On Tuesday, the Supreme Court did not remove Governor Hope Uzodinma of Imo State from her job.
The court, led by Justice Inyang Okoro, threw out an application to remove Uzodinma from office on the grounds that the All Progressives Congress (APC) did not legitimately select him to run for the election that led to his first term in 2019.
More than that, the application tried to throw out the years that Uzodinma was governor of Imo state.
In the 2019 election, Mr. Uche Nwosu was the governorship candidate for the Action Alliance (AA). He brought the appeal to the highest court first. However, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and its candidate, Emeka Ihedioha, who won the election, asked to be added as interested parties in the case.
That is, the PDP and Ihedioha asked the Supreme Court to uphold its 2019 decision that Nwosu was not eligible to run for office because he was named by both the AA and the All Progressives Congress (APC).
The appellants said that if the highest court agreed that Nwosu was the APC candidate, then it was not legal for it to fire Ihedioha and name Uzodinma, who was also backed by the APC, as the real winner of the governorship election.
Because of this, the PDP asked the highest court to put its candidate, Ihedioha, back in office, since the APC couldn’t support two candidates in the election.
A lawyer for the PDP, Adedamola Farokun, said in an affidavit supporting the application, “The third respondent/applicant (PDP) is not in any way seeking a review of the valid, existing, and well-thought-out judgment of this court delivered in this appeal in 2019, nor is it seeking a review of the judgment of this court delivered on January 14, 2020 in SC/462/2019. Instead, it humbly seeks that this court give effect to its judgmentme.”
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“That this court has the constitutional, inherent, and legal power to grant the reliefs asked for and carry out its decision.”
Farokun, the deponent, said that Uzodinma was not the APC’s candidate because the court had said that Nwosu was the candidate of both the APC and the AA.
For the Supreme Court to rule that “both the AA and APC did not sponsor and/or field any candidate for the governorship election held in Imo State on March 9, 2019, the PDP asked them to do so because the appellant/respondent was nominated by both parties and was then disqualified as their gubernatorial candidate, as found by this honorable court in its judgment.”
As Governor Uzodinma did not run for office as an independent candidate, the lawsuit said that he could not be legally accepted as the governor of Imo State who was elected.
The people who applied said that the recent election in the state on November 11 was invalid because Ihedioha had not yet finished his term.
The case was brought up again on Tuesday, but the highest court said it didn’t have the power to hear the appeal because it was pointless and would cause a lot of trouble.
The highest court then fined Chief Mike Ozehkome, SAN, N40 million for his part in the case as a lawyer for the PDP and Ihedioha.
Surprisingly, the case stayed on the top court’s docket for over three years. It was first scheduled to be heard in October, but that was pushed back until after Uzodinma’s recent re-election as governor of the state.
