As terminus ad quo, the truth remains that Emeka Ihedioha did not win the election. He did not even win two third of local governments which was supposed to be 18. Yet he was declared winner against all known principles of law.
Ihedioha having been declared winner under such an uncommon circumstance shouldn’t have resorted to vendetta as a primal course of action. He had only two viable options:
I. Aligning with the centre which will include none interference with the immediate past governor’s projects and person…
ii. Going back to drawing board, bearing in mind he was only declared winner , but the election is still on in the 318 polling units where elections were cancelled.
Recall that Ihedioha’s real challenger; Uche Nwosu who was AA candidate and Rochas’ inlaw withdrew his case and 318 polling units where elections were cancelled and Hope was claiming victory with evidence of original results sheets were computed and that gave him victory.
Legal practitioners will be asking how was the result for this 318 polling units collated? Who and who signed the results?
Political thinkers like us will be asking what effort or machinery did Ihedioha put in place to reach out to the agents who worked in this controversial centres immediately he was declared winner?
He was banking on the court to set the result aside, such banking system is risky and it could swing either way. Thus, it would have been safer if he reached out to the 318 polling officers as a management method.
Thus, he paved way for the victory of Uzodimma the moment he ignored the result Hope Uzodimma the executive governor of Imo State was presenting before the court.
He didn’t even generate a parallel result as a possible panasea to the looming danger. As s former executive governor of Imo State this options were before him and he has every machinery at his disposal to achieve same and present to the court.
Now if the 318 result presented by Governor Hope Uzodimma is not correct, then which one is? Or were his agents not in the polling units when the results were being collated?
Rt. Hon. Emeka Ihedioha started out with a lot of vindictive actions without proper grip on POWER. This made his opponents to realign with Rochas back to APC and the AA guy gave backing to Hope at the Supreme Court by withdrawing and paving way for Hope to become the real challenger.
This for me is capitalising on possible openings created by Ihedioha, it does not require any spirituality. Any good political philosopher or scientist could simply read into this and know is technically over for Hon. Ihedioha.
Mbaka: Supreme Court Technicality, Jeopardy & My Hopelessness…
This was simply high wired politics, any loophole can be exploited to achieve a desirable result.
Note well, “the exclusion of the results of those polling units was the fulcrum of the petition presented at the Tribunal by Hope Uzodinma. Ever since David Mark V. ABUBAKAR USMAN, and DOMA V. INEC, the law has been settled that neither collation officers nor a returning officer, has the power in law to exclude a polling unit result duly signed by the presiding officer at the polling unit; only the election tribunal possesses the power to cancel or exclude such a result.”
This scenario presented even before American Apex Court may not yield a different result, since the court do not really question the method of which evidence was obtained as a principle of law.
‘”The Supreme court simply looked at the evidence as adduced by Uzodinma at the tribunal where he contended that the results from the various units in Imo state duly signed by the INEC officials and all the party agents shows that he won the valid votes cast.
These results were tendered and admitted by the tribunal. What the Supreme court simply did was to look at the genuiness of those results and concluded that they were wrongly excluded.
These votes were therefore added to all the candidates votes and the end result saw Uzodinma of the APC leading and he was consequently declared the winner with ease.
The apex court declared that the 236,600 votes due to Senator Uzodinma was unlawfully excluded from the 318 polling units and be added to his votes.
APC: Hope Uzodinma = 96,458 + 236,600 = 333,058
PDP: Ihedioha Emeka 273,404
APGA: Ifeanyi Ararume 114,676″.
Meanwhile, there was no any other result before Justice Tanko of the Supreme Court save the one presented by Hope Uzodimma. One cannot therefore accuse the court of throwing any result away or refusing to accept parallel result.
This is why I maintained that Emeka Ihedioha gave Hope Uzodimma victory and not the Supreme Court or Rev. Fr. Ejike Mbaka.
Hope Uzodimma displayed great political prowess in arguing his Hopeless case before the Hopeful Court and got an anticipated result.
Imo State people should accept their new governor and hope that he devout same energy with which he upturned the election to transform their state.
Sir. Augustine Ike (KSJI)-Ikedoji
Publicity Secretary Nzuko Ora Nnewi