By Emmanuel Aziken, Political Editor & Emma Amazie

Last Friday’s judgment of the Supreme Court upholding the election of Dr. Emmanuel Uduaghan as governor of Delta State is supposed to clear all the legal landmines that for almost five years shadowed his stewardship of the state. But will it?

AS news of the judgment of the Supreme Court on the petition filed by the Democratic Peoples Party, DPP gubernatorial candidate, Chief Great Ogboru against the election of Dr. Emmanuel Uduaghan as governor of Delta State distilled in Asaba last Friday, the Government House was quickly turned  into a celebration arena.

At long last the persistent and irritable tackles from Ogboru, famed in the past for troubling even the most stoic military juntas, have now been pushed aside Uduaghan’s enthusiasts heaved a sigh of relief.

It was a victory worth thanking God for and so the faithful led by the deputy governor, Prof. Amos Utuma congregated at the Government House chapel for an impromptu thanksgiving service that afternoon.

As the man nearest to Governor Uduaghan, Utuma should know how the several court cases that have been instituted by the governor’s political opponents may have distracted the governor in his implementation of his developmental goals.

“The April election was contentiously contested. We had seven different litigations and one after the other God frustrated all of them. Today God has completed what He started in the life of this government. It is, therefore, befitting for us to hold this thanksgiving”, Utuma said in the testimony of the day.

Uduaghan who was attending the burial of Dim Emeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu at Nnewi at that time was undoubtedly in tune with the congregants as he would have been buoyed by what many considered as the final political burial of his longtime political traducer, Ogboru.

“We would have moved faster than we are in the development of this state but for this distraction (legal battles),” Prof. Utuma added at the thanksgiving in Asaba last Friday.

The claim of distraction is, however, one that Ogboru is now contesting as he accused the Uduaghan legal team of filibustering and causing unnecessary delays in the adjudication of his election petition.

“Every time that they have been challenged that they didn’t win election instead of coming to court to state their case they would be filibustering bringing up all sorts of motions. In one instance, they brought up over 200 motions to strike out a petition. They are the ones causing their delay. I am not distracting them, they are distracting themselves,” Ogboru said in a telephone interview.

Ogboru and Uduaghan

Remarkably the Supreme Court in its judgment relied on a technical provision of the Electoral Act which requires the Appeal Court to dispose off a petition within sixty days.

Ogboru’s petition commenced at the Delta State Election Tribunal which confirmed Uduaghan as winner of the April governorship election, but just by the whiskers.

The tribunal had declared Uduaghan winner with less than ten thousand votes and Ogboru subsequently filed an appeal at the Court of Appeal to further examine the validity of the votes in Warri North Local government area. The hope of the Ogboru team was to knock off those votes and as such have himself declared as governor by the court.

The Court of Appeal, however, dismissed his appeal but did not give the reason for its decision within the sixty day frame as required by law. Ogboru immediatel soldiered on the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court in its judgment dismissed the appeal by Ogboru on the fact that there was nothing before it since the Court of Appeal’s judgment was a nullity, being that it was not given within sixty days.

Victory by technical means or by any other means should be a harbinger of peace to the administration in Asaba and lay the prospects for more developments for the state.

For all of  the four years in his first term Governor Uduaghan was in and out of court fighting off challenges from Ogboru. It is remarkable that the court cases even overflowed to the second term.

Where he was not distracted by court cases the governor was faced with strong political challenges from his political father, Chief Edwin Clark and the Delta Elders.

Optimism of more action from Governor Uduaghan following the Supreme Court verdict was also echoed in the streets.
The chairman of Delta State Integrated Development Project, DIDP, a Public Private Partnership Development programme, Mr. Godwin (Gary Bire) Akpobire told Vanguard that Deltans would now see Uduaghan in action.

“I think it is a very big mistake when people say a lot of things have not been put in place. The fact that we have not made a lot of our work known to the public does not mean nothing has been done. Personally, I think results are a better judge. It is surprising that a lot of people criticize the governor using indices based on political propaganda and personal vendetta”.

However, prospects of peace as envisaged after the court judgment are now being played down following Ogboru’s determination to seek a review of the Supreme Court judgment.

Noting what he described as the variation in the conclusions of the Supreme Court between the case in Delta and Kebbi States, Ogboru told Vanguard in a telephone interview that he would now be seeking a review of the court judgment.

“The Supreme Court needed to treat our appeal on its merits and not to say that there was no appeal at all. They should have done what they did in Kebbi. In any case, the Kebbi case was heard on the same day with the Delta State case and by the same panel and the conferences were done on the same day but the outcomes were different.

How is it possible?
The same panel heard our case with that of Kebbi on the same day and the same panel did their conference on the same day but came out with two different outcomes on the same circumstances and facts,” he said.

His quest was immediately flayed by the Delta State Commissioner for Information, Mr. Chike Ogeah who described the latest effort as an irritation out of the ordinary.

“I think that his people are now leaving the realms of reality and I cant comment on that when people want to start becoming delusionary, the law is clear on that. Is he trying to say that the learned justices of the Supreme Court should reverse themselves or that they don’t know what they are doing?

“That is a clear abuse of court processes, our jurisprudence doesn’t know anything like that, it is totally unknown”
The chairman of the PDP in Delta State Chief Peter Nwaoboshi was equally dismissive asking, “Why is he wasting his time, he should concentrate on his business and some other things, he should stop wasting his time.”

But Ogboru is not giving up affirming that he was determined to actualize a mandate he believes was given to him.
“I do not see anything wrong in what we are doing and I do not see how defending the rights of the people of Delta State amounts to a distraction of the governance in the state.

On the contrary the people of Delta State applaud what we are doing, using our time and our resources to make sure that their sacred mandate is not lost on the platter of technicalities.”