Imo judiciary abracadabra, illegalisation of Amotekun are linked – Kperogi

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By Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.

The bewilderingly illogical and indefensible Supreme Court judgement that handed over the governorship of Imo State to APC’s Hope Uzodinma— who came fourth in the actual election— may appear to have no connection with the Federal Government’s January 4 declaration of Amotekun as “illegal.” But they are both parts of a well-rehearsed political choreography.

The Machiavellian political hawks around Muhammadu Buhari are not prepared to allow the presidency to rotate to their informal coalition partners in the Southwest in 2023—contrary to the gentleman’s agreement they reached in 2014. What to do? Dissolve the coalition with the Southwest and build a new one with the Southeast.

Northern politicians who want to retain power in the region are now actively courting Southeast politicians to be junior partners in a 2023 coalition—like the Southwest has been since 2015. The brazenly immoral capture of Imo State for APC using the instrumentality of the Supreme Court, which is now indistinguishable from the Buhari Presidency, is part of this plan.

The judgement was, of course, predetermined. It didn’t even pretend to be fair and just. It was merely the acting of a script that was written in the Presidential Villa. Notice that since Ibrahim Tanko Muhammad was illegally imposed as Chief Justice of Nigeria, most, if not all, Supreme Court and Appeals Court judgments regarding elections have been “unanimous.” There’re no longer dissenting opinions or minority judgments.

In his interview with AriseTV in January 2019, Buhari confessed that he rewarded 84-year-old retired Justice of the Court of Appeal Sylvanus Nsofor with appointment as Nigeria’s ambassador to the US because he wrote a “minority report” in his favor when he challenged his loss at the polls in a previous election. Now, Buhari doesn’t want even minority reports or dissenting opinions in favor of his opponents from judges.

We have an unprecedentedly total fascist takeover of the judiciary, the kind that compelled the Supreme Court to award nullified rigged votes to APC’s Hope Uzodinma even if by doing so the Supreme Court created an astonishing numerical incongruity where the Supreme Court’s final vote tally is now greater than the number of people INEC accredited to vote!

Brazenly pre-planned electoral heists are now the new normal, which honchos of the regime had foretold before now. Recall that Secretary to the Government of the Federation Boss Mustapha had on January 12, 2019 assured his audience in Gombe State during a campaign speech that APC had already “won” the election that hadn’t yet taken place. “We are only waiting for the announcement of the results,” he said.

That wasn’t rhetorical hyperbole; it was a classic Freudian slip, the type APC chairman Adams Oshiomhole committed when he said, in the aftermath of APC’s INEC-assisted rigging in Osun State, that democracy could only thrive when the opposition is ready to “accept the pain of rigging.”

The Imo Supreme Court judicial rascality was a well-practiced plot by the regime’s henchmen to make incursions into the Southeast in preparation for 2023. And it might well work if Nigeria survives till 2023. People in the Southeast— and in the South-south— are so aroused to deep resentment by the Southwest’s support for Buhari in 2015 and 2019 that they might be willing to be strategic underlings of an opportunistic political partnership with the North if only to spite the Southwest.

And Amotekun has provided an opportune moment for the cabal to dissolve its crisis-plagued political marriage with the Southwest.

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