News
Owo ward result: The monkey hand in Enugu governorship election magic
By Sunny Igboanugo
Government magic! Babanla nonsense! Democrazy! Demonstration of Craze! Crazy Demonstration! These were the words of Fela Anikulapo, the late Afrobeat king with which he tried to capture Nigeria’s variance of democracy. Hear him: People no go vote, dem come get big-big numbers – thousands to thousands – millions to millions. Na decocrazy be that!
Now this was after the 1983 elections. How long is that now? That’s 40 clear years. Now, in those 40 years, the same people who brought the idea of democracy to Nigeria, have practically turned man into woman and vice versa – something nobody thought was ever possible. They call it transgender. In 1983, when Fela sang of the sorry state of Nigerian election, who could have thought that a woman in her farm at Eha-Amufu would pick up her phone and call her son in Lagos or Maiduguri to complain of her ailing knees and get the instant soothing words she needs to carry on or that one would enter a car and programme it, sit comfortably and be watching a movie, while the car takes him to his destination, safely and comfortably, without having to shout at his driver.
That’s the level the world has moved. Yet in Africa as retrogression remains the name of the game, the people continue to grapple with most basic elements of life, not because they are completely ignorant of what happens elsewhere, or because they lack the template to redeem themselves, but because they have become prisoners to the most retrogressive enablers of bad behaviour – primordial sentiments.
As Fela sang: In Africa, as time de gooo things just de bad, de bad more and more. Poor man de cry, rich man de mess! Yes, because of the mess the big man makes, the poor have remained the butt of the society, have remained at the receiving end of a swivelling, tempestuous, whirlwind of vicious cycle. They have remained in their sedate, innate and sedimentary state, simply because they lack the means to extricate themselves from the vice grip of their traducers – too helpless to act and failing to act because they are helpless.
Just like many other states, Enugu presents a demonstrably perfect example of this vicious cycle. In the last 24 years, it has found itself in this vice grip, where a political tendency, which burst into the state with some uncanny fanfare, has virtually taken a life of its own, growing into a monstrous behemoth, stamping down on any sort of organic growth that managed to sprout out from the ground with the prospect to give the people a new lease of life.
That nobody can turn the taps in Enugu today, as in most cities in Nigeria and water will flow from a public source, flows from the direct consequence of the illicit, but powerful force that seems to have taken permanent residence in the state since the inception of the current regime the purveyors refer as democracy, but which the majority see in Fela’s apt description as – democrazy.
Just like in previous editions, Enugu, the capital of former Eastern Nigeria presents its variant of the macabre dance the world is being regaled with in Nigeria. It is a dance in which chieftains of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and the Independent National Electoral Commission have taken the front row to demonstrate one of the oddest if not the most grotesque forms of electoral heist that has marked the 2023 general elections.
The Owo ward of Nkanu East Local Government Area of the state, was the venue, where the weird political performance was displayed. There, the dramatis personae engineered the crooked construct that made Peter Mbah of the PDP prevail over Chijioke Edeoga of the Labour Party (LP) in a manner that has kept many mouths agape as they see the curtain fall after the outlandish drama that characterised the March 18 governorship election.
The full story of that uncanny episode was captured by Eze Sabinus Oscar O, Professor in the department of biochemistry and Dean, Faculty of Biological Sciences, University of Nigeria Nsukka (UNN), who as the Collation Officer for the ward, saw it all.
Here is how he recorded his story entitled: Why Owo Ward Of Nkanu East LGA, Of Enugu State Is In The Eye Of The Storm he gave a graphic picture of his encounter with some people that could only be described as electoral brigands, gave a clear impetus to to why many people have described the 2023 election as the worst in the history of Nigeria.
His account: “My fellow colleagues and the general public. Having observed the turmoil arising from the results collated from Nkanu East LGA and also having served as the Governorship Collation Officer for Owo ward in Nkanu East LGA, I stand in a proper position to put the records straight and clear some pockets of doubts as follows:
*Collation of results at the INEC office near the LGA secretariat started around 7.30 pm with the arrival of PO’s (Polling Officers) from different wards
*As at 1.30am on Sunday morning, the PO’s from Owo Ward had not returned to INEC office to submit their results.
*As at such late time, majority of the collation officers had already completed their collation assignments from wards under them.
*The PO’s at Owo ward finally returned around 2.00am but collation couldn’t start immediately as the SPO (Supervisory Presiding Officer) was nowhere to be found, as reported by POs.
*Collation of the results finally started around 2.30am
*It was observed that only polling units 008, 009, 010 and 011 used BVAS machines for accreditation of voters, while seven polling units (001- 007) did not use BVAS machines.
*Steps 5 and 6 of the guideline for collation of results were activated but no response was observed.
*This was immediately brought to the attention of the EO but couldn’t yield good result
*Step 17 of the guideline (Form 40G) on collation was activated, as the hard copy of the Form 40G was not issued to CO (Collation Officer) alongside other collation materials, but still failed.
*When all these actions were taken and all efforts to justify results returned from Owo could not stand, it became imperative that the only alternative was to cancel those results from Owo where these BVAS machines could not work.
*All these were brought to the attention of the LGA collation officer who also doubles as the LGA returning officer for gubernatorial election.
*I categorically made it clear to the LGA collation officer that he should not collate the results for Owo ward, especially where BVAS machines could not work, and that the election in the affected areas without BVAS machines should be cancelled so that a re-run should be fixed since the RATECH (Registration Area Technician) claimed that those BVAS machines malfunctioned.
*The LGA collation officer for gubernatorial election claimed that he would not adopt my advice because his life would be in danger thereafter.
*All my efforts to get the results from Owo Wards (polling units 001 to 007) cancelled generated a lot of tension as the news permeated everywhere that I want to cancel the gubernatorial election held at Owo.
*The cloud of tension and animosity became too thick to the point that I was advised from both within the area and outside Nkanu to make effort to leave the scene as my life was visibly in danger.
*At this point, all other collation officers from other Wards had already left back to Enugu with the only two buses that conveyed all collation officers to the INEC office at Nkanu East, thereby leaving only me behind.
*As efforts to get the results from polling units 001 to 007 canceled with a view to rescheduling a re-run failed, I decided, as a last option, to do a letter of complaint to the REC through the LGA collation officer/returning officer. Unbelievably, the LGA Collation/Returning Officer refused to accept this letter from me, insisting that unless the EO endorsed it, he would not collect the letter.
*The EO, on the other hand, also declined to endorse the letter.
*This particular action taken by me to initiate the process of cancellation of the polling units results, skyrocketed the tension in the area and it became visibly obvious that my life was in danger since I have been abandoned with no vehicle to exit the area.
*The total number of registered voters in Owo ward was 6129.
*How the number in (20) above translated to 30,000 votes from Nkanu East LGA is not known to Owo ward collation officer?
*Note that all the results sheets from all the eleven polling units in Owo has only one political party with votes and other parties scored zero.
*The recording of zero to other political parties was done at the polling units level and not at the Ward collation level.
*When I did not obtain the protection and support of the EO to secure the rejection/cancellation of the results for a rerun, and given the clear threats from a plethora of thugs, and without any security protection, it was clear that I was on my own and that my life was in obvious danger. How, I as Owo ward collation officer left the area and arrived at Enugu should be better imagined. The dead does not tell the story but the living.
Now, while many would be quick to capture the incredulity of the story, many more, would simply dismiss it as as an open and shut case, given the glaring and obvious ingredients in relation to the the guidelines used by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC).
But not when vested interests are involved – politicians with bags of money chasing willing electoral officials at the highest level, whose only interests are to either complete some shopping malls in some cities across the country, acquire more housing estates in choice areas of Lagos and Abuja or buy properties in Europe and America – as opposed to those seeking better and nobler ideals for humanity and for country.
So, what do you have? They went to work, after apparently sealing their deal. In the end, the totally scandalised people of Enugu, have again been served one of the wackiest offerings on the Nigerian electoral menu – the Owo breakfast – a pot of soup with the hanging hand of the axiomatic monkey with all the garnishing to boot.
Indeed many believe that the Enugu miracle is a direct counter to the February 25 presidential election in which the Labour Party (LP) through its presidential candidate, Peter Obi, shocked the entire nation by virtually stop a moving train with bare hands. There is the talk that the INEC officials were only acting a script forbidding the party, from capturing any state across the federation in order to asphyxiate the party of the needed oxygen early enough and ensure it ceases to be a formidable force capable of posing any form of threat to the powers that be now and in future.
To achieve this, the INEC in Abuja, where the case was referred, which ought to cancel the entire election in Owo, as a result of not using the BVAS and the glaring fact of over-voting only managed the skim off some votes from the 30,000 recorded for the PDP, leaving it with just 16,000. Case closed.
Now the questions. The ward in issue has just 7,000 accredited voters on the BVAS. From where then did INEC that announced double that figure get the extras? In the first place, is INEC not supposed to cancel election in the ward and call for a rerun, as contained in its guidelines. What is the fate of Enugu people from hence. The answer can only be obtained in those three words – Go to court! Tragedy!
Columns
The Three-Month Sprint (1): Philosophical Architecture of an Intellectual Trilogy of State Decay
Last week on The Sunday Stew, we unveiled the Decoupling Sovereignty Index (DSI), a quantitative metric I developed as an extension of the Trinity of State Decay. It is meant to be a mathematical instrument for measuring the degree of separation between a state’s juridical sovereignty and its lived reality. I had planned to follow up today with the first instalment of a three-part series on the methodology and indicators of the DSI.
Then, from the middle of last week, there was a development that sent me into a sustained period of reflection.
On Wednesday, Zenodo — the open-access repository developed by CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, and the European Commission — published my 16,315-word theoretical treatise, ‘The Trinity of State Decay (Part 1): Sovereign Decoupling and Rival Sovereignty — A Theoretical Statement.’ On Thursday, Harvard Dataverse, owned and operated by Harvard University, published the same work. On Friday morning, an email arrived from the Social Science Open Access Repository (SSOAR), operated by GESIS — the Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences in Germany — confirming that they too had accepted, published, and archived the paper.
Late Prof. Edward Said
I sat with that for a while. It is exactly three months since The Sunday Stew made its debut. In those three short months, we have produced an original analytical framework (The Insecurity Triad), a comprehensive theoretical formulation (the Trinity of State Decay), and a quantitative index (DSI). Within the same period, the framework entered global scholarly circulation, and now the theoretical paper has been published by three of the world’s most respected scholarly repositories within seventy-two hours of each other. I found myself thinking about the symmetry of it: three months. A trilogy of original contributions. A triple publication in a single week.
Numbers sometimes carry meaning far beyond arithmetic. This one felt like it was trying to tell me something.
I. The Seed Planted in a Library
When The Sunday Stew was conceived, I did not set out to become a framework architect, a theorist, or an index creator. But looking back, I think the seed was planted much earlier — by accident, in the history section of the University of Calabar library.
I was preparing a term paper on Nigerian history. Our lecturer was the late Dr. Erim O. Erim — a man you had to do your absolute best to satisfy. I was moving along the shelves when I stopped. What arrested me was a name on a spine: Sigmund Freud. His biography. I could not understand what such a book was doing in the history section. I took it anyway, borrowed it, and in one week read it cover to cover.
Of everything I read about Freud’s life, one idea lodged itself in my subconscious and has never left: Freud’s concept of immortality. He defined it simply but profoundly: immortality is being known by many anonymous people. Not a mystical phenomenon, but a psychological and systemic one. It is the act of leaving behind an intellectual footprint so distinct that your ideas are absorbed by millions of people who may never meet you, but who must use your language to understand their own reality.
Freud did not merely write a theory. He changed the global vocabulary. Because of Freud, anonymous people who have never read a page of psychoanalysis use the words ego, subconscious, projection, and defence mechanism every single day. They are operating within his architecture without ever knowing it. That, he argued, was immortality.
I was a young man in a university library who had come looking for Nigerian history and stumbled into a philosophy of intellectual legacy. I did not know, at the time, that I had been given a compass.
•Late Antonio Gramsci
II. The Book C.Don Handed Me
Several years later, when I lived in Lagos, I had someone who was (and still is) a friend, a big brother, and a mentor. The home of C.Don Adinuba — then at Ilupeju — was like my second home. I could walk in at any time. C.Don was the perfect host, and his wife a hostess of uncommon warmth. There was never a dull moment in that house. He knew I loved books, and he is himself one of the most intellectually deep people I have ever encountered.
On one of those days, he pulled a book from his shelf, handed it to me, and said: “Go and read this.” I looked at it. The author was unfamiliar. I asked: “Who is Edward Said?” He replied: “Just go and read the book.”
Representations of the Intellectual — which grew out of Said’s 1993 Reith Lectures for the BBC — turned out to be, apart from the Bible, one of the most impactful books I have ever read. In its pages I first encountered Antonio Gramsci, whose Prison Notebooks has made an enduring impression on my intellectual formation and theoretical development. Said’s argument — that the intellectual’s vocation is to speak truth to power, to represent the unrepresented, and to refuse the comfort of specialisation in favour of the discomfort of genuine engagement — became a way of understanding what journalism, practised seriously, is actually for.
And from Antonio Gramsci, particularly his broad conception of the intellectual, I came to understand that intellectuals are not confined to universities, research institutes, or academic titles. Gramsci argued that intellectual activity exists wherever people help shape ideas, interpret reality, organise knowledge, and influence how society understands itself. Through that lens, I realised that journalism is not merely a profession of reporting events; it is an inherently intellectual vocation.
As a journalist, I do more than gather facts and relay information. I help frame public conversations, interrogate power, highlight social challenges, preserve collective memory, and contribute to the global marketplace of ideas. This understanding deepened my sense of responsibility to society. It reinforced the belief that journalism carries a duty not only to inform but also to enlighten, challenge assumptions, encourage critical thinking, and provide citizens with the knowledge necessary to make informed decisions.
Gramsci’s perspective helped me see that the journalist occupies a vital bridge in the relationship between structured knowledge and public life. The responsibility is therefore not simply to report what happens, but to pursue truth rigorously, interpret developments thoughtfully, and contribute constructively to the intellectual and moral development of society. In that sense, journalism became for me not just a career, but a pure form of public intellectual engagement.
These two books — one stumbled upon by accident, one pressed into my hands by C.Don — formed the philosophical foundation on which everything that follows in this column rests. I did not know that at the time. I know it now.
Late Sigmund Freud
III. The Question That Started Everything
When The Sunday Stew made its debut on March 8th, I initially envisioned a column anchored broadly on faith, character, and the structural forces that shape society, with a focus on Nigeria and Africa in a global context. But the second edition on March 15 inspired our current trajectory. Entitled ‘A Country Without Earthquakes — Yet Shaken by Itself’, it explored the tragic reality of Nigeria manufacturing catastrophic man-made disasters while other nations contend merely with natural ones. The insights that came from writing that piece—drawing heavily from an expansive interview a former colleague and I conducted with the late Professor Jubril Aminu in 2012—inspired the rigorous analytical direction this column ultimately took, beginning with the development of The Insecurity Triad.
At the outset, I only set out to understand why Nigeria keeps bleeding. I wanted to discover why the same communities bury the same dead in the same circumstances decade after decade, while the state issues the same predictable condemnations, commissions the same redundant reports, and recommends the same superficial reforms that are never implemented. I set out, in other words, to do journalism.
What I did not anticipate was that the honest, uncompromising pursuit of that question would eventually produce what the academy calls a macro-theoretical framework—and that this framework would, in time, find its home at Harvard and other top-tier scientific repositories.
The Trinity of State Decay did not arrive fully formed. It emerged from a profound frustration—the frustration of a scholar-journalist who has spent years watching analytical frameworks imported wholesale from external academic traditions fail to explain the immediate reality happening in front of his eyes.
Failed state theory, useful as far as it goes, describes a static outcome. It names the corpse but completely fails to trace the actual cause of death. The Fragile States Index produces superficial comparative rankings but isolates no mechanisms. What was missing was an indigenous framework that could explain the operational process—the structural logic by which sovereign authority fractures and is progressively displaced by rival formations.
The insight, when it came, was disarmingly simple: states do not lose control randomly. They lose it systematically along three specific axes—Money, Land, and Mind. When the state loses its command of fiscal and economic legitimacy, when it loses territorial authority over its physical space, and when it loses ideological and psychological hold over the behavioural psyche of the population, something else moves in. Not chaos. Something far worse than chaos: a disciplined, purposeful Shadow Order, which is often more efficient at its enforcement functions than the formal state it is displacing.
This is what the Trinity of State Decay theorises. Not the mere failure of the state—but the active production of an alternative to it.
The geography of legitimate knowledge production has long maintained a centre and a periphery. The global centre produces the theoretical frameworks; the periphery receives them, submissively applies them, and occasionally pushes back against them in minor footnotes. What is happening right now with the Sundiata Post Intelligence Unit (SPIU)—with The Insecurity Triad already circulating in global academic repositories and the Trinity of State Decay now anchored across multiple institutions—is a clear demonstration that intellectual rigour does not possess a postal address.
The publication of the Trinity of State Decay on global scholarly platforms is not an end point. It is the formal opening of a conversation three decades in the making. If in the months, years, and decades to come, a professor at Harvard, a post-doctoral fellow in Legon, a PhD candidate in Oxford, or an undergraduate in Makerere writing a term paper finds it useful and engages with it, our purpose will have been fulfilled. None of them may ever know me personally, just as I never knew Freud, Gramsci, or Said.
Coda: The Symmetry Completes Itself
I began this reflection thinking about the symmetry of three: three months, a trilogy of contributions, a triple publication. But symmetry, I have come to understand, is not always visible at the beginning of a journey. It reveals itself exclusively in retrospect—which is, incidentally, also how Sovereignty Decoupling becomes visible to those who are living through it.
A young man borrowing a biography of Freud by accident in a university library. A mentor handing him Edward Said across a table in Ilupeju. Several years of frontline journalism asking the same stubborn questions about why our nation bleeds. A column that began as political commentary and rapidly transformed, by structural necessity, into a site of deep theoretical production. And now: Harvard, Zenodo, GESIS-SSOAR, all in a single week.
Three months. A trilogy. A triple publication. And with SSOAR’s confirmation arriving on Friday morning, our overall global archival footprint expands to seven critical institutional repositories when we include the foundational papers of The Insecurity Triad: SSRN, Harvard Dataverse, Zenodo, SocArXiv, SSOAR, ResearchGate, and Academia.edu. The symmetry, it appears, was not done with me yet.
The Trinity of State Decay is now available on Harvard Dataverse (doi:10.7910/DVN/ZQWEM7), Zenodo (doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20580627), SSOAR (nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:0168-ssoar-110533-8), ResearchGate, and Academia.edu. Read it. Push back against it. Apply it. Find its limits. That is exactly what it is there for.
Trust is sacred. Stay seasoned.
•Dr. Max Amuchie is a Scholar-Journalist, Media CEO, and Lead Researcher at the Sundiata Post Intelligence Unit (SPIU). He is the architect of The Insecurity Triad framework for African security analysis, the Trinity of State Decay theory, and the Decoupling Sovereignty Index (DSI)—original, indigenous analytical frameworks for understanding, categorising, and measuring conflict, state decay, and sovereignty in the Global South. He writes The Sunday Stew, a weekly syndicated column on faith, character, and the structural forces that shape society, with a focus on Nigeria, Africa, and the Global South in a changing world.
X (formerly Twitter): @MaxAmuchie | Email: max.a@sundiatapost.com | Tel: +234(0)8053069436
Abubakar Rabe, retired Major General former spokesman of the Nigerian Army who was abducted by bandits in Katsina State exactly two weeks ago, has died in captivity, reports coming from the state, one of the hotbeds of terrorist activities in Nigeria, confirmed on Saturday.
The retired senior military officer was kidnapped alongside his wife around the Matazu area of Katsina State while traveling to attend a wedding ceremony, was said to have died of complications from diabetes and high blood pressure in the camp of his abductors.
Nasiru Mu’azu, Commissioner for Internal Security and Home Affairs, in the state, who confirmed the incident, in a statement, said the government received the news with heavy heart and deep sense of loss.
He wrote: “It is with profound sadness that we confirm the General’s death while in bandits captivity. Despite the relentless and concerted efforts of the State Government and various Security Agencies to secure his safe release, the situation ended in this tragedy.
“The deceased Retired General died a natural death from complications of diabetes and hypertension. His abduction and subsequent death are not only a loss to his family and Katsina State but a monumental loss to the entire country.
“His Excellency, the Executive Governor of Katsina State Malam Dikko Umaru Radda, PhD, CON, extends his deepest condolences to the family of the late General and the country at-large.
“The Governor has described this incident as a “dark moment” and a reminder of the urgent need for a collective and intensified front against the criminal elements threatening the peace of our communities.
“The Katsina State Government remains committed to working with the Federal Government and security forces to ensure that those responsible for this heinous act are brought to justice. We assure the citizens of Katsina State that our resolve to eliminate banditry and ensure the safety of all residents remains unshaken.
“Our thoughts and prayers are with the bereaved family during this difficult time. May the soul of the departed Retired Major General Rabe Abdulakdir rest in eternal peace.”
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