By Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.
Twitter: @farooqkperogi
The bewilderingly illogical and indefensible Supreme Court
judgement that handed over the governorship of Imo State to APC’s Hope Uzodinma—
who came fourth in the actual election— may appear to have no connection with
the Federal Government’s January 14 declaration of Amotekun as “illegal.” But
they are both parts of a well-rehearsed political choreography.
The Machiavellian political hawks around Muhammadu Buhari are
not prepared to allow the presidency to rotate to their informal coalition
partners in the Southwest in 2023—contrary to the gentleman’s agreement they reached
in 2014. What to do? Dissolve the coalition with the Southwest and build a new
one with the Southeast.
Northern politicians who want to retain power in the region
are now actively courting Southeast politicians to be junior partners in a 2023
coalition—like the Southwest has been since 2015. The brazenly immoral capture
of Imo State for APC using the instrumentality of the Supreme Court, which is
now indistinguishable from the Buhari Presidency, is part of this plan.
The judgement was, of course, predetermined. It didn’t even
pretend to be fair and just. It was merely the acting of a script that was
written in the Presidential Villa. Notice that since Ibrahim Tanko Muhammad was
illegally imposed as Chief Justice of Nigeria, most, if not all, Supreme Court
and Appeals Court judgments regarding elections have been "unanimous." There're no longer dissenting opinions or minority judgments.
In his interview with AriseTV in January 2019, Buhari
confessed that he rewarded 84-year-old retired Justice of the Court of Appeal
Sylvanus Nsofor with appointment as Nigeria’s ambassador to the US because he
wrote a “minority report” in his favor when he challenged his loss at the polls
in a previous election. Now, Buhari doesn’t want even minority reports or
dissenting opinions in favor of his opponents from judges.
We have an unprecedentedly total fascist takeover of the
judiciary, the kind that compelled the Supreme Court to award nullified rigged
votes to APC’s Hope Uzodinma even if by doing so the Supreme Court created an
astonishing numerical incongruity where the Supreme Court’s final vote tally is
now greater than the number of people INEC accredited to vote!
Brazenly pre-planned electoral heists are now the new normal,
which honchos of the regime had foretold before now. Recall that Secretary to the Government of the
Federation Boss Mustapha had on January 12, 2019 assured his audience in Gombe State
during a campaign speech that APC had already “won” the election that hadn’t
yet taken place. “We are only waiting for the announcement of the results,” he
said.
That wasn’t
rhetorical hyperbole; it was a classic Freudian slip, the type APC chairman
Adams Oshiomhole committed when he said, in the aftermath of APC’s
INEC-assisted rigging in Osun State, that democracy could only thrive when the
opposition is ready to “accept the pain of rigging.”
The Imo Supreme Court judicial rascality was a well-practiced
plot by the regime’s henchmen to make incursions into the Southeast in
preparation for 2023. And it might well work if Nigeria survives till 2023.
People in the Southeast— and in the South-south— are so aroused to deep resentment
by the Southwest’s support for Buhari in 2015 and 2019 that they might be willing
to be strategic underlings of an opportunistic political partnership with the
North if only to spite the Southwest.
And Amotekun has provided an opportune moment for the cabal
to dissolve its crisis-plagued political marriage with the Southwest. There are
few things into which Southwest politicians and electorates alike have invested
enormous emotional energy in recent times as Amotekun. And it’s easy to see
why. It’s about life and death. Self-preservation is the first law of nature.
It’s irrelevant if Amotekun is constitutional or
unconstitutional. You need to be alive to read the constitution. Only the
living debate legality and constitutionality. The seemingly never-ending
widening and deepening of the theaters of bloodshed in the country, occasioned
by the unrestrained sanguinary fury of homicidal marauders, in the face of the
inability or unwillingness of federal security forces to protect lives has made
Amotekun an issue on which most people in the Southwest won’t compromise.
The Buhari cabal loves this because heads or tails the
Southwest politicians will lose. If they come out strongly to support it, as
Governors Fayemi, Akeredolu, and Makinde are doing, they will be framed as
regional bigots who can’t be trusted to lead the country (never mind that
members of the cabal have themselves elevated retrograde regional chauvinism to
an art).
And Southwest politicians who oppose, are indifferent to, or
choose to speak from both sides of their mouth about, Amotekun will automatically
be cast as traitorous bastards by their people. A Southwest politician who is
rejected by his own people can’t be in contention for the presidency in 2023
since Northern Christians, the Igbo, and ethnic minorities from the South are
unlikely to support a Yoruba candidate in 2023—if that Yoruba candidate
supported Buhari in 2019.
This is different from former President Olusegun Obasanjo’s
case in 1999. His rejection by the Southwest actually aggrandized his pan-Nigerian
credentials and caused him to be accepted by other parts of the country. A
Southwest politician who is seen as a betrayer by his own people and who, in
addition, worked to install Buhari, easily the most divisive figure in Nigeria’s
history, would be a political burden in ways Obasanjo wasn’t in 1999.
As I pointed out in a December 22, 2019 social media update,
the cabal is toying with Bola Tinubu like a yo-yo—and he is naively, if
gingerly, playing along— in readiness for his eventual political incineration
by or before 2023. And the cabal is being ruthlessly Machiavellian about it.
Tinubu has been given a fake promissory note that he’ll be
APC’s presidential torchbearer in 2023. On the strength of this worthless
promissory note, they’ve sought his permission to destroy some of his most
trusted foot soldiers.
With his consent, they’ve consigned Yemi Osinbajo to
symbolic Aso Rock jail. Tinubu endorsed Tunde Fowler’s replacement at the FIRS
and is in on his impending trial for corruption. He also stamped his imprimatur
to Muiz Banire’s unceremonious ouster from AMCON. He’s giddily approving
everything the cabal tells him it wants to do to his “constituents” and foot
soldiers.
Also notice that he was summoned to the Presidential Villa
just a few days before Abubakar Malami declared Amotekun “illegal” and
“unconstitutional.” It won’t surprise me if it emerges that he endorsed
Malami’s statement. After all, he once asked “where are the cows?” when a
prominent Yoruba politician’s daughter was murdered last year.
He has now fallen out of favor with almost all Southwest
governors except his dutiful stooge in Lagos and his nephew in Osun. Of course,
he is a bête noire to Afenifere. At this rate, Tinubu would divorce his wife
and disown his children if the cabal tells him to do so—just because he’s told
that he’d be president.
This is a strategic, Machiavellian demobilization of his
base, but one in which he is a willing participant, using the illusory promise
of APC presidential nomination. When he is eventually denied the APC
presidential slot, he would have no one of political consequence in his natal
region to fall back to for counterattack other than his battering rams in the
Lagos media.
Before his eventual political annihilation, he would be
thoroughly unpopular in the Southwest. His fate would elicit no mass sympathy
from the region when the cabal finally bares its fangs publicly and devours
him.
To be sure, Tinubu is sensing danger, as we can tell from
the newfound, unaccustomed critical commentaries in his paper, but he is like a
moth that is irresistibly and fatally attracted to the flame that will
eventually burn it alive. The flame is the promise of the presidency.
Once he is politically crushed, and his opponents are cast
as provincial champions who can’t be trusted with the presidency, the cabal would
be justified to seek new collaborators from the Southeast—and the South-south.
In essence, the cabal would revive the North’s First Republic and Second
Republic alliances with the Igbo and Southern ethnic minorities and return the
Southwest back to opposition.
