WHERE does the law stand on speedy trials? Is it impossible to reach decisions on time? Does the law ever consider consequences of its disinterest on speed, even when matters so obviously demand? Or is the law meant to be a waste of everyone’s resources?

While some are applauding the sacking of the five governors – Timipre Sylva (Bayelsa), Murtala Nyako (Adamawa), Aliyu Magatakarda Wamakko (Sokoto), Liyel Imoke (Cross River), and Ibrahim Idris (Kogi) – as justice, we disagree. Justice delayed is injustice, especially in this case.

Not a few lawyers, as well as laymen, were convinced that the governors could not procure a new tenure by the virtue of their being sworn in after a re-run election in their States. It was more ridiculous when the governors attempted to benefit from the 2010 amendments to the Constitution when the re-run elections were in 2008. They wanted to gain from an amendment that was not retroactive and which came more than a year after they won elections.

The Supreme Court went through the maze multiple suits created. Courts annulled the elections, the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, appealed (its way of saying elections were properly conducted in those States). Governors headed to court when INEC listed the States for the 2011 elections.

“Once an act is declared null and void by a competent court of law, such an act has never existed in the eyes of the law. INEC was wrong in trying to give effect to the annulled 2007 elections in the five states. Something cannot be built on nothing; it will collapse,” the Supreme Court ruled.

“It has been argued that the tenure of four years envisaged in the 1999 Constitution is a single unbroken tenure but that submission loses sight of the glaring fact that the provisions of Section 180 (2) does not expect or envisage an indefinite occupier of the office of governor of a state that is why the tenure is very definite: four years,” the apex court continued.

“To accede to the argument of the respondents is to bring uncertainty into the clear provisions of Section 180(2) of the 1999 Constitution which will render the tenure of governors indefinite as what it will take an elected governor whose election is nullified to remain in office almost indefinitely or for life is to continue to win the re-elections which would then be nullified to continue the cycle of impunity.”

Great judgement but it should have come earlier. The courts have to give speedier hearing to cases like this that have profound effects on our lives and the tensions that bind our politics to ensure justice is not denied.