Introduction: Igbo Youth Council (IYC) is an amalgamation of 22 Igbo youth and student organizations, with membership of over 700,000 all over Nigeria and in the Diaspora. We are mostly young graduates, professionals, and undergraduates. Igbo Youth Movement (IYM) had earlier issued a statement condemning APGA’s action. We can no longer keep quiet. We expected Chief Victor Umeh, the APGA National Chairman to keep quiet or to publicly apologize to Ndigbo for selling the future of Anambra and Igboland, but instead he has been everywhere trying to use the usual strategy of falsehood and blackmail to defend the indefensible. We want to assure Chief Umeh that it won’t work this time, and Nigerians laugh at his folly.
Outsiders will never allow Igboland to develop and they will always find enough Igbos at two for a penny to betray Igbo cause or stop our best and the brightest. What we are seeing is what makes decent people abhor politics and think of politicians as all liars, treacherous, betrayers, blackmailers, and callous. Yet, some of them receive the Holy Communion; answer knights of the church, and also with red caps as ‘Ozo titled men’ (which in Igboland should normally be reserved for people with high integrity and honour). If APGA and Chief Umeh want to make the ‘Soludo disqualification’ the issue for Anambra election, we welcome it with two hands, and we will mobilize our members to join in this struggle to keep Igboland sane. APGA has been in crisis and instead of seeking reconciliation, Chief Umeh in a cantankerous manner is fighting to kill the party at all cost. Enough is enough!
The Facts: We Challenge Chief Umeh to swear before the Blessed Sacrament (as Knight of the Catholic Church) and before any priest or Bishop he chooses that the following are not the facts:
a) That Chief Umeh as National Chairman personally went to beg Soludo in his house to join APGA and be the candidate and that Soludo for over a year insisted on “time to think about it”. In the meantime, Soludo and some of his supporters were approached by Chief Umeh and they helped to finance APGA through him.
b) That Chief Umeh assured Soludo of APGA ticket at a meeting of some eminent Nigerians, including a former Senate President and a former Attorney General of Nigeria on July 23, 2013. Chief Umeh also swore that he would never allow Gov. Obi to nominate his minion as APGA candidate.
c) That Chief Umeh and Gov. Obi later had parallel “peace negotiations” (in the presence of eminent clergy men) bordering mostly on the selection of APGA candidate. As a result, Gov. Obi paid Chief Umeh N600 million (which Chief Umeh has confirmed to several persons), and Gov. Obi has told everyone that the payment was in return for Chief Umeh to allow him to nominate the APGA candidate. Is it true, as some people speculate, that Chief Umeh lured Soludo in simply to raise his bargain price with Gov. Obi?
d) That Gov. Obi told Chief Umeh and several other people that “President Goodluck Jonathan does not want Soludo as APGA candidate”. Indeed, the campaign by Gov. Obi and Chief Umeh that “the President does not want Soludo” is known to many stakeholders in Anambra and even outside of Anambra. Many people also know of the persistent and unrelenting blackmail and campaign of calumny mounted by Gov. Obi at the villa designed to perpetuate a fear in the mind of the President and his wife that Soludo had a presidential ambition and therefore might not support President Jonathan in 2015 if he was “allowed” to be Governor of Anambra. In Anambra, Gov. Obi mounted a campaign that “if Soludo is allowed to become Governor, he would behave like Rochas Okorocha in the sense that he would decamp to opposition party to contest for President/Vice-President”. This propaganda became the talking point of his henchmen, in the desperate attempt to blackmail Soludo. Only Gov. Obi knows the real reasons why he would not want Soludo to succeed him.
e) That Chief Umeh not only delivered the same message of “the President does not want Soludo” to Soludo himself, he also told several of their mutual friends including two businessmen, a former member of House of Reps; a serving member of House of Reps; an Ambassador; their mutual lawyer and friend; etc and they are still alive. That initially, Chief Umeh even personally requested two of the persons to see if they could intervene with Mr. President: to get him to change his mind.
f) That when there did not seem to be progress in getting President Jonathan to change his mind and Chief Umeh’s “arrangements” with Gov. Obi had taken more concrete form, Chief Umeh called Soludo on Sunday, August 11 and asked him to withdraw from the race on the grounds that the President did not want him; and that Soludo refused to withdraw and insisted that it was more honourable for him to lose at the primary election than to quit simply because of a “directive from above”. Is APGA still ‘the Igbo party’ or now a unit of PDP/Presidency?
g) That even before the screening exercise on August 14th, a decision was already taken that Soludo must be stopped at the screening stage because of the fear that if he was allowed to contest the primary he would surely win as most APGA members wanted him, thereby “embarrassing the party leadership and putting them in trouble with the Presidency”. This message was delivered by two surrogates of Chief Umeh (including a member of the screening Committee) to Soludo on August 13, 2013 at his house.
h) That Chief Umeh deliberately set up a three man ad-hoc Committee instead of the seven-man ‘Standing Committee’ provided in Article 16d of the APGA Constitution which also states that he should be the chairman of the screening exercise. This was so that he can ‘blame the committee’ which he teleguided. Is it not true that Chief Umeh called to inform one of the aspirants about the ‘favour’ he did to him by not disqualifying him? Was Chief Umeh not the person who personally dictated who should be disqualified or not, even on most flimsy excuses outside of the party guidelines?
i) Is it not true that others were disqualified so that APGA could give the excuse that after all, “Soludo was not the only one disqualified”? While you disqualified somebody on the flimsy excuse that he did not seem to have enough money to execute the campaign (after collecting N12m from him), it was the Anambra Commissioner for Works who bought the forms for the ‘anointed’ candidate, and the candidate has been using Anambra state government vehicles since he was hurriedly ferried back from the US. That is APGA integrity! You can’t fool all the people all the time.
j) Indeed, if President Jonathan denies that he directed that he did not want Soludo, then it must be that both Chief Umeh and Gov Obi invented the insidious campaign so as to allow for easy implementation of their “negotiations and payment”.
APGA/Chief Umeh’s Falsehood about Disqualification:
After Soludo provided the Screening Committee with all the documents they asked for and answered all their questions, it took more than 24 hours to come up with “a reason” to disqualify him. They came up with the most childish, flimsy and stupid excuse ever: that Soludo has “Pending EFCC investigation”. To satisfy the “ogas at the top”, the result of the screening was announced on NTA network news and all news media that “Soludo and 5 others disqualified by APGA” one day before aspirants were told/given the result of the screening. Now you can go and get a presidential handshake that “you delivered”. For more than one week APGA was too embarrassed to even state publicly why it did it. Members of the committee granted interviews but were ashamed to mention the specific reasons, because they knew they were lying. APGA faced public uproar and unrelenting criticisms. Finally, Chief Umeh chose (as the chairman and publicity secretary of APGA combined) to start usual blackmail and falsehood, at least to justify the N600 million payment he received.
Brief comments on this patent falsehood:
(i) Section 6 of the ‘APGA Electoral Guidelines for the Anambra State Governorship Primary Election 2013’ provides that “An aspirant to the gubernatorial primary election shall not be qualified to be nominated or to contest the primary election, if he/she:
a) Fails to produce his personal income tax certificate, or any evidence that he has paid his income tax as at when due for the last preceding three years or evidence of exemption from payment of personal income tax; or
b) Presents a false birth certificate or declaration of age for the purpose of the primary elections or for any other purpose; or
c) He/she is otherwise disqualified by virtue of the provisions of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria 1999 as amended, the Electoral Act 2010 as amended or the provisions of the Party’s Constitution”.
Soludo satisfied the three conditions above. “Pending investigation” (if there is any) is not one of them. Is Chief Umeh (through the Committee) at liberty to invent other conditions/rules for disqualification outside of the Guidelines issued by the party’s NEC?
(ii) We can state without fear of contradiction that Soludo has no case with EFCC. If APGA was sincere, why did it not contact the EFCC to know if he has any case to answer instead of acting upon some newspaper report?
(iii) Let us even assume that there is “pending EFCC investigation”, then we ask:
a. When does having a ‘pending investigation’ become a crime or basis to disqualify somebody from contesting election anywhere in the world or holding public office? The Nigerian Constitution and many Supreme Court judgments require that only if someone is convicted in court can you disqualify him. Some of the candidates for the current Anambra election have ‘pending EFCC investigation”, and some even have prosecution in the law courts. Many people who contested and won the last 2011 election had ‘pending investigations’ and many had prosecutions in courts.
b. Chief Umeh and some of his national officers of APGA STILL HAVE “pending EFCC investigations” over alleged embezzlement of APGA funds. Why have they not relinquished their offices? When Gov. Obi contested election for his second term, reports showed that he had “pending investigations” over the alleged N250 million ‘cash movement’, but the same APGA under Chief Umeh cleared him to contest for the election. What changed???
c. If you set the precedent of disqualifying anyone with “pending EFCC investigation”, are you going to apply the same rule in the forthcoming elections or is this meant for ‘Soludo only’? As next election approaches, people are going to flood EFCC with all kinds of petitions against their perceived opponents. Once EFCC invites such people to respond to the petition, does it mean that APGA must then disqualify all such people?
d. Also, what if some people send petition(s) against your anointed candidate to EFCC now and he therefore has ‘pending EFCC investigations’, will you disqualify him and look for a replacement? Do you see the idiocy of your logic, Chief Umeh? If you have integrity, answer YES to the question and we assure you that there will be a floodgate of petitions and ‘pending investigations’ against the APGA candidate. So, what will you do then?
In the next publications, we provide more details and even evidence on many more aspects of this issue. In the meantime, we urge Soludo to stop keeping quiet. If someone of your status is treated this way and you walk away, who then can fight to correct the system? He must take all steps to ensure that this kind of dance of shame by our people does not happen again for the sake of our democracy and Igboland. For Chief Umeh, he needs to look himself in the mirror. Is it not an irony that the history book might in the end agree that Chief Nwobualor and all those who fought for a “reformed APGA” were right? What happened to all those who took all kinds of risks to fight with you during the APGA crisis? How many other people did you promise Governorship or Deputy, collected money from them, betrayed and now blackmail them? Even for the sake of your children Sir Victor Umeh, remember there is God in heaven!
Signed:
Sir Mike Ozoemena, KSJI (B.Sc Econs) Barrister Osita Nkanna Dr. Clems Adizua,
National Coordinator National Secretary UK/Diaspora Coordinator
(08095794254)
