No Amount of Intimidation Will Stop Ekweremadu, Supporters Insist

Gideon Arinze

Ahead of the 2023 governorship election in Enugu State, the campaign organisation of former Deputy President of the Senate, Senator Ike Ekweremadu has stressed that no amount of intimidation and court processes would deter him from contesting in the polls.

The organisation was reacting to what it described as plots by enemies of peace, democracy in Enugu State to use the courts to stop the aspiration of Ekweremadu to the governorship seat of Enugu State.

In a statement by its Director-General, Ogbonna Asogwa, the organisation said it has in its possession, court processes already filed at the Enugu State High Court, with the aim of using the Enugu State Judiciary to obtain an injunction barring the Senator from contesting the Enugu State gubernatorial election.

The organisation noted that in the suit marked E/254/2022, with Ekweremadu as the Respondent, the Applicant, Chief Oforma Mbannaji from Nike (For himself and on behalf of other members of Enugu East Senatorial District, Enugu State) wants the former Deputy President stopped based on a zoning agreement supposedly reached at an expanded caucus meeting of the Enugu State Chapter of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) on July 7, 2013.

The matter filed by the Applicant’s counsel, Dr. Peter Aneke, who also hails from Nike, was expected to be heard by Justice Harold Eya on April 28, 2022.

In its reaction, the organisation said the move by Mbannaji was yet another display of unmitigated and unconscionable desperation by a people hell-bent on ridiculing and desecrating virtually all critical institutions of democracy just to stop Ekweremadu’s aspiration and impose their lackeys and relations on the people of Enugu State.

 “Their festival of lawlessness has seen the State House of Assembly, Local Government Council Chairmen, Town Unions, and lately the Enugu State Council of Traditional Rulers, and, in fact, almost every institution that our people hold in high reverence, needlessly dragged into and ridiculed by their reckless 2023 plots.

“Even institutions that have remained apolitical since ages have been both compelled and induced into issuing communiqués purportedly upholding an inexistent zoning arrangement, while those who resisted their plots have been threatened, detained in prison and or sanctioned,” the organisation said.

It noted that the attempt to drag the Enugu State and Nigerian judiciary into the plots was the height of it and one that the Enugu State Judiciary, the Nigerian Judiciary, the National Judicial Council, and the Chief Justice of Nigeria must never allow to happen.

 The organisation maintained that there is no such organ as an Expanded Caucus in the PDP Constitution and local government chairmen are not members of the State Caucus.

“Therefore, the purported meeting could not have been a Caucus meeting of our great party. In any case, it is not the business of the Caucus under the PDP Constitution to zone elective offices” it said.

 The organisation further noted that the provisions of the Electoral Act 2022  expressly exclude the State High Courts from matters pertaining to State House of Assembly, governorship, National Assembly, and presidential elections.

 “So, this is evidently an evil, meretricious, and baseless plot to use the judiciary to abort the popular will of the people by manipulating the course of democracy to obtain from that revered arm of government what they cannot obtain in a free and fair contest” it said, calling on the judiciary to watch the unfolding events in Enugu very closely, as ‘democracy is gravely imperiled when the rule of law is reduced to the rule and unholy schemes of some men, who found themselves in power’