Ekiti 2018: Oni’s legal action and matters arising

For those who have been conversant with the twists and turns of Ekiti State politics, most specifically among members of the All Progressives Congress (APC) in their preparations for the July 14, 2018 governorship election, the very recent development and awareness that Chief Segun Oni had filed a lawsuit against his party and Dr. John Kayode Fyemi (the party’s flagbearer) coming about two weeks to the governorship poll cannot be more perplexing and head spinning.

Most people (like yours truly) probably first dismissed the news as fake when it barged into the public domain. As if the possibility of a litigation at this eleventh hour of the election date was not enough to trouble the soul, watchers of Ekiti politics became even more discomfited when they learned that APC leaders in the Southwest geo-political region had issued a press statement in which they not only condemned the litigation, but were very emphatic in their support for Fayemi’s candidacy and asked Chief Oni to publicly dissociate himself from the lawsuit despite the latter’s earlier report in which he distanced himself from this bizarre development.

The real confusion soon set in as to whether what these watchers saw flying across Ekiti skies was a plane or a bird, in a manner of speaking. Then entered Otunba Ben Oguntuase (who, for all intensive purposes, can be described as Oni’s Chief of Staff, if not his other brain — with no pun intended) into the public space with a treatise that identified for us what the flying object was. It was indeed a cargo plane packed with legal papers on its way to the APC secretariat in the state capital and Isan-Ekiti to drop off its cargoes that has to do with a lawsuit that had been instituted by none other than the immediate past Deputy National Chairman (South) of APC, Chief Segun Oni. And all this happened within a 24-hour period.

Since we have been counselled by Oguntuase to look at the merits of a litigation that not a few — including the party hierarchy in the Southwest and quite possibly the presidency — have emotively concluded as having all the hallmarks of everything reprehensible, distasteful and also reeks of “bad belle,” the onus, therefore, is on us mere mortals who would rather prefer to remain in the bottom rung of the democratic ideals because we have no (or at least have very little) understanding of the democratic tenets, to step up our understanding that Segun Oni’s litigation “might actually be doing the party a huge favour” which would, therefore, ennoble all of us, thereby deepening our nascent democracy.

To be sure, Oguntuase’s strong exception (in his submission) to a litigation that has offended the collective sensibilities of the party and most, if not virtually all its members can be hinged on three main pedestals. The first and major one is the judicial interpretation and determination of two main issues in the suit; one of which is whether an appointed officer (in reference to Fayemi) of government should “resign the appointment before contesting any election” while the other (also targeted at the APC candidate) “is whether or not a criminal indictment by a state or federal government constitutes a moral burden to overcome while seeking a public office.”

The second is what seems to have been (in Oguntuase’s mind) a hasty rejection and condemnation of the suit by leaders of APC in the Southwest and their unflinching support for Fayemi to fly the party’s flag in the July 14 election, while the third is this recurring decimal of what has now been dubbed Fayemi’s policy of “isolate and marginalize” Oni’s supporters even prior to the candidate’s victory from the primary.

While not an attorney, and one is in agreement with Oguntuase that it is the courts that have the final say about this lawsuit, Oni’s prayer for the judicial determination of whether or not Fayemi properly and legitimately resigned his ministerial appointment before contesting the party’s primary election in which he emerged victorious has sinister and mischievous motives behind it. This is because of the fact that this resignation matter was hotly debated in the run-up to the party primary election in which the then minister — through several public pronouncements which were never disputed — said that the rule(s) that guides his resignation as a minister of the federal republic stipulates 30 days to the general election (bold italics mine for emphasis) which is July 14th as opposed to the primary election which was just a prelude to the governorship election. Fayemi resigned his appointment several weeks before the party’s primary, not to talk of the July 14th governorship election. So, the APC candidate was within the ambit of the rule(s) when he resigned his ministerial appointment.

What is more, considering a primary election that was anything but a fight to finish by all the aspirants, if not a gang up against Fayemi, one wonders how any of the aspirants, including Segun Oni, would have missed the opportunity to stop the primary in its tracks through the court if they believed that Fayemi was trying to hold on to his ministerial portfolio as an “insurance policy in the event of failure” as Oguntuase would want us to believe. It should also be emphasized here that there was absolutely no guarantee of victory for Fayemi when he resigned his appointment to contest the primary election in which delegates had the freedom and liberty to gift the ticket to whomever they saw fit among the aspirants, including Chief Segun Oni. So, the question that someone may have held a “subsisting public office to underwrite the risk of failure” does not, and should not, have risen in this circumstance because Fayemi duly resigned his appointment prior to the primary election which he was not under any obligation to have done as long as he met the 30 days requirement to the state-wide governorship election.

Oni’s other prayer in this litigation (according to Oguntuase) is indecent — to put it mildly — in the sense that this particular insertion into the suit as to “whether or not a criminal indictment by a state or federal government constitutes a moral burden to overcome while seeking a public office” (a reference to Fayose’s so-called White Paper) should not have merited a debate of any kind, let alone a lawsuit, because not only was this particular issue also debated almost to exhaustion by the aspirants and several independent legal minds in the run-up to the party’s primary. More importantly, the judiciary in which Oni is seeking a determination had already established quite a few precedents on very similar matters.

For instance, it would be recalled that a court of competent jurisdiction overturned a 2004 indictment against former Kano State governor and governorship candidate of the Peoples’ Democratic Party (PDP) in which Kwankwaso was alleged to have wasted his state’s ecological funds while in office and for not disclosing the fact of an indictment by his successor government while filling an affidavit issued by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC). Hassan Indabawa, the plaintiff, whose prayer was that Kwankwaso should be disqualified from the April 2011 governorship election because of his indictment by a Commission of Inquiry constituted by the Kano government. The court simply struck out the case for lack of merit. Also, the Supreme Court had also ruled in a case that sought to bar Atiku Abubakar from contesting the 2007 presidential election in which the Apex Court said that only a competent court of jurisdiction can disqualify a candidate in a political contest. Therefore, if these precedents already exist, one wonders why the same prayer with this suit?

It probably would have been grossly irresponsible of APC leaders in the Southwest geo-political zone not to have swiftly reacted the way they did in a clear case of mischief, if not a deliberate attempt to torpedo their hard works not only in their efforts to establish cohesion among party members, but in their desire for victory for the party in the forthcoming election with such a frivolous suit. The leaders would have known what to do had Oni told them in no uncertain terms that his personal interest was of paramount importance and not the party’s during the several meetings they had with him and other aspirants prior to and after the primaries both in Lagos and Abuja where they all agreed to support whoever emerged the winner.

How can anyone believe Oguntuase in his submission that Oni is also “committed to working for the total victory of the APC candidate, Dr. Kayode Fayemi” in spite of this lawsuit? If Oguntuase, as well as Oni “knows too well that there is no miracle by which this case can be determined by July 14, 2018,” then why filing the suit in the first place? Why should Segun Oni, who defected from the PDP and within months, was meteorically catapulted into the highest organ of the party at the expense of several others who kept faith with the party through thick and thin before its final metamorphosis, be the one to reward the party with a litigation that is legally unnecessary, if not unrealistic and morally untenable, if not repulsive? One wonders if Oni’s camp thought of the unintended consequence (or was it intended) of this suit on APC votes on election day in which the opposition could prevail on the electorates (who are still largely uninformed, if not gullible) not to waste their votes as the court was definitely going to disqualify Fayemi because one of his own had filed a suit against him.

Oguntuase’s seeming deep-seated scepticism of Fayemi’s promise of inclusivity after his emergence from the primary, which he immediately demonstrated by setting up a Campaign Council of about 77 members in which Segun Oni and some of his supporters are members was unfortunate. His assertion that there seems to be a deliberate policy of “isolate and marginalize” by Fayemi and his camp has no basis in fact. It is further from the truth. One must wonder if the cries of isolation and marginalization of Oni’s supporters when there’s none even before Fayemi won the primary election was not a clever, but insidious strategy to blackmail and force the candidate’s hands when he becomes the governor. Why is this issue so strident and prevalent only in Oni’s camp when the election is yet to be won in the first place? Could it be said that all these psycho-emotional and legal torments from Oni’s camp is indicative of its belief that its principal should have won the party’s primary election at all costs?

While one hopes that this case is quickly dispensed with by being thrown into the court’s waste bin before the governorship election, perhaps, the newly elected organ of the All Progressives Congress (APC) under a new Chairman should take advantage of this unfortunate development in Ekiti State to truly sanitize the party with a deliberate policy of purging its rank and file of recalcitrant elements who can never see themselves subsuming their personal political interests within the party’s interest. Any organization that lacks, or whose members observe its codes of ethics and conduct in the breach cannot be expected to go far in its set goals.

It is time that the country’s political players identified, stay true to their core values and political philosophies, then look for political parties that best approximates these values and political philosophies and stay in them in relative permanence. It is just so annoying, if not discouraging that there exists such a virulent opposition within the party than all the other opposition political parties combined.

Femi Odere is a media practitioner. He can be reached at [email protected]