Enugu 2023: Time for Edeoga to Move On

By Lawrence Madu

In September, I published an article, which I titled “Valid Reasons Why Ndi Enugu Rejected Edeoga.” I highlighted reasons the Labour Party (LP) governorship candidate in Enugu State during the 2023 election cycle lost to Dr. Peter Mbah of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), who emerged governor. That intervention, which was spurred by the misinformation and poorly reasoned arguments churned out by Edeoga’s supporters, was supposed to be my last on the subject of that governorship election. The number of calls and messages I received in regard also affirmed to me that the issue of the 2023 governorship election in Enugu State was sufficiently and convincingly addressed in that article. The Court of Appeal and Supreme Court validated my arguments as it concerns the law and conduct of elections.

Is Edeoga entitled to contest the outcome of the Enugu 2023 governorship election? Yes, of course; and he has exercised it to the fullest, pursuing his case up to the Supreme Court, the highest court of the land. In fact, even when he committed his matter to the jurisdiction of the court, Edeoga and his minions didn’t refrain from inflammatory and fallacious statements and claims on a matter that was sub judice. And he is a lawyer. But one should have expected him to know that there is always an end to every process and that with the Supreme Court ruling affirming Mbah’s election, the curtain effectively dropped on the Enugu 2023 governorship contest.

But Edeoga and his party’s national chairman, Julius Abure, a lawyer also, would have none of that. Only this week, they regaled Nigerians with how Edeoga supposedly won the Enugu election but was purportedly rigged out and how the Election Petition Tribunal, Court of Appeal, and Supreme Court allegedly denied him justice. This is so unbecoming and makes it imperative to remind Edeoga and his party why they failed in that election.

The truth is that the odds were highly staked against Edeoga in that election. Forget about the fact that the Peter Obi tsunami ferried some political nobodies and never-do-wells to victory in the February 25 National Assembly elections, gifting LP in Enugu with eight out of the seven National Assembly seats (with three now upturned by the court) and two out of the three senatorial seats. While I shall return to this much later in this piece, it needs to be stated unequivocally that the dynamics and sentiments that underlined the presidential and National Assembly elections on 25th February, 2023 were quite different from those that underpinned the gubernatorial elections.

Number one, Enugu people had grown weary of professional politicians, who had built nothing to their names and had only lived on political offices and patronages. So, Peter Mbah’s entrance with his private sector pedigree and credentials as the founder of Pinnacle Oil and Gas Limited, which he nurtured from the rear to the number one in Nigeria’s petroleum downstream subsector was like a breath of fresh air to Ndi Enugu. What has Edeoga built? He was Deputy Chief Press Secretary to Dr. Okwezilieze Nwodo as the governor of Enugu State, Council Chairman of Isi-Uzo LGA, House of Representatives Member, Special Adviser to Deputy Senate President, Special Assistant to President Goodluck Jonathan, and Commissioner for Local Government and Commissioner for Environment in the former Governor Ifeanyi Ugwuanyi’s eight years administration. Yet he cannot point at anything in his constituency or any brilliant performance to his name. Enugu was the dirtiest under his tenure as Commissioner for Environment. But even more remarkably, he built nothing to his name outside government patronage.

 Again, I doubt that anyone devoid of primordial sentiments, who watched or listened to Mbah and Edeoga media interviews or during public engagements during the campaigns, and who really meant well for Enugu State would choose  Edeoga over and above Mbah. One was flat and bereft of ideas, while the other displayed brilliance and an understanding of how to turn the state around. In fact, whereas Mbah launched an ambitious manifesto with clearly stated promises restoring water in Enugu city within 180 days after over 20 years of acute water scarcity (which he has fulfilled, increasing water production from the occasional two million litres to 120 million litres daily), making Enugu one of the top three states in term of GDP, growing the state’s economy from $4.4bn to $30bn, achieving zero percent poverty headcount, etc,  Edeoga repeatedly and boldly told Ndi Enugu that he had no manifesto and didn’t need one to make a good leader. He even claimed in one of his radio programmes that he has more leadership experience than Obi, as Obi was nowhere in politics when he became a local government chairman and a member of the House of Representatives. In fact, speaking on Mbah’s pedigree, the no-nonsense Monsignor Obiora Ike said: “Dr. Mbah is not a politician. He is a technocrat; and at certain points, we need a technocrat, who comes to salvage the society.”

Again, although denomination had played no significant role in the emergence of governors of Enugu State, Edeoga, who is an Anglican, shot himself in the foot by introducing religion. He attacked Anglican priests like Archbishop Emmanuel Chukwuma, Bishop Onyeka Onyia, etc. for allegedly betraying the Anglican faith by supporting Mbah, who is a Catholic. On 4th March, 2023, an online medium quoted him as saying, “Be it known unto us today that an Anglican has never been a governor of Enugu State; all the past governors were either Catholic or Methodist adherents, who conspired with Pentecostal churches to marginalise Anglicans.” The import of that statement was that virtually everything, including the Catholic Church, that worked for Obi and LP’s victories on 25th February, worked against Edeoga in the 18th March gubernatorial election.

Importantly, Edeoga and Ugwuanyi’s mother are from the same family in Obollo-Eke, but married off to Eha-Amufu in Isi-Uzo LGA and Orba in the same Isi-Uzo until Udenu LGA was carved out of it in 1981. They are cousins. Meanwhile, whereas Isi-Uzo was carved into Enugu East Senatorial Zone from the old Nsukka Zone during transition to civilian rule, Edeoga did not pretend about the fact that he was a candidate for his Nsukka cultural zone rather than Enugu East Senatorial Zone where power was supposed to rotate to, based on the zoning principle. In fact, prior to the primary election, the likes of  Chief Nnia Nwodo, Dr. Okwesilieze Nwodo, Chief Okey Ezea, Senator Chuka Utazi, etc. openly canvassed that Ugwuanyi’s successor must come from the old Nsukka Zone to give it a straight 16 years. But this was contrary to the existing zoning principle.

But if anybody from the other zones was still being deceived that Edeoga’s candidacy was about Peter Obi and LP or that after all Edeoga hails from Enugu East Zone geopolitically, the declaration and incitement by the then Senator-elect, Okey Ezea while addressing a crowd of people from Nsukka zone at his residence, Ichi in Igbo-Eze South Local Government, after his victory cleared it all.

He said: “The March 11th (governorship) election is a straight fight between Nsukka and Nkanu…. So, you must prepare very well. You must make sure the directive goes round. This is about Nsukka. Young men, please, you must prepare yourselves very well. We are going into a war on March 11th, and it is a do or die affair.”

This viral comment, which Edeoga failed to condemn, became an eye-opener to the rest of the state, who thought they were doing Obidient Movement and “EluPee” with Edeoga. It was perhaps the last straw that broke Edeoga’s back.

Again, Edeoga is married to Nkechi, daughter of Grace Obayi, elder sister of Chief Nnia Nwodo, and former governor, Okwesilieze Nwodo. Every rational person knows that an Edeoga governorship would have amounted to letting the Nwodo dynasty into the Lion Building through the back door. And many people, even from the old Nsukka zone, detested the idea. Furthermore, Edeoga presented himself as lacking in honour because he co-initiated a meeting of all Enugu East Senatorial Zone governorship aspirants in the PDP at the palace of  Igwe Julius Nnaji at Nike. They, including Edeoga and the traditional rulers, signed an agreement that they would support any of them anointed by Ugwuanyi. He thought he was Ugwuanyi’s anointed candidate. But when it turned out otherwise, he reneged and contested the primary against Dr. Peter Mbah, but could only muster nine votes in a transparent pirmary compared to Mbah’s 709 votes. After meeting with Mbah, he addressed his supporters at Bronzar Bar, New Haven, Enugu and later issued a statement under his own hand declaring total support for Mbah and urged his supporters and Ndi Enugu to do the same. But when Peter Obi and LP started making waves, he reneged again and jumped into the LP. So, people rightly didn’t see him as a man that they could trust.

Again, anybody who followed proceedings at the tribunal, and the media campaigns by Edeoga would attest to the fact that he hardly contested that he won. They invested all their energy disqualifying Mbah for alleged forgery of his National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) discharge certificate. But the tribunal was clear that the petitioners could not prove the allegation of forgery. That position was upheld by the Court of Appeal and Supreme Court. But it was at the Federal High Court that the complicity and ineptitude of the NYSC became most glaring and shameful. It is perhaps the lowest any public institution had sunk. In summary, the court fined NYSC the sum of N5 million and declared that  the “Defendants (NYSC and its Director of Corps Certification, Mohammad Ibrahim, conspired by fraudulent design, suppressed and misrepresented facts in their supposition that the Plaintiff’s certificate was not issued by the Defendants, a fact they knew or ought to know as untrue, incorrect, which constitutes the tort of conspiracy.” Anybody interested in the details should Google up the article “Mbah-NYSC: Navigating the Interplay of Law and Politics” by Lemmy Ughegbe.

One could go on. But the bottom line is that Edeoga lost the 2023 election fair and square. Enugu people made their choice, and any unbiased Nigerian could attest to the fact that it was the right choice. As they say in Latin, Res ipsa loquitur (The fact speaks for itself).

Madu writes from Oji River, Enugu