His Excellency,
It is with a throbbing heart full of joy and absolute sincerity that I write this letter to you. I wouldn’t know what man is meant for on the green earth if not to serve and praise his Maker in truth and in spirit while he lives without a wavering spirit but with an ebullient and stoical heart by standing firmly on the things ought be defended by him as commanded him by his Maker. If men still deserve fowl or goat when they show mettle, you do not only deserve fowl or goat but also cow because of the innate potentials you’ve shown to make sure that our democracy was not hijacked by a group of men whose stock-in-trade was self-aggrandizement. These men meant Nigerians well only on the pages of the newspapers, but live, they rule with scorpion.
When they ganged up and indicted you of enormous misdeeds at the Petroleum Development Trust Fund, PDTF, that you pocketed in the bank the firm’s money worth over $140 million, you did not squabble with them, after not being allowed a fair hearing, you stepped out for a legal battle while they were out for a political battle.
Their anger against you was just for the sheer reason that you objected the rule of lucre they introduced to pursue the rule of law. Your counter outcry against their devilish plans brought the Emperor to his knees. He was knee-bent. Though he did not say this in print or on air, but he may have sworn that you will never succeed him from the way things looked. You know that he’s not penchant to forgive or forget. In earnest, he will never forget the humiliation he suffered in your hand, while Nigerians will not forget your undaunted spirit in fighting for our democracy. You are a beacon of hope!
His Excellency, not only the Emperor, you dealt with the campaigners of calumny who reeled out blows against you. They sent their messy reports against you to the senate to commence your impeachment. Instead of following them lawlessness-for-lawlessness, you resorted to the courts. Kudos!
In the courts, at the Code of Conduct Tribunal, you won outright after asking the court to set aside the messy reports or charges against you. But these men wouldn’t submit to correction or defeat, they, incivility, went to the Court of Appeal to challenge the High Court ruling on the Code of Conduct Tribunal. They even asked the court of Appeal to declare your seat – as the vee pee – vacant after they have done the wrong thing: Holding your entitlements without a legal stand.
Four days after they stamped this suit, you won them again outright. Even though they withdrew the suit before time, the court had to interpret the law for them that they lacked the muscle to remove you from the seat of vee pee since you were not employed or bureaucratically appointed by them. Yet, they did not cover their eyes in shame!
Like the Igbos have it, “How many times would a man kill lion before he would be called lion killer?” It is once! These men did not cover their face in shame. Having seen how you defeated them, the electoral commission sprang up to try power on you by removing your name from the list of this year’s presidential election that came up in April 21. Just barely six days to the election, after the commission has cleared 24 candidates that would contest in the election without your name in the list, you won them again at the Abuja High Court. The court ordered the commission within few hours to the election to put your name on the ballot the same day the court’s sister, the Appeal Court, held that the electoral commission had power to disqualify any candidate from contesting in an election.
Turaki Adamawa, the Igbos also have it that there is nothing a suitor could do for his fiancée’s child that the child would call him daddy. You know what this proverb means. The Igbos also have it that if a big rope leaning on a tree couldn’t be cut down, one can shake it. Your legal battles with the foot-soldiers have shown or demonstrated how you dearly love the nation, but your traducers didn’t love you for that just course.
His Excellency, you have everything to be proud of, even when people are saying that you were among the crew that perpetrated fraud in the 2003 elections but now crying blue murder. I tell them that after all, Paul was once Saul! You lost the election of 2007 but you won your political foes in all the courts they took you to and in the once you took them to. You are not a “do-or-die” politician, as preached by the captain of their train. You made the nation’s judiciary stand for what it’s for – justice. You fought from humility and humbled the evil plotters against your political career. You are not an advocate of bloodshed or a bitter practitioner of democracy. Without someone like you being in the fore against the devilish agenda, the third term would have attain ground. How many of your defensive approach for our democracy would I say here? They can not contain in a 500 page note!
However, how I wish I could have the opportunity of meeting with you, I will call you Ebubedike. I will shoot up the cork of a Champaign, celebrating your victory as a mighty man in battle.
His Excellency, hold unto the rule of law, as you have been doing, people that would look up to you as their role model would be magnanimous than you may have known. All the best!
Yours Compatriot,
Odimegwu Onwumere
