By CHUKS COLLINS

NO doubt the legal assault on the Labour Party candidate for Anambra Central Senatorial   Zone, Chief Victor Umeh by Senator Uche Ekwunife is a veiled attack on the presidential ambition of Mr. Peter Obi, the Labour Party presidential flagbearer.

It may not be too glaring to the public, but the legal battle may have been a targeted onslaught on Obi’s towering stature in the coming presidential election. Obi is popular no doubt and the entire nation, indeed, the world has come to accept him and his message of change as the surest way of   redeeming the country.

So, as the countdown to the election kicked off, fears have risen high,   especially among such parties as the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP; the All Progressives Congress, APC, etc, on the likelihood of Obi sweeping the stakes and wished things were completely different.

The Anambra Central Senatorial District appears worst hit, where three long-time rivals -Senators Uche Ekwunife, Victor Umeh and Dozie Nwankwo are locking horns for the Senate seat. But curiously for reasons best known to her, Ekwunife attempts shooting down Obi, Umeh and the LP, using the instrumentality of the law courts. But when in actual fact it is a calculated scheme against Obi and his party, the   Obidatti International Movement, as well as the popular Peter Obi Support Network, POSN.

The dangerous scheme is presumed to be master minded by some elements in the PDP in conjunction with other stomach infrastructure-driven political elements nationwide who are said to be dangling the Senate president seat as a bait.

The plot, we further learnt was said to have been designed to unfold in stages and had commenced a long time ago. Its first stage was reportedly successful with the name calling of Obi as a “kindergarten president”. It was closely followed by the multiple attempts to downplay/discourage his moves/messages of hope, saying he has no structure and that his supporters were merely on social media alone and none on ground.

Another stage was ignited to key into the previous one by describing his mammoth enthusiastic crowd that greeted the nationwide Obidatti Movement rallies as “rented”.

But when the lies persistently failed to make any impact, the already exasperated antagonists tried violent assault on the incremental, self-motivated crowd to see if they would retaliate for them to seize the opportunity to unleash mayhem on the young Obidients who saw in Obi their guide compass to recover Nigeria, their common destiny and freedom from the mindless-structured traducers.

This was while some of the antagonists at the corridors of power including Governor Nasir el-Rufai of Kaduna State and Senator Ifeanyi Okowa, the presidential running mate of the PDP, as as well as Governor  Sanwo-Olu of Lagos State refused any indoor, outdoor advert placement of Obidatti Presidential campaign, rallies and gathering in any part of their states.

But who can fight a vision whose time has come, or God’s anointed? Certainly nobody!

Yet another stage was to go against Umeh, the LP’s Anambra Central Senatorial candidate as a subtle attack on Obi and the Obidatti Movement.

Pronto, Umeh was disqualified vide a Federal High Court verdict on Jan 27,2023. And he quickly went on appeal, which his succeeding looks dicey when details of the judgement were critically considered. Already, the appeal panel drawn from Enugu Division has sat, taken oral and written arguments and final addresses. The judgement was now deferred for a day to be announced soon.

And should he fail, then it would simply become a straight fight between his main traducer, Ekwunife and another political hardhitter, Hon Dozie Nwankwo of the All Progressives Grand Alliance, APGA,   the ruling party in the state.

Until the present court verdict, Umeh was one of the top contenders to the coveted Anambra Central Senatorial seat in the fast approaching February 25 general  election. He was facing a battery of lawsuits over his emergence.

While a member of his LP, Chief Solomon Onyekwelu, a senatorial aspirant who claimed he was not given opportunity to prove his popularity in the primary was dragging him from within the party, Ekwunife was fighting him from outside.

Ekwunife is seeking an unprecedented third term re-election into the Red Chamber which only very few had attained nationwide. This was in addition to having spent two terms in the Green Chambers earlier.

But in all of these, the APGA candidate, Nwankwo who was described as being on ground with citizens of the area and burning with desire to impress the constituents is standing bye and ready to step in.

The trio have been at it together before now and tested and known each other’s political strength, antics and tactics.

There was also Chief Kodilichukwu Okelekwe of the All Progressives Congress, APC. However it was a bit difficult to decipher why he joined the race.

Sadly, political pundits while acknowledging the beauty of the addition of knowledge through the suit to the nation’s jurisprudence, it hurts that the presidential candidate of the LP, HE Peter Obi may actually be the original target of the whole matter.

Therefore, it leaves sour taste in the mouth that Ekwunife was the main litigant in the suit against Obi’s LP considering the close affinity between them before now. More so, she has spent about two decades at the National Assembly and clearly stands a good chance of clinching a plum position under an Obi presidency. It was also touted she was eyeing the Senate top job, should she return to the red Chambers of the National Assembly. Consequently she would fight with everything at her disposal to ensure a win.

This brand of politics hurts, really hurts!