By Dele Sobowale

“Law does not seek to inspire human excellence or distinction. It is no guide for exemplary behaviour or even good practice”. Anonymous. (VANGUARD BOOK OF QUOTATIONS P 120).

Perhaps that was why in an essay by someone calling himself “a Noble  Writer” derisively announced that “Law is injustice codified”. He might have a point. However, granted that it has become almost universally accepted conventional wisdom that “the law is an ass”, reasonable people, who hold the view that the law should be an instrument to serve justice, expect magistrates and judges to ride the ass and not crawl, on all fours, with it.

The judgments of our electoral tribunals since 1999, till date, convey the impression that the ass rides some of our jurists virtually all the time. Added to that is the issue of corruption which had prompted the Nigerian Bar association, NBA, to announce recently that it would soon conduct probes and expose corrupt judges and lawyers.

The sooner the better for all of us – before politicians lose faith in election tribunals and resort to self-help. Those who lived through the grueling experience of the “Wild, Wild West” in the 1960s would readily join this call for serious re-introspection by judges.

From 1999, we have been treated to absolutely bizarre judgments in many states including Osun, Ondo, Ekiti, Edo Rivers, Plateau, Anambra and now Akwa Ibom.

 In Rivers, as many of us will remember, someone was installed as governor who did not run for elections at all. A lawyer friend in the United States called to ask me who were the “asses” who wrote the law and the judgment which could make that happen in Nigeria.

In all fairness to our judges, our electoral laws were written by people who deliberately set out to encourage electoral fraud. By promoting the “first past the post” approach to elections, they make cheating and violence inevitable.

The “elected” official is sworn in before his legitimacy is confirmed and he starts to earn the jumbo entitlements of the office, with which he prosecutes the case, while the opponent, who might actually have won, spends his own money. And, in the rare event that he is ousted by the courts, he does not pay back a penny of money he had stolen on top of the mandate he illegally acquired. He suffers no penalty at all. What crime could be more perfect than that?

Then the judges at the tribunal take their turn at making a fraudulent system even more criminally profitable. Reading most of the judgments, it is clear that there is no agreed basis for judgment. The electoral laws having placed virtually all the burden of proof on the petitioner, the judges have been provided with enough loopholes for ten camels, side by side, to crawl through.

Consequently, there is no discernible principle underlying the judgments. While some accept “clear and convincing proof”, others rely on “proof beyond reasonable doubt”; and yet others, on what a lawyer told me is “preponderance of evidence”.

Now don’t ask me which is which; lawyers and politicians (sometimes they are one and the same) are slimy individuals. Perhaps that was why Shakespeare, 1564-1616, said, “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers”. (BOOK OF QUOTATIONS p 123). They and judges are messing up our democracy in a serious way. And up till now, the Supreme Court, itself in a mess and the last Chief Justice leaving in a cloud of scandal, had condoned the organized swindle that has characterized the tribunals.

Several cases were decided on technicalities – time expired, substantial compliance, INEC not joined or INEC inexcusably joined, PDP or police not invited etc. In very few cases was the evidence allowed to be presented. Yet, elections are not held for politicians, the political parties, INEC, the police, lawyers and the courts alone.

Indeed there are other stakeholders – the people – whose right to choose their leaders provided the legitimacy for elections in the first instance. And a basic rule of democracy is that the majority of legitimate voters, casting votes at an election should determine the person to lead them. How then is their interest, which is primary, protected, when a court decides that because INEC was not joined the case is thrown out without listening to the evidence?

Then came Chief Justice Mudstapher, whose court recently rule that a case brought by the Action Congress of Nigeria candidate, in Akwa Ibom, which had been decided on technicalities, be reopened and decided on its merits. That to me is the difference between substantive justice, which takes into account all stakeholders and the “cash-and-carry” judgments we have been having so far.

But, just as we were about to shout “Thank God”, the tribunal handling the case in Akwa Ibom again threw out the case on a technicality – the application was not filed within 180 days. Now, what makes 180 days more sacrosanct than the rights of the people of Akwa Ibom to know if Akpabio had been legitimately elected or not?….

SURE: ANOTHER ROPE A DOPE
“As I came in I saw the SURE book being distributed. We are withdrawing it. This is the old one. We developed this with the expectation that we were going to completely deregulate the downstream sector of the oil industry, the 100 per cent removal of subsidy”. President Jonathan, in Abuja, Monday, February 20, 2012.

That was how President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan, our own dear GEJ, announced that several million copies of a 24-page (including covers) document, expensively produced, will go up in flames. I hope the order to withdraw it does not include me because there is no way my copy will be surrendered except in exchange for an oil well.

But, on a more serious note, I will keep it, as I kept copies of all the budget speeches of Babangida for one simple reason, offered by Fredrick Von Schiller, 1759-1805, “Against stupidity the gods themselves struggle in vain”.(VANGUARD BOOK OF QUOTATIONS P 235). And of all forms of foolishness, one must be really patient with the stupidities of those in power. Those documents now about to go up in flames cost this country millions of naira, or enough money for perhaps a thousand families to live on in one year.

Yet, on these pages in December 2011, under the title “SURE: SURELY DEFECTIVE, I  advised the government to forget the document. Even if Jonathan had got away with N141 fuel, SURE would still have been constituted a cynical deception of the Nigerian people. GEJ promised another version of SURE, which only he and his governments’ officials will believe.

I cannot imagine Madams Ngozi and Diezani doing another song and dance in front of an audience asking people to “Trust us” after this. What a pity; for the ladies I mean. Perhaps, Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala can again return to te World Bank; if her position is still vacant. A politician, like an actress, is only as good as her last show. For Madam World Bank, this has been a burst which will henceforth blemish her C.V. She has my sympathy. And I mean that sincerely. She means well, but Nigeria is no place for her.