VARRYING assessments have attended the recently conducted Delta local government elections. As to writing off the process as abhorrently compromised, a perfect specimen would be Ogaga Ifowodo’s last two offerings in his Vanguard column. There is a rumour circulating in Delta to the effect that he wants to run for a position in the federal legislature under the All Progressive Congress, APC.

I believe Ifowodo is eminently qualified to be a legislator and if it were not for the potentially irresolvable differences I have with his preferred party, I would not only campaign for him but go the extra mile by contributing financially to his ambition. Nevertheless, being qualified to run for public office does not in any way present the aspirant with a blank cheque for ignoring glaring truths or conveying blind partisanship through the medium of a newspaper column.

Ifowodo painted a picture of absolutely no elections held in the two Isoko constituencies, going ahead to imply that the entire elections were a farce on that score. Other reports credibly maintain that elections were substantially and compliantly held in both areas, save for hitches here and there orchestrated by desperate politicians determined to subvert the determination of the Delta State Independent Electoral Commission, DSIEC, to deliver on credible polls. Ifowodo equally ignored the attitude of the opposition to their prospects in the polls.

Attitude of the opposition

The opposition parties unprofessionally approached the elections with stunning lack of confidence, ironically confident that it would be business as usual with the umpire merely waiting to rubber stamp the dictates of the ruling party. They studiously undermined the avowed determination of the commission to conduct meaningful polls, an assurance, time and again, reiterated by its chairman, Akpoyoma Moses Ogbe.

They thus went into the field half-heartedly, mostly fielding candidates the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, had earlier rejected. In many constituencies, they campaigned superficially, as if merely going through the motions, thoroughly convinced the electoral contest was already lost even before the battle for votes had begun. It is indeed stupefying they even bothered to field candidates for the polls at all. Unfortunately, Ifowodo’s mindset on the polls perfectly encapsulates this unfortunate electoral disposition. He admitted to have originally included the word ‘charade’ in his first article on the polls, thereby writing them off even before they held. It is thus a wonder he bothered to show up at his polling unit to cast a vote he was already cast-iron positive would neither be counted nor count at the end of the day.

Yet perhaps there is an easily understandable reason why the opposition was fanatically convinced the polls would be nothing but a grand electoral sham. Scamming the electorate in local government elections is as much its stock-in-trade as it keeps hypocritically suggesting is the sole preserve of the PDP. When was the last time the PDP won even as much as a councillorship seat in an election conducted in an opposition held state? In Edo, Lagos, Anambra and indeed absolutely every state it controls, the opposition insists on taking absolutely everything!

Having adopted an uncompromising winner-takes-all approach to local government elections in the states it controls, the opposition was quite convinced the PDP would reciprocate that greedy-hunter approach to electioneering in the states it in turn controls. Well, in Delta, the reverse has been much the case. In spite of its utter unpreparedness for the polls, the opposition kept winning councillorship seat after seat in the few local government areas in which it was either serious or lucky enough to present credible candidates in those constituencies in which it bothered to make a stand.

One would have expected a man of Ifowodo’s intellectual credentials to have factored these commendable facts into constructing a balanced template for what unfortunately turned out to be a most partisan x-ray of the polls. Rather than suggest that Governor Emmanuel Uduaghan was defending the indefensible in their social media exchanges, Ifowodo should at least have acknowledged him for not compromising the independence of the umpire, a stance that ended up benefitting his opposition friends in deference to the will of the electorate.

I would similarly urge him to resist in future, the increasingly consolidating tendency of his bedfellows to play the ostrich in defiance of even the most compelling evidence. That was unfortunately his approach to assessing the Ekiti Governorship polls when he aligned himself with the APC’s elitist rebuke of the electorate for rejecting an out-of-touch governor. Had he and his APC palls taken the commission seriously when its chairman and commissioners kept harping on their commitment to delivering on genuine elections, they wouldn’t have suffered anything close to the scathing defeat they ended up taking home from a substantially compliant process they had earlier on hypocritically written off as a sham.

Jesutega Onokpasa, a lawyer , wrote from Warri, Delta