By Henry Umoru
ABUJA—FORMER Vice President, Atiku Abubakar, has described last Tuesday’s judgment as a great victory for honesty and integrity and a rebuke against arbitrariness and impunity.

Atiku Abubakar reiterated that President Goodluck Jonathan’s decision to contest the 2011 presidential election would send wrong signals to groups and organisations that painstakingly develop constitutions and ground rules to guide their operations, adding that “certainly, it will be a contradiction to urge Nigerians to obey the laws of the land when the President has refused to obey the rules of his party.’’

The PDP presidential aspirant, who termed the ruling as a victory against “majority tyranny”, said,”because the PDP’s zoning arrangement was derived from the principle that in a heterogeneous country like ours, with unequal distribution of populations among the federating ethnic nationalities, an unfettered electoral competition based on one person, one vote, will lead to majority tyranny, and denial of opportunities to ethnic minorities.”

In a statement from his Campaign Organisation yesterday, the former Vice President said “while some people have tried to ethicize or regionalize the PDP’s zoning arrangement, the premise of our support for it has always been that if you choose to become a member of any group or association, you must be prepared to abide by that body’s ground rules or constitution.”

It would be recalled that an Abuja High Court had, on Tuesday, declined to invoke its original jurisdiction and make the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, enforce its zoning arrangement.

According to Atiku’s Campaign Organisation “we have consistently argued that to join any group and use the rules of that group to get to the top, and then unilaterally urinate and deny the existence of such rules, amounts to impunity and dishonesty.

“We refused to waiver even in the face of sponsored attacks or denials that zoning existed within the PDP constitution or the use of other spurious arguments such as that zoning contravenes the country’s constitution.

“The court has now unambiguously upheld that zoning is in the PDP’s constitution and is binding on its members.

Though Justice Gummi was quoted as saying that he is “unable to make declaration that the North is entitled to bear the presidential ticket of the PDP for two consecutive terms i.e. 2007 and 2011, respectively, as the South did in 1999 and 2003, same being political question and therefore not justifiable,” the moral burden on President Jonathan arising from this important judgment cannot be denied.

“At issue here is the President’s decision to place his ambition above the rules of his party and the implications of this for legitimacy – his moral right to contest. Certainly despite the knee-jerk recourse to ethnicity, subterfuge and obfuscation, the President has never denied being the 35th signatory in the minutes of a meeting held on December 2002, where the issue of zoning was re-affirmed to enable former President Olusegun Obasanjo run for a second term in office.

“The new Nigeria we all dream of cannot be realised without respect for rules or upholding the sanctity of agreements. Above all, respecting rules and agreements is vital in building trust, which is in itself an essential ingredient in fashioning out a viable nation from a mosaic of previously independent nationalities that make up our dear country.

“Now that the Court has unambiguously supported our position on the issue of zoning, we call on President Jonathan to do the right thing by recognising that he entered this race in error. Certainly it will not be a sign of weakness for a leader do the right thing. On the contrary, it takes courage for a true leader to admit that he or she has made.’’