The political weather in Southern Nigeria, the main habitat of Nigeria’s oil and gas is at the moment very inclement. This is largely due to the intense power struggle in the region. Despite the recent counsel by former President Olusegun Obasanjo that electoral politics should not be a life or death matter, virtually everywhere in the oil region is a battle field.
The governing All Progressives Congress (APC) appears to be driven by an inordinate ambition to flush out the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) from the oil and gas basin so that the vultures can have unfettered feasts in the honey comb. They have been assiduously battling to make Rivers State ungovernable, deploying all unwholesome tricks that are in the books. In Rivers, the security agencies have been compromising their professionalism.
While the situation is public knowledge, the war drums have started to sound in Cross River State. There, APC, the party of President Muhammadu Buhari, a supposedly anti-graft czar, is busy laying the mines and accusing Governor Ben Ayade of deliberately masterminding the challenges that have led to the delay in the conducting Local Government elections in the state.
Fickle-minded political heavy weights of the PDP have since defected and are still defecting to the APC in a seeming desperate bid to throw out the PDP through the window from the Government House, Calabar. APC Spokesman, Men’s Ikpeme claimed in the state capital that Governor Ayade was in a haste to conduct elections but caught in a web of fear of the federal government granting autonomy to local governments and the state assemblies which will make him lose grip of the contest.
According to the APC, ”Ayade is afraid of the local government autonomy, afraid of being caught in the web by the federal government granting autonomy to local government area, the state legislators and judiciary, if this happens, CROSIEC can no longer handle local government election.
”So he has to rush the local government elections for fear of being toppled by All Progressives Congress. After discovering that APC is on ground”, pointing out that they support Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) to conduct elections for the executive and legislative arms of the third tier of government.
APC says they are convinced that INEC has the capacity to organise and conduct local government elections that shall reflect the wishes of the people and meets Nigerian and international standards; where all the political parties will be participating at a level playing ground; where there must be clarity, consistency and certainty regarding the constitutional and electoral frame work for the conduct of local government election. Political parties shall benefit from certainty in terms of date for the conduct of local government elections.
They argued that if local government elections are handled fairly, winners of the local government elections shall improve the pool of quality leadership that will manage the resources at that level more efficiently. At the end of the day, the state will have a reservoir of brilliant leadership and we shall be able to find prosperity at the local level, maintaining further that the constitution was clear on local government administration.
Continuing, APC said, ”it is clear that section 7 of the Federal Republic of Nigeria’s Constitution imposes a duty to state governments to ensure that the system of local government continues unhindered,” the APC said and posited that the tenure of the past administration ended in August 2016.
They are equally insisting that the absence of a definite timetable has affected stakeholders, and ”the defiance of Governor Ayade in pronouncing a definite schedule for the conduct of local government elections in Cross River State has impacted negatively on the state, political parties and CROSIEC (Cross River State Independent Electoral Commission). Statutory period for fresh elections is 90 days from date of end of previous tenure”, APC said.
Local sources say CROSIEC had previously announced an indefinite suspension of the elections due to the Continuous Voters Registration exercise. APC is however, accusing Governor Ayade, the state House of Assembly and CROSIEC of “always unilaterally” changing the timeline for the conduct of election.
Regardless of the stakes in the power struggle in Cross River, political leaders there should learn from the ongoing horror in Rivers. It has been a state of bloodletting, mostly executed by the armed security forces and the armed political soldiers of the contending political gladiators.