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Edo polls: Tinubu didn’t sign peace accord, yet emerged President – Kuhah
To Matthew Hassan-Kukah, Bishop of the Catholic Diocese of Sokoto, not signing the peace accord during elections does not carry any compulsive consequences because the Nigerian Peace Committee (NPC), lacked the powers to force anyone to adopt it outside the moral obligations, which could have a telling effect on candidates.
Kukah, one of the conveners of the NPC, led by Abdulsalami Abubakar, former Nigeria’s military Head of State, while appearing in a townhall meeting organised by Channels Television, on Sunday that the only consequence of failure of political parties and their candidates to sign the documents, meant to persuade them to shun electoral violence, was only because it could send a wrong signal to Nigerians.
Citing an example with the 2023 presidential election, Kukah, who is also a prominent social critic argued that despite not signing the document as candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Bola Tinubu still became President, though he equally blamed the opposing political parties for not making political capital out of the development.
The television network, held the meeting tagged: Edo Election Security Townhall, as a precursor to the September 21 governorship election in the state, in partnership with the Kimpact Development Initiative and the UK International Development.
Though 17 political parties are fielding candidates in the September 21, 2024, Governorship Election in Edo State like the All Progressives Congress (APC) and the Labour Party (LP), among others, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) shunned the pre-election ritual last week over some allegations levelled against the police.
Advancing his argument on the raison d’etre of the initiative the cleric, who said there was no way the committee could force any candidate to sign the peace pact which has become an electoral ritual in the last decade, added: “The National Peace Committee, what we do is not in the Electoral Act, it’s not law; it’s moral.
“You can’t compel people to fall in love or love their neighbour. If you go back to the 2015 election, Alhaji Atiku Abubakar the presidential candidate for the PDP, was not there to sign the Peace Accord. And of course, the opposition went to town, which is what it ought to be, and the next day, he (Atiku) turned up to sign.
“What is also very interesting is that the current president, when he was a presidential candidate, did not sign; it wasn’t our fault that the political opposition didn’t take advantage of it. It’s a pity but we are not going to take anybody to court for not signing the Peace Accord. The only thing it does to you as a candidate is that it sends a wrong signal which can be very easily exploited by the opposition.”
The cleric had spoken against the backdrop of the refusal of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), making good its threat not to sign the document after Godwin Obaseki, gave the immediate release of members of the party, allegedly arrested by the police as a condition for the party to ink the document.
Abdulsalami Abubakar, Nigeria’s former military Head of State, who brokered the transition that led to the return of civilian rule in 1999, said on Thursday at the venue of the signing ceremony in Benin that the ruling party in the state, had declined to sign the document.
He told his audience, which included representatives of the political parties contesting the election, including PDP: “As you must have seen in the media, I met the Governor (Godwin Obaseki) yesterday and he told me that the PDP is not going to sign this peace accord.
“They have made some observations and I was expecting the Chairman of the PDP to come and make that statement. Having waited for him this long, it is just to announce that the PDP said they are not going to sign. The PDP said it will only sign the peace accord if certain conditions are met.”
Atiku Abubakar seventh attempt at the presidency has been halted by the Court of Appeal in Abuja, which held that David Mark is not the fit and proper person to assume the position of the National Chairman of the African Democratic Congress (ADC) – the camp that produced the former Vice President as candidate of the party.
Hours after the former VP, who had attempted the bid for the nation’s number one job and is on the seventh edition by virtue of his nomination for the 2027 presidential election by the Mark, agreed with the position of the Federal High Court, Abuja, restraining the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) from recognising or participating in any state congresses organised by the former Senate President.
Justice Okon Abang, while reading the lead-judgement in the three-to-one split, said there was no reason for the appellate court to set aside the April 29 order by the lower court, adding that Justice Joyce Abdulmalik, who barred Mark and his executives from interfering with the tenure and functions of the party’s elected state executives, was in order.
Agreeing that the responsibility for conducting state congresses of political parties rested with elected state executive committees and not with the national leadership, he ordered INEC not to recognise the executive produced as a result of the defective process.
Though his position was echoed by Donatus Okorowo in the majority, Justice Abba Mohammed, who disagreed sharply, with a dissenting judgment, held that the case that precipitated the restraining order bordered on a non-justiciable internal affair of a political party, adding that lower court was wrong to have assumed jurisdiction to entertain the matter.
By Ken Harries Esq
Some speeches disappear with the applause that greets them. Others acquire greater force with the passing of time. Their words do not change; history simply grows into them. Years later, they resonate with fresh power, not because they have been rewritten, but because the nation has finally arrived at the realities they foresaw.
One such speech was delivered in April 2012 at the 2nd South South Economic Summit in Asaba. There, Senator Godswill Akpabio, then Governor of Akwa Ibom State, presented what many regarded as an ambitious vision for maritime corridor and blue economy development.
Speaking before political leaders, investors, and development stakeholders at the 2nd South South Economic Summit in Asaba, Akpabio outlined what many regarded as an ambitious vision for a model state in particular and regional development in general. Long before the Ibom Deep Seaport became a national priority, he argued that Nigeria needed new maritime gateways, integrated industrial clusters, aviation maintenance facilities, and modern logistics infrastructure to unlock economic growth. His vision was not simply about building a port; it was about creating an economic ecosystem capable of transforming a region and strengthening the nation’s competitiveness.
Fourteen years later, those remarks read less like political advocacy and more like an economic blueprint whose underlying logic has steadily been vindicated by events and times. Looking back today, his address appears almost prophetic—not because it predicted the future in mystical terms, but because Nigeria has gradually grown into the ideas it contained.
Truly visionary speeches never fade; they gather strength with time. This one deserves renewed attention, not because every prediction has materialised exactly as envisioned, but because it reveals a quality increasingly scarce in public leadership: the ability to think beyond electoral cycles.
Nigeria has never lacked projects. What it has often lacked are leaders willing to imagine the infrastructure of tomorrow while grappling with the demands of today. Akpabio’s vision was shaped by precisely that instinct.
At a time when public discourse was largely focused on roads and recurrent expenditure, he spoke instead of logistics corridors, industrial ecosystems, aviation maintenance, manufacturing clusters, export processing zones, maritime and blue economy opportunities, and security reform—not as isolated initiatives, but as interconnected pillars of national competitiveness.
His vision for the then proposed Ibaka Deep Seaport, now known as the Ibom Deep Seaport, best illustrates this broader philosophy. Rather than presenting it as another state prestige project, he framed it as a strategic response to structural inefficiencies in Nigeria’s maritime sector and the wider economy. He argued that the Lagos ports were already burdened by severe congestion, with vessels waiting for extended periods to berth, driving up costs, disrupting supply chains, and delaying the delivery of critical imports, including pharmaceuticals.
His objective, however, was never to rival Lagos, but to complement it. The distinction is fundamental. No major trading nation concentrates all its strategic maritime infrastructure within a single corridor. Successful economies spread capacity, ease bottlenecks, and create multiple gateways through which commerce can flow efficiently. Nigeria has long recognised this principle in policy documents; Akpabio was among the few public leaders articulating it so clearly more than a decade ago.
Equally significant was his emphasis on geography. He reminded his audience that Ibaka possessed a naturally deep coastline requiring little or no dredging, with water depths of approximately fifteen to seventeen metres. According to his account, the location had been identified as suitable for a deep seaport as far back as 1963, yet decades passed without meaningful progress. His observation that “being a minority area, there was nobody to push it” reflected a broader concern that strategic national investments have too often been influenced by political considerations rather than economic merit.
Whether one agrees entirely with that assessment is, in many respects, secondary. The larger point is that Akpabio consistently argued that national infrastructure should be driven by economic logic, strategic necessity, and long-term national interest rather than sentiment or political convenience. More than a decade later, that remains a lesson Nigeria is still striving to learn.
Yet, to see the 2012 Asaba address merely as a speech about a deep seaport is to miss its larger significance. The Ibom Deep Seaport was never presented as an end in itself. It was conceived as the anchor of a much broader economic ecosystem—a platform around which industries, manufacturing, aviation, logistics, free trade, and investment could flourish.
Akpabio envisioned the acquisition of about 14,000 hectares of land to support a self-sustaining industrial city comprising fertiliser and ammonia plants, refining capacity, manufacturing facilities, and a Free Trade Zone. What development economists today describe as industrial clustering was already embedded in his thinking. The port was simply the gateway.
That broader vision deserves a discussion of its own. Today, Ibom Deep Seaport in that Asaba Speech has berthed.
•Ken Harries Esq is an Abuja-based Development Communication Strategist.
Justice Joyce Abdulmalik of the Federal High Court in Abuja, on Monday, granted allowed Uche Nnaji former Minister of Science and Technology, to go home, on the condition of a N20million bail bond.
Nnaji, who was arrested at Nnamdi Azikiwe International Airport (NAIA), Abuja on July 1 by officials of the Independent Corrupt Practices and other Offences Commission (ICPC), while returning to Abuja, was granted bail after pleading not guilty to a six-count certificate forgery charge.
The anti-corruption agency alleged that Nnaji, Minister of Science and Technology between August 16, 2023 and October 6, 2025, when he resigned office after a crisis regarding his university degree broke out is currently the governorship candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in Enugu for in the 2027 general election, squaring up against Peter Mba, the incumbent, who incidentally won his office in 2023 under the same PDP, before defecting to the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC).
He was accused of forging his academic credentials, especially a degree certificate from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka (UNN) alongside presenting a bogus National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) discharge certificate during his ministerial screening process in 2023.
At the proceedings on Monday, the former Minister pleaded not guilty to the charges, and following an application by James Onoja (SAN), his lawyer, was granted to bail in the sum of N20 million with one surety in the like sum, who must also be a civil servant resident in Abuja, not be below grade level 15.
The court, which ordered the surety to depose to an affidavit of means, mandated the former Minister to also surrender his international passport and not travel outside the country without permission, while fixing September 21 for the commencement of the trial.
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