What is the strange logic behind Hope Uzodinma’s political actions? By Rotimi Fasan

If one considers the unlikely calculus through which he emerged as the governor of Imo State in 2020, Chief Hope Uzodinma is one of the oddities of Nigeria’s adventure in democracy. Between him and Owelle Rochas Okorocha, with whom he has locked horns in a struggle over the senatorial ticket of Imo West, there is hardly anything to choose. He had been elected a senator and was in the middle of his second term representing Imo West at the National Assembly when he decided to throw his hat into the Imo governorship race in 2019. Owelle Rochas, whose jankara ideology of iberiberism signposts his fascination with statues and other monuments of dubious aesthetic value, at this time called the shots of Imo State politics. It was a peculiar political brand of domestic governance in which his family members had a firm grip on some of the prime aspects of Imo’s political estate. From his wife to his daughter, his daughter to his son-in-law, etc., all had a role to play.

Some of his antics in this regard prefigured the disdain with which he was held by people in the state and beyond. They were partly the reason some of his detractors misnamed him Okorohausa, a name that came from his long association with the north of the country, where he attained adulthood and made the economic fortune that he obviously leveraged into political mileage. It was in this political landscape, in which Okorocha was the godfather, that Hope Uzodinma emerged to carve a slice for himself as a senator. His vision did not at this time extend beyond part of the western corner of the much vaster space over which Chief Sam Mbakwe held court as the first executive governor between 1979 and 1983. His senatorial spell was halfway before ambition took the better part of him and he decided to be governor. With this, he appeared to have mistaken his political might and ended up biting off more than he could chew. For, in the election that was held in January of 2020, he was the clear underdog.

A former Deputy Speaker of the House of Representatives, Emeka Ihedioha of the Peoples Democratic Party, was one of the two frontrunners. The other was Uche Nwosu, Rochas Okorocha’s favoured son-in-law. He was of Okorocha’s self-created Action Alliance. Emeka Ihedioha carried the day in the duel that had two other contestants, namely, Ifeanyi Ararume and, of course, Hope Uzodinma. They were respectively of APGA and the APC. Okorocha’s son-in-law emerged as the first runner-up, followed by Ararume and then Uzodinma, who took the rear position. Emeka Ihedioha was returned as the winner of the election and sworn in as governor, and the others headed to the election tribunal and later the Court of Appeal. But in a legal showdown that played out at the Supreme Court, Hope Uzodinma triumphed. It was a unanimous decision that was read by the current Chief Justice of the Federation, Justice Kudirat Kekere-Ekun. It was Uzodinma’s second victory through the courts. He became a senator through a Supreme Court decision. He probably knows the courts better than others. Which is why he may be headed in that direction again in his tango with Okorocha. He tripped last week in the Federal High Court of Justice Obiora Egwuatu.

Uzodinma’s main argument in the courts for his governorship contest rested on the simple claim that votes in 388 polling units had been excluded from his tally, which, if returned, would give him victory. The Supreme Court agreed. That was how, in a demonstration that lent political valence to a biblical declaration, the last, actually the fourth in this case, became first and the first became last. Emeka Ihedioha had to go home. The courts have given what the people did not give. It was a freak of a judicial pronouncement with a bizarre outcome that came straight out of the book of impossibilities. It normalised the abnormal. Under normal circumstances, Hope Uzodinma could not have had a cat in hell’s chance of emerging victorious. Nor was his joy diminished by the circumstances of his emergence. He walked into the office of the governor with every confidence he could muster, even as Imolites see him not as their choice but as an imposition of the courts. But dat one concern dem, concern dem papa, not Hope Uzodinma. A man with such a political background would not be fazed by anything. Not in life, much less in politics.

He would see himself as the divine beneficiary of what Nigerian Pentecostals call unmerited favour. If rules and laws could be divinely broken (which is what church people pray for) in order to make him governor, what would he consider sacrosanct? What could be held beyond the grasping fingers of his vaulting ambition? Is it any wonder that, after six and a half years of being in the saddle as governor and with nearly two years of his eight years left, Uzodinma has cleaned up his playbook to do gidigbo with Rochas Okorocha over a senatorial ticket? Without going into the details of the fight, which are as dirty as they could be and make both men look criminally liable notwithstanding their finger-pointing, it is reasonable to ask in which world this kind of thing happens? Just a year into his second term, Uzodinma decided to trade his senatorial ticket for that of a governor, and now, in his second term as governor, he thought it was time to jump ship and go for the same senatorial ticket he had voluntarily relinquished. He sure would have his cake and eat it.

Which section of our electoral law permits this brigand kpalongo? Assuming no section of the law explicitly forbids it, which political convention condones it? If a civil servant cannot hold two government-paid jobs simultaneously, how does an elected governor do that? Of course, Uzodinma has his eyes on something bigger than being governor, which is the rumoured seat of the President of the Senate that he hopes would go to the South-East in a post-2027 Bola Tinubu administration. But under what label or mechanism of governance would this happen while he is still a governor? And then, he chose to abuse his position as Chair of the Progressive Governors Forum, mobilising self-aggrandising governors like himself who claim to be working for the president’s re-election. But their goal was to thwart Nyesom Wike’s so-called Rainbow Coalition. Uzodinma is yet to demonstrate his might as a political heavyweight in an APC that is struggling to gain a foothold in a South-East awash with the separatist sentiments of an outlaw group. Which raises the question: what does Governor Hope Uzodinma bring to politics, to the APC table, beyond raw ambition?