were literally all held captive by the illusion of helping to produce a Nigerian president of Igbo extraction even when their politics remains completely insular.

So from where did Obi secure his much lamented mandate?

In the Christian areas where he weaponised religion, working in cahoots with the likes of Babachir Lawal, the votes he got were soon ‘eaten’ up and subsumed by the huge figures the APC recorded in the NorthWest and the North central.

The election results for Labour and APC are summarised below: LABOUR PARTY.

President- 0

Senate – 7 seats.

House of Reps -34.

Governor- 1

State Assembly seats- 38.

If Labour party could secure victory in only 7 senatorial districts, out of 109, in an election that took place, same day and same time, where was Obi’s victory in the Presidential election expected to come from?

Can he put something on nothing?

Or are they so logic challenged?

It is this logical reasoning, which is not common among Obidients, that led one of them, in a WhatsApp post, to ask Peter Obi why, rather than provide figure showing how he won the election, all he put across to the election tribunal are how the President – Elect emerged candidate of APC, and why he was declared elected when he did not score 25 per cent of Abuja votes. Funny enough, not even the five who recently filed a case at an Abuja High court against the President – Elect being sworn in, for not scoring 25 per cent of Abuja votes, even though lawyers, or have lawyers representing them, knew that apart from the Abuja issue already being before the election tribunal, there is a subsisting court decision to the effect that Abuja is the equivalent of any other Nigerian state and, therefore, has no such superior status as is being arrogated to it.

So I ask Obidients: Quo vadis?

While this question goes, primarily, to Obidients, it also applies to Ndigbo in general. I am darn too small to attempt answering a question directed at such an unarguably brilliant, sagacious and enterprising Igbo race.

Let us, therefore, press into service, a very educated and patriotic Igbo gentleman to help us.

I refer here to former Enugu state governor Chimaroke Nnamani who has spared considerable time thinking through the problem with contemporary Igbo, as he attempts to offer a way out of the Igbo conundrum.

Below are some of his views in an interview captioned “Reflect On (the) Looming Reality of Tinubu’s Presidency” which I enjoin interested persons to Google.

Said the senator:“The fact that a government can be formed with virtually zero input from Igbo land saddens me. It means that the Igbo leadership has failed. The wrong people have led us; jobbers and mediocres have led us. When you get to the table, jobbers and mediocres negotiate for us because the Igbo man appears to be intimidated by intellect.

We were in total control – the army, the police, external affairs, banking industry, the economic sector; name it. Ndigbo were number one in this country, today it is arguable whether we are three or four. Remember we were in control, University of Lagos, University of Ibadan, University of Nigeria, but we lost everything. Others have done everything possible to displace Igbo intelligentsia, so that those who argue for us are not intellectually equipped. Those who have no certificate were talking for us. The Igbo first eleven never showed up in the past sixteen years in this country. It was a gradual emasculation of the Igbo man. So traders or political frauds, fronting for people outside Igbo land are those we now associate with speaking for Igbo. The mediocres had no political ideology as they move from one party to the other. Privateers, people looking for one tariff or another, one contract or another; they became the Igbo elite. False elite, planted by outsiders. Igbo man now has to seek acclamation from outside Igbo land”.

And so on and so forth.

And for the solution, he says: “We need to have Igbo citizens’ conference! Who can facilitate such a meeting? Chekwas Okorie can do it. Ogbonnaya Onu can do it. We have to enter into the sanctum of power. Whether it is UPP, PDP or PDC, we have to find a way and gradually walk ourselves back to the centre of Nigerian politics. What are the criteria for attendance?

Merit and intellectual content of a man, brain is power. You can solve problems with brain, man is not just a mass of flesh; it is intellect. We want to send our best; not the confirmed mediocres. Mediocres that pander to the whims and caprices of non-Igbo; who seek acclamation in Abuja, carrying Ghana-must-go bags there, and come back to become leaders”.

But will the Obidients who think they already have an Igbo messiah in Peter Obi listen to this voice of reason? Beyond that, what of the infernal fear of the different killing groups who predominate Igbo land and who all seem to rally round Obi in the mistaken view that he is the messiah? To say anything contrary to the dominant view in the region about the election is to earn a death sentence. So in a thousand years these people will, surely, still be chorusing ‘Tinubu must not be sworn in”.