Akeredolu and Ayedatiwa
Hardball
The Ondo gubernatorial impeachment wars have hit a dangerous tempo, with the hawks on both sides going for broke. The APC should stay steady: it should defang these hawks and negotiate a truce.
That’s the party’s best bet, if it must not blunder into a self-set ambush, at governorship election time, less than a year away. A house divided against itself seldom stands.
The latest salvo came from the Ondo legislature, fearing the fiery impeachment threat to Deputy Governor Lucky Ayedatiwa might be turning cold ash — no thanks (or is it thanks?) to an intervention by the APC National Chairman, Dr. Abdullahi Ganduje.
In a sudden twist, the Ondo House wrote to the Chief Judge of Ondo State, Justice Olusola Odusola, to go ahead and put in place the impeachment probe panel, claiming the restriction order on it, by a Federal High Court in Abuja, had lapsed.
In playing to that new gallery, the House not only touted its huge number of pro-impeachment deputies, it also bragged it was superior to the ruling party, without which platform they couldn’t have been elected, on “constitutional” matters. Ego!
But Ayedatiwa’s lawyers, kamikaze-like, responded, warning the pro-impeachment legislative bastion not to get ahead of itself by misdirecting the CJ, over “conjectures, misconceptions, inconsistencies, undue desperation and misconstruction of the law” — what a torrent! What a mouthful! Counter-ego!
The lawyers, led by Ebun-Olu Adegboruwa, SAN, told the CJ to maintain the status quo.
Another batch of self-named pro-Ayedatiwa Ondo native-lawyers then raised the stakes: Governor Rotimi Akeredolu should not only address a press conference to “declare his health status”, it also goaded the Ondo State Executive Council to trigger Section 189(1) of the 1999 Constitution, with the dangerous insinuation that Aketi was “incapacitated and unable to perform the functions of his office”!
But mercifully, if incidentally, as all that drama was unfolding in Akure, Aketi was meeting the South West governors, in his Ibadan home, in his capacity as chair of the South West Governors Forum.
The optics of that was sweet and sour. Sweet, because Akeredolu looked much improved and appeared gaining weight. Perhaps that was his traducers’ “press conference”!
But sour because, by and by, the governor’s health was becoming fair(?) fare in the fierce impeachment war! That’s isn’t helping Aketi’s recuperation much.
This impeachment, either way, is a bad idea that turns everyone into a loser. Let both parties therefore lick their wounds and tactically withdraw.
The governor going after the deputy or vice-versa, is less strategic than earning a fresh four-year mandate less than a year away. That should be APC’s message to the hawks, who easily can destroy but hardly can build.
The Nation
