By Emeka Umeagbalasi

The Chief Justice of Nigeria, CJN saga has again introduced a shocking dimension into the Nigerian legal system and profession. Personal legal opinions and biases of some lawyers have taken over the operations and functions of the Constitution and constitutionalism in Nigeria. The Constitution and its provisions are brutally relegated and personal legal opinions and biases elevated in place of the Constitution as the new laws of Nigeria.

Justice Onnoghen

Intersociety had in the past warned and specifically called on some lawyers  to always relegate and quarantine their personal “learned” opinions and biases to their private intellectual orchards and allow the Constitution and constitutionalism to operate and until the 1999 Constitution is impeached by the peoples of Nigeria, it remains the country’s grand norm or primus inter pares of the country’s body of laws. They were advised not to toe the lines of the Russian Anarchists of the medieval age.

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Intersociety is deeply concerned and had empirically observed that almost all the blunders and governance misdeeds including state butchery perpetrated and perpetuated in the present central Government of Nigeria are linked to elevation of personal legal opinions and biases and brutal relegation of the country’s Constitution. The architects of these constitutional impeachments are also the intellectual brains behind the skewed or selective application or enforcement of the Constitution especially where and when it suits the whims and caprices of the Government.

In the recent executive coup against the Nigerian Judiciary: per unconstitutional and illegal suspension/removal of the CJN (Walter Onnoghen) and its aftermath, same has brazenly played out. When a Federal High Court ruled against the incumbent Governor of Abia State in a tax evasion case, same group of lawyers mounted campaigns harassing the Governor and ordering him to vacate office when they know as lawyers that the Governor has right of appeal up to the Supreme Court of Nigeria and has not declined to exercise same in the referenced case.