An Anambra High Court of Justice sitting in Awka and presided over by Honourable Justice Obiorah Nwabunike, yesterday extended the order of the court restraining the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP from submitting the name of Val Ozigbo as candidate of the party for this year’s Anambra governorship election on November 6, 2021.
The court also restrained the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC from accepting the name of Val Ozigbo as the candidate of the party and further restrained Val Ozigbo from parading himself as the candidate of the party for this year’s governorship election.
The court ordered all the parties to revert to status quo pending the determination of the substantive suit.
This latest court order of Wednesday 14 July, 2021, exposes as fake news the report credited to Mr. Kola Ologbondiyan, the National Publicity Secretary of PDP, that Val Ozigbo has been cleared by the court to become the authentic candidate of the party in this year’s governorship election.
This is a treacherous lie to confuse the polity. The officials of the party should educate themselves on the importance and necessity of obeying court orders and submitting themselves to the laws of the land. The fake news that Justice Nwabunike denied the jurisdiction of his court to hear the matter and consequently dismissed the applications before him is a senseless propaganda, that tells a lot about the unabating impunity of the PDP, to go to extreme lengths in order to subvert justice.
The general public is hereby advised to ignore the serial mendacity of certain officials of the party, who are struggling to enthrone an illegality that died before its arrival.
As Achilleus-Chud Uchegbu, correctly observed in his column in the Sun newspaper of 15 July, 2021, “the problems that the PDP has now created for itself in Anambra had earlier been resolved by the Court of Appeal in Olalere vs Oye, where the court held that, “a political party is bound by its Constitution and any action taken, which is not in conformity with the constitution of such party, is null and void and of no effect.”
This summarizes the futility of PDP’s present position in the Anambra PDP primary election. The delegates provided for in the PDP constitution elected Senator Ugochukwu Uba as candidate of the party in this year’s governorship election. The PDP is therefore bound by its Constitution to recognize the Senator as the validly elected candidate of the party.
The so called super Delegates that were purported to have elected Val Ozigbo are unknown to the PDP constitution and therefore, every action taken to appoint him candidate of the party, are actions not in conformity with PDP Constitution, and by the ruling of the Court of Appeal, the actions are null and void and of no effect.
