By Dele Sobowale

“An organization has no pants to kick and no soul to damn. And, by God, it should have both.” US Justice Wendell Holmes, Snr, 1809-1894, VANGUARD BOOK OF QUOTATIONS, VBQ, p 179.

The Judiciary is one of the prime organizations in any democracy which is designed to dispense justice. Generally, in Nigeria, this had been done. But, occasionally, a case comes up which demonstrates that some elements in the organization deserve to have a kick in the pants, as the Americans say.

The other arms of government – the Executive and the Legislature cannot often deliver the kick without being accused of trying to intimidate the judiciary. That leaves only the Fourth Estate of the realm as Thomas Carlyle, 1795-1881, called the press, to do the job. We should not shy away from it. Justices must be tackled with the same ferocity we address the other two branche. Justices Musa Abubakar, V.I. Ofesi and W.I. Kpochi constituting the Taraba State Election Tribunal had failed woefully to dispense justice to the people whose interests are fundamental in this case. Those are the people of Taraba State who made clear their wish on Election Day.

“Salus populi suprema est lex (Latin), meaning, “The good of the people is the chief law”, according to Cicero, 106-43 BC. (VBQ p 120).  In a national, state or local government election, only the people within the constituency can determine what is in their best interest. Nobody else, not even three people in black robes and white wigs can or should impose on them a candidate they don’t want. The rest of the nation might not like it if the people of a state decide to elect an orangutan into office when the opponent is a sage.

But, that is their choice. No amount of judicial sleight of hand can alter the fact that fifty seven percent of the people of Taraba state declared on Election Day that they don’t want the APC candidate. Imposing the APC candidate on Taraba State amounts to substituting the wishes of the judiciary for those of the people. That is why it should not stand.

It might be of interest to ask how the justices arrived at this unjust decision. They declared that the votes cast by 369,318 voters of Taraba State were “wasted votes”.  Justices don’t even have a monopoly of the interpretation of the law; they definitely don’t have a monopoly of the meaning and the use of words. Some of us will contend with the three justices that, in order to evade the horrors of their verdict, they left a sentence uncompleted. They failed to tell the whole world who wasted the votes. Obviously, votes, like any precious property of human beings, can only be wasted by somebody and that party must bear the responsibility and suffer the consequences of doing so.

Let us quickly remove one group that could not have wasted the votes – the voters themselves. The reasons are so clear that it staggers the imagination that it escaped the attention of the Tribunal. The voters, all 645,302 of them, could not be accused of wasting their votes because they all com0lied totally with the constitution and the various act of the National Assembly, NASS, in order to become eligible voters and to exercise their sovereignty. There was no violence; neither were there reported cases of ballot box snatching and stuffing by any party. The voters of Taraba were peaceful and patriotic citizens of which Nigeria can be proud. Almost all of them were accredited by INEC officials and given ballot papers.

They were also provided with a list of candidates CLEARED by INEC for their decision, as in every state of the Federation of Nigeria. About fifty-seven per cent of them voted for the PDP candidate and against any other candidate of any other party. Surely, the justices at the Tribunal know that voters cannot on Election Day query the list of candidates handed to them by INEC. There is no provision in the constitution or laws for that. Voters should assume that what INEC places before them is an authentic list of candidates.

They had no other alternative to make their wishes known than to go ahead and vote. Clearly, the people who paid dearly in money, sweat and tears to register and to vote on Election Day, leaving other personal concerns, cannot now be accused of labouring in vain by a group of justices. Since the voters were the victims of a fake INEC form which they could not challenge how could they be told they have “wasted their votes”? Can a buyer who can identify the merchant who sold the counterfeit product to him be told, by a fair judge, that he has wasted his money when the merchant (read INEC) is still in business and goes away unpunished? This is a clear case of punishing the victims (read Taraba State voters) twice – first by INEC and then the Tribunal. They forfeit their fundamental rights to choose because of INEC’s rascality.

INEC did not regard the votes as wasted also because the commission counted all of them, recorded them and presented a certificate to the choice of the people. Like in al elections, a few votes were voided by INEC. Those were the ones INEC “wasted”. And nobody else could have declared the votes of the people wasted but the justices of the Tribunal. They are the ones trying to disenfranchise the majority of Taraba State voters by imposing the APC candidate rejected by fifty-seven per cent of them. It is the Tribunal which is trying to impose a candidate who did not only fail to gather at least fifty percent of the votes, but, who won in only five Local Government Councils and lost in eleven. They call that justice; I call it robbery of the innocent majority.

WAR DRUMS IN BIAFRA AGAIN? — 1

“I am tired of war. Its glory is all moonshine….War is hell.”General Sherman, US Army, 1820-1891. (VANGUARD BOOK…).

Before we reach the point of no return, we better pause to consider some of the consequences of escalating tension. All wars don’t start with a formal declaration. Most start with skirmishes and escalate into full blood shed. The Biafran issue is moving gradually towards taking us to hell again…