THE SECOND COMING OF SOLUDO – By Nosa Igiebor, Guest Writer

THE SECOND COMING OF SOLUDO – By Nosa Igiebor, Guest Writer

After all the hoopla, the predictions of violence and the tension they created, the Anambra governorship election turned out to be an anti-climax. Nothing unusual happened. Charles Chukwuma Soludo, the cerebral professor of economics, former Central Bank of Nigeria governor and APGA’s candidate, won at a canter as was generally expected.

But the legitimacy of his victory is questionable, given the fact that just about ten percent of the approximately 2,500,000 registered voters in the state cast their ballots. That translated to 253,388 votes, out of which 8,108 were declared invalid.

It’s very arguable that, if more people had come out to vote, Soludo would still have won. So it wasn’t really his fault that an overwhelming majority of voters chose to stay home. The pre-election violence that wracked the state and IPOB’s call for a boycott of the poll, threatening to disrupt it with more violence, obviously dampened the people’s enthusiasm about choosing a new governor. For most of them, it’s safety first. Hence they duly turned their backs on the election.

Even though IPOB was persuaded to cancel its threat and end its call for a boycott of the poll at the last moments, it still wasn’t re-assuring enough for the people to come out en masse. Also, the ubiquitous presence of the police and military personnel, all heavily armed and battle-ready, didn’t have any positive impact on the voters’ turn-out.

Soludo won with a little over 112,000 votes, with PDP’s Valentine Ozigbo coming a distant second, scoring about 53,000-plus votes. APC’s Andy Ubah placed third with 43,000-plus votes.

Ubah had won his party’s governorship primary election in a controversial manner. Most of the contestants in the primary had declared the contest a sham, claiming no voting took place. They had accused the committee that was charged with conducting the election of acting a script of ensuring that Ubah was gifted the ticket. The result announced by the committee showed that over 400,000 party members voted in the primary election. And Ubah was credited with nearly a quarter of a million votes to emerge the winner of the party’s ticket.

The governorship election definitely proved those figures to be fraudulent as most of Ubah’s opponents had alleged. If he had about 250,000 people rooting for him to be the party’s candidate, how come he did so poorly in the November 6 election? Besides,  the number of votes cast in the APC’s primary election back in June is almost double that of the governorship election. The huge discrepancy between the two figures has validated the position of those who are opposed to direct primary elections for choosing candidates for the various elective positions.

The new, amended electoral law mandates direct primaries for all the parties contesting any election. It’s an ill-thought provision that will end up compounding the problem it’s meant to solve. The problem of the governors and other big party wigs manipulating the indirect primary election by simply buying the delegates, special and ordinary. Now they will just sit somewhere and write the results they want. The indirect primary is always a sham. But the direct primary will be the worst version of it.

The governorship election also served as a rude reminder to the APC that its hope of making any serious political inroad in the south-east before the next general elections is, at best, a mirage. It has two governors in the zone – Hope Uzodinma of Imo and Dave Umahi of Ebonyi. The former is a creation of a most bizarre judgment of the Supreme Court, while the latter defected from the PDP. And none of them can muster any large following as their political affiliation is antithetical to the prevailing political sentiments in the region. Simply put, they don’t and can’t offer much electoral value to their party.

For those advocating that the south-east should align itself with the ruling party Koop and “play the politics of the centre” – whatever that means – their message needs refining. Because they’re not getting through to the mass of the people who feel the Muhammadu Buhari administration is hostile to the Igbo generally.

“The governorship election also served as a rude reminder to the

APC  that its hope of making any serious political inroad in the

south-east before the next general elections is, at best, a mirage”.

More significantly, the Anambra election has foreclosed APC’s presidential ticket in 2023 going to the south-east. Uzodinma, Umahi and other party leaders from the zone will have a hard time persuading the other zones to concede the ticket now. So the question then is, where do they all go from here? The answer will unfold as the politics of 2023 heats up.

Meantime, APGA has once again consolidated its position in Anambra. It has run the state, arguably the most important one in the south-east, continuously for 16 years. And with Soludo’s election, it’s very likely that it could control the state for another eight years, providing he doesn’t disappoint the people.

By the time he’s sworn in next March, it will be his second coming as governor. Soludo had risen from relative political obscurity to be first, chief economic adviser to President Olusegun Obasanjo and then governor of the Central Bank in 2004.

Ubah may be claiming the credit for Obasanjo appointing Soludo to head the apex bank because he was close to the president then. In fact he was a senior special assistant for domestic affairs to President Obasanjo for eight years. A position he exploited to receive generous patronages mainly by arranging access to his boss for those who needed all kinds of presidential favors.

What’s not in doubt in any form is that Obasanjo couldn’t have given Soludo the very important job of running the Central Bank if he hadn’t been impressed by his credentials and capabilities. Ubah might have put in a word for his kinsman, but arrogating to himself the credit for Soludo becoming CBN governor is a lot of stretch. And touting that claim during the Arise TV election debate, where he performed badly, didn’t take him anywhere on November 6. That debate exposed Ubah as a misfit for the position he was contesting for.

He was once elected governor of the state on PDP’s platform in 2007. But he set a record for being the first and only governor to spend the shortest time in office before he was sacked by the Supreme Court. The court had agreed with Peter Obi’s contention that the INEC was wrong to have conducted a governorship election in the state as his tenure was yet to expire. His governorship lasted less than a month. But he was elected to the senate in 2011 and contested the governorship again in 2017 after defecting to the APC.

Soludo’s tenure as CBN’s governor was quite remarkable. He initiated some bold reforms in the financial sector, one of which led to the controversial consolidation in the banking industry. About eighty, mostly financially weak banks were shrunk to 25, leading to the emergence of some really big, strong banks that could operate on the continental and global level.

But having revolutionized the banking industry, he became over-protective of them even when the owners/chief executives of many of the banks were gambling with their customers’ deposits and manipulating their banks’ shares in the stock market. The global financial crisis of 2008 exposed the buccaneering nature of the bank executives, and many of them got their fingers badly burnt and paid dearly for their financial malfeasance.

Notwithstanding those setbacks, Soludo’s impact on the financial sector generally and the banking industry in particular can neither be ignored nor downplayed. With his groundbreaking reforms, he demonstrated what could be achieved with public institutions when the right people with ideas are put in charge.

“Governor Soludo needs to be an inspiring

breath of fresh air in the cesspool Nigeria’s

politics and governance have become”.

This is the enormous challenge he will face as governor – the challenge of managing and meeting the people’s high expectations of him. Only a fraction of the electorate voted for him. But all the people of the state and, indeed, the whole country are looking up to him to do the very needful. This is being truly governor of the people and for the people. And not for party apparatchiks and cronies.

Governor Soludo needs to be an inspiring breath of fresh air in the cesspool Nigeria’s politics and governance have become. He must walk his talk to bring his considerable intellectual resources and public/corporate-service experiences to bear on the governance of the state. He should set an example by running a lean but effective government. One that understands that its only major remit is serving the people.

He doesn’t need any entourage around him, sapping his time and energy and making him look like an emperor as most governors are. Given his humble background, which he’s very proud of, he has to remain grounded as governor; never forgetting he’s the people’s chief servant and that they’re not his minions.

His victory isn’t in doubt. His opponents have acknowledged it and congratulated him for his success in his second run for governor. Therefore, he isn’t likely to have the distractions of endless tribunal cases challenging his election. So he’s obligated to be different in the most positive way. And make a huge difference in providing good governance for Anambra in the most impactful way.

Soludo has enormous goodwill within and outside the state. He just can’t afford to fail. We all desperately want him to succeed and pave the way for more serious-minded people to take charge of our affairs.

nosaigiebor@tell.ng  0807 629 0486 (WhatsApp & SMS only).