Snatch Ye First The Office And…

The pattern that is clearly emerging is that any governor whose election is nullified by the Appeal Court (which is the final arbiter in all gubernatorial matters) will return to that seat. So far, we have two cases to support this thesis. The first of the cases was the Ibrahim Idris election re – run in Kogi State, while the second was that of Murtala Nyako in Adamawa State.

On the strength of this thesis, it is guaranteed that Timpere Sylva will return as governor in Bayelsa State, just as Magathakada Wammako will surely get his seat back in Sokoto State. Except in constitutional matters where the Supreme Court declared outright the removal of sitting governors, (such as Andy Uba of Anambra State and Celestine Omehia of Rivers State, who stole the constitutional rights of others to get into office) and their immediate replacement by the rightful candiditates, if the verdict of the court is for an election re-run, the deposed candidate in the current dispensation will surely come back to the seat. Why and how does it happen that way? Very simple.

The reason it will always turn out that way can be located in the enormous power a governor wields. Most important element in this is the power of money and patronage. Being a governor in Nigeria just for six months grants the incumbent an unimaginable power over any and all his opponents in any election re-run.

There is no state government that does not have at least N 3 billion as monthly income. In six months, that is a whooping N 18 billion. In some of the Niger Delta states, the monthly income is as much as N 25 billion. As it is well-known, the portion of the income which is not available to the governor to spend as he wills is personnel cost, which is hardly up to half of what they get monthly.

What the governors do basically is to use state resources to secure firm control of their political parties, court significant power brokers and godfathers in their state and buy the loyalty of their Houses of Assembly. In this calculation, the Speaker of the House of Assembly is King, because the governor knows that it is the Speaker that will act as governor if and when his fraudulent election is nullified.

So much now is the power of the Speaker of any House of Assembly in a State the election of whose governor is being contested in the court, that you see the governor grovel and genuflect before the Speaker even in public functions.

With the party machinery, the Speaker of the House of Assembly and the powerbrokers in the state in the pocket of the governor, an election re-run is to the deposed governor like the pleasurable early morning jogging that health conscious people do to prolong their lives.

Prolonging (or rather, elongating) the tenure of the governor is what an election re-run actually does. Given the Supreme Court’s landmark judgment in the Peter Obi case of April last year, the tenure of any elected state official takes effect from the date he / she is sworn into office. Thus, the nearly one year or more that a governor who wins an election re-run has spent in office prior to the nullification of his election is bonus to him and not counted as part of his new tenure.

By default, therefore, a governor legally proven to have stolen his mandate is rewarded with a longer tenure in office than one who is not legally found wanton. This is yet another instance, among several others, in Nigeria where evil seems to pay.

The dictum, therefore, is snatch first – by hook or crook, by any do or die means – the office of the governor (and as we shall soon see, the office of the president), and you shall be perpetuated in it. Thus, in perversion of Matthew 11:12, the political kingdom in Nigeria “suffereth violence and the violent take it by force”. And this precisely is the great mark of a political order that will not last.

What is now manifest is that in the current political dispensation, the judiciary can always have its say, but the men of means and power will always have their way. In real terms, therefore, judicial pronouncements on gubernatorial matters will be made of no effect by the power of politics and the politics of power.

But as it has been said and as history has confirmed, those who make peaceful (and I add, legal) change impossible make violent change inevitable. For sure, this evil temple will not stand for long.