The 2015 general elections may have come and gone, but the ripple effect of the keenly contested elections is still smouldering and reverberating all over the place. Last Thursday, outgoing President Goodluck Jonathan met with members of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, Presidential Campaign Organisation at the new Banquet Hall of the Presidential Villa, ostensibly to receive the report of the 2015 elections campaign and also to thank the members of the committee. It is a different matter when it comes to why it was necessary to thank the members. Is it for an assignment properly executed or an assignment that was poorly executed, leading to the magnificent defeat and disgrace the party suffered at the polls? At any rate, I think it was all done out of courtesy and civility not that the members really deserved a pat on the back.
At that ceremony, President Jonathan’s address drew a thunderous standing ovation from the audience. But one man refused to join his colleagues in the ecstasy, a development that aroused the curiosity of those present including the ubiquitous members of the Press. This occurred when Ifeanyi Ubah, a prominent member of the campaign team and the founder and chief executive officer of Transformation Ambassadors of Nigeria, TAN, the body that was at the vanguard of the president’s re-election campaign, caused a stir as he started weeping like a baby right in the full glare of all those present at the ceremony. Reports had it that Ubah, who was sweating profusely, wept uncontrollably to such an extent that at a point, he had to excuse himself from the hall. This was after some party chieftains had taken turns to console him to no avail.
I think Ubah has every reason to weep. The only amusing and embarrassing aspect of it is his choice of venue and time to weep out his immoral idiosyncrasies. As leader of TAN, Ubah participated in the multidimensional campaign heist which saw his group staging fake rallies all over the country in the build-up to the 2015 elections in order to bamboozle President Jonathan into the presidential race when they knew in the innermost recesses of their hearts that it was going to be a difficult road for Jonathan to thread. It was a perfect, well co-ordinated ploy to make money off the president and the PDP by deceiving President Jonathan that the whole country was solidly behind him. In a country where cooking or falsifying figures has become a rampant political gimmick to lure politicians, Ubah and his clique claimed they had collected 12 million signatures of Nigerians who wanted Jonathan to continue in office, after travelling all over the 36 states of the federation.
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‘I think Ubah has every reason to weep. The only amusing and embarrassing aspect of it, is his choice of venue and time to weep out his immoral idiosyncrasies’
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Judging from the final results of the presidential election held on March 28, 2015, well, Ubah and his organisation may have been right after all. At least in that election, President Jonathan scored 12,853,163 while his closest rival General Muhammadu Buhari of the All Progressives Congress, APC, scored 15,424,921 to emerge as winner of the election. With this result, it means that Jonathan surpassed the pre-election prediction of Ubah and Co. by about 853,163 votes though this was not enough to see him through to a second term in office as he trailed miserably behind Buhari, by 2,571,758. This woeful result could have been a source of irritation to Ubah, a situation he could no longer control and he eventually ended up crying like a toddler.
Quite recently too, Ubah had contested election as governor of his home state, Anambra, and lost woefully after expending a deep war chest on the elections. As if money was everything in life, he actually started his campaign by going to the United States of America, USA, where he opened several campaign offices in many cities in God’s Own Country, perhaps, to intimidate his co-contestants and cow them to submission. Back home, it was a media fiesta as he bought overwhelming spaces on television stations and newspapers to campaign vigorously for his candidacy. At the end of the day, all these paled into insignificance as the electorate proved they were wiser by rejecting him totally at the polls. Ubah beat a hasty retreat, went underground and disappeared from public view for some time. Probably to lick his wounds and count the heavy losses he incurred in the ill-fated election.
Recall that Ubah, who also doubles as the chief executive officer of Capital Oil, has been in the news for some time for the wrong reasons. A while ago, he and his firm, Capital Oil, were at the centre of a messy deal with a fellow townsman, Cosmas Maduka, the President of Coscharis Group, who accused him of playing a fast one on him over a N21bn facility granted him for an oil-lifting transaction by a bank in which Maduka stood surety. The whole deal was so messy that the Special Fraud Unit of the Nigeria Police on Milverton Road, Ikoyi, had to step in. That was during the tenure of a current Assistant Inspector-General of Police, who was then the Commissioner of Police in charge of the SFU.
The story of the arrest of Ubah by the SFU in Ikoyi, was very interesting. On the day he was arrested, he had gone to the station casually to answer an invitation. It was at the tail-end of the week. One thing led to another, and Ubah was eventually detained. Few days after, he came face to face with the officer in charge, the CP. In his characteristic arrogance, as soon as he was ushered into the presence of the CP, he (Ubah) fired the first salvo: “Is the Villa aware that I am here?” Since the question was not directed to anybody in particular, he did not get any response. There he was standing confused and lonely. He was then asked to sit down. Apparently because he was hungry, he had opted to join the CP who was by then eating rice at midday in his office. I don’t believe that Ubah was genuinely hungry at that time but only wanted to have an in-road into the heart of the CP who had become a difficult nut to crack for him. All the same, the CP needed to be civil as he ordered his boys to get Ubah a plate and some cutleries to enable him partake in the meal.
That done, Ubah confidently opened up discussions with the CP as a way of finding a soft landing out of the legal cobweb he had become entangled. He made some tempting monetary inducements, which he said his boys could package in hard currencies and bring to the CP immediately if he would agree to play ball. But the CP turned it down. Ubah then increased the bait but the CP, sensing danger and the possibility of a clandestine set up avoided getting involved in such a mouth-watering offer that could spell doom for him. Thus, Ubah became more confused and desperate for freedom. Many times the CP slipped away from office leaving Ubah wondering whether the end had come.
After staying in the gulag for an upward of about nine days, during which time he tried profusely, albeit unsuccessfully, to get across to the lioness of the villa, who was at that time recuperating in a German Hospital after a near fatal surgery, respite finally came for Ubah. In the morning of the ninth day, the CP got an international phone call. The caller on the other end was the lioness and the message was simple and direct: “Na me o. I learnt that my boy…. is with you there. Please allow him to go. He no go do that again, you hear. Make you allow him go, I go talk to am.” Of course, that ended the whole detention saga and probably closed the case sine die. Now tell me, why will Ubah not weep blood in place of tears at a time like this!
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