Akwa Ibom And The Legal Consequences Of Delegated Desires -By Ugar Usem

Governor Udom Emmanuel

If a state was created for peace it is Akwa Ibom State. If a citizenry has generally practiced the science of being in peace with one another, it is the peoples of Akwa Ibom State. Since the creation of the state in 1987, the peoples of Akwa Ibom have been, and this perhaps more than any other Nigerian state and its peoples, at peace. It was a peace arrived at by a consensus of the parties at play, and the interests in contention.

And since all parties were in it and all interests as humanly possible taken into account, Akwa Ibom turned up a natural haven for peace and political tranquility. So literally Akwa Ibom politically engineered as stable and working powerhouse, has gotten into, in fact was racing on the runway, poised for the next phase of industrial takeoff. It is a takeoff to be piloted by the current administration, led by its Governor Udom Emmanuel. For Udom the game is to drive and deliver Akwa Ibom to a cruising speed as an integrated and integral economic miracle. His vision and horizon is to transform Akwa Ibom into a model of a shared greatness and goodness. The plan is to unleash the bottled-in capacities of the citizens and have the average Akwa Ibom see personal and thus state greatness as a staple, not a specialty. It is this capacity to work on man as the supreme resource that made America a super power. Simply put if the powers of the individual is released, not even the frontiers can stop him. This is Udom’s first mandate vision for Akwa Ibom and he has started on achieving results.

But all that is about to change. And with the change is that one of the key centers of the production of the nation’s wealth may be thrown into political and sectarian chaos and the attended national and possibly international consequences. The details of whom the culprits this destructive design are not perhaps as clear as daylight, but only perhaps. However despite the fog and shadows, one could trace out the powerful images of political destroyers in human form, or in party formation.

And that image is made in the mold of the loud opposition party, the APC and its key functionaries. But first, a certain background. Now it is a notorious fact that the Nigerian appellate courts on matters concerning election and related petitions have earned an odious name. One indisputable fact is clear in this. It is that this self-de-robing of the appellate judiciary has been insistent and is occurring, perhaps studiedly, in the era under the president Mohammed Buhari and his APC party machinery. Under the last dispensation nobody ever considered or insinuated the judiciary at its first instance, or appellate levels was under the white smoke of pontifical or ‘sheriffical’ interferences.

But as we write the matter appellate court has so fouled things up that even the Chief Justice of the nation has spoken in disgust. He has not only questioned the visceral or choreographed discrepancies in the same levels of juridical dispensation but thundered it must be brought to a halt.

And one can’t blame the Chief Justice. Otherwise how does one explain the riotous conflict and irrational sense of justice in one jurisdiction as exemplified by the following: in a Lagos APC-Akinwunmi Ambode versus PDP-Jimi Agbaje verdict, the court held that card readers are issues of no importance? And the appellate courts ruled accordingly. But in a mysterious if not shameful flip flop the same level of appellate justice held that the card reader was a matter of political life and death in Akwa Ibom. In consequence the court mystifyingly ordered fresh elections. And apparently the ‘revered judges’ acted in independence or were guided by certain invisible hands?

Well if you believed in that independence then you have not been Nigerian or perhaps have been but in coma, political coma. Now you need to wake up to the following data and facts. Just like the bible said it is from the abundance of the heart that the mouth speaks. So when Chief John Oyegun the current Chairman of APC, couldn’t hold himself he let out his party’s innermost secret, the recesses of its heart. In his own confession, Akwa Ibom and Rivers States are two states so geopolitically critical they must be won by the APC. That is the fate of these two states can’t be left in the hands of their voters and citizens to decide whom will rule them. To put it blankly for Oyegun who will rule Akwa Ibom and Rivers will have to be determined and fixed in Abuja by party not electorate.

Now the following has to be clear. Chief Oyegun as current scarecrow of APC is only a mouthpiece, the mouth of a dark and mischievous heart. So who are this heart? They are a dark and darkening inner conclave of the opposition, the APC.

Their scheme is to aggregate all powers in their hands and claim it leads to clean morality. But to do this they first of all have to compromise or at least put the judicial process into ridicule. And the way of doing this is through the concept of delegated desires.

And it goes like this. A henchmen or party comes and propagates that they are the messiah or Mahdi. And they bounce about and begin to do things that are clearly illegal and claim that they are acting beyond good and evil on a forged promise of paradise. But that paradise they promised never comes and they not being angels know it is all lies. Theirs is perhaps to grab power and be dictators.

It is with these lies projected as truths that they dramatize that they are unto a higher mission, a mission higher and above the judiciary or that part of her that lack moral spines. So while there are no memos directing the judiciary to self-immolate themselves, the demand to do so is provocatively suggested as a self-evident demand. And by fact that they are bent on dictatorial powers anyway, the judiciary is warned or cowed. It dictates: This is what we want if you are to be in my good books.

– Usem is a Lagos based minority rights expert. He may be reached on ugarusem.yahoo.co.uk