By Bashir Adefaka
The Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN), Ondo State Chapter, has said it has gone to appeal against the dismissal of its three petitions filed before the national and state house of assembly Election Tribunal in the state at the Court of Appeal. It also said it had lost confidence in the lower court because its lawyers had been compromised.

Speaking to Saturday Vanguard in Akure, the Ondo State capital, on Wednesday, the state secretary of the party, Mr. Adegboyega Adedipe, said its party was disappointed at the many irregularities and illegalities observed in the Tribunal judge’s handling of the petitions.

The lead counsel to the party, Mr. Titiloye Charles, told Saturday Vanguard that he had prayed through his notice of appeal filed at the Court of Appeal in Akure, among other things, that the appellate court should order a re-trial of the cases at the lower court but by different panel other than the one as currently constituted by the three judges.

The ACN state secretary, Adedipe, explained that his party had a good case before the Tribunal regarding the National Assembly election in Ilaje-Ese Odo and State House of Assembly election in Owo Constituency I and Idanre Constituency but that the Tribunal dismissed those petitions on shoddy grounds, hence he said his party leadership no longer had confidence in the Honourable Justice Aisha Bawa Bwari-led Tribunal.

Mr. Adedipe, Secretary Ondo ACN.

“Right from the onset, we knew that we had a good case but mid way, we discovered that the Tribunal members cannot be relied upon. They have shown that they can crumble under pressure and as a party that believes in the rule of law and the judiciary, we then said, okay let’s take it a little bit higher whether we will get desired result.

From the beginning as a political party, we’ve always had problem with the Tribunal but as soon as we get to the Appeal Court, where we have men of proven integrity, we,ve always carried the day. The Tribunal is more highly compromised, let me use it that way. So that’s why we believe that when we get to the Appeal Court, we will get the right judgment,” he said.

On who he thought was compromising whom, he said, “We are dealing with a man (in the person of Governor Rahman Olusegun Mimiko) that can go to any length to make you bend. We are dealing with a man that is highly desperate. We are dealing with a man who is ready to empty the treasury of the state for him to get falsehood as being the right thing. But God willing, we will get the desired result very soon,” he said.

The Court of Appeal’s embattled President, Honourable Justice Isa Ayo Salami, had set up Tribunals to hear disputes regarding the conduct of last April National and State House of Assembly elections in respective states of the federation. The one for Ondo State has three judges headed by Justice Aisha Bawa Bwari as chairman with Justice Goddy Ifeanyi Anunihu and Justice Ineife Ebimie Thelma as members.

These judges, according to findings, have a lot of explanations to give to the authorities that appointed them as sources close to the Tribunal confided in Saturday Vanguard that they are already designing a plan to shift the whole blame on their secretary. But the secretary, believing that she needed not to allow them destroy her career is making frantic effort to ensure that wherever she is taken to, she will always be found innocent.

Former Secretary of the Nigerian Bar Association, Akure Branch and human rights activist, Mr. Titiloye Charles, lead counsel to the ACN in the legal team of 10 lawyers representing the party, said many disgusting things happened during the Tribunal proceedings to earn the judges the distrust of his team and his client, ACN.

“We have three petitions before the National Assembly and State House of Assembly Election Petitions Tribunal in Akure here and the three cases are now pending before the Court of Appeal also sitting here in Akure.” He said, pointing out emphatically that the ACN and his legal team had lost confidence in the Tribunal thus the decision to go to higher court.

Compromise of three court judges

“What happened was that we discovered that the three judges of the Tribunal during the proceedings descended to the arena of conflict by trying to prevent us from arguing our cases. What really started as mere observation of petition to the President of the Court of Appeal finally blossomed to the dismissal of our petition because initially we brought an application querying the jurisdiction of the court to hear the application of the Labour Party for the dismissal of our petition.

“And this application was based on three grounds. One, anybody who wishes to apply to dismiss a petition, the application must be returnable in three clear days and that is the rule. Secondly, anybody who has taken step and who has failed to act within reason time, the rules say that the Tribunal has a duty to stop him from bringing an application to nullify the proceeding. And finally, anybody who has failed to file Form TS008 has no right to be heard during the pre-hearing session.

“Our petition came by way of application and we were already at the second stage of pre-hearing session when the Labour Party brought its application. And when they brought the application, the Tribunal failed to fix it for hearing within the three days. They fixed it for hearing within ten days and we are saying that the Tribunal is ceased of jurisdiction having failed to avail itself of …and hear the application within the time provided by law.

“We are also saying that the Labour Party who had participated in the first pre-hearing session is deemed to have waved their rights; there is such by law, not to query that proceeding any more. Even if the process that brought the first pre-hearing session was effective, they ought to avail themselves of the time…but they waited for 10 days and they participated in the pre-hearing session. They now came back to say that they wanted to nullify the proceeding.

“So by the clear provision of the rules of the Tribunal, Paragraph 63 (2) is very clear that a party who has not got an application within reasonable time should not be allowed to bring any application to nullify the proceeding. And it’s in tandem with the position of the Supreme Court of Nigeria in the case of Attorney-General of Bendel State and Attorney-General of the Federation where the Supreme Court stated the principle of waiver.

You are deemed to have waived your rights to query procedural irregularity when you have taken step in respect of the proceeding. So we filed an application and the provision of the law is very, very clear that once your jurisdiction is being queried, the court must hear it first before hearing the application.

“But that was not the case in our matter! The court called on Labour Party to move their application for dismissal of our petition before they asked us to move our preliminary objection querying their jurisdiction to hear their application dismissal. And the implication in law is that they have already prejudged our application. By so doing, they have overruled us. The position of the law is that jurisdiction is the foundation of any case. So if we raise issue about the jurisdiction of the court to hear an application on three grounds, the court must hear on it before hearing the application. They heard their application before our preliminary objection and now they overruled the preliminary objection and dismissed our petition. Then we now moved to the Court of Appeal.”

Rulings filled with many irregularities and illegalities

“First of all the first petition which has to do with the House of Assembly in Owo, the ruling was given on the 8th of July but when the copy was served on me, it showed that the ruling was given on the 7th of July! And in law, you cannot backdate your ruling; you must sign and date it the day you deliver it. You can neither backdate it nor put another date apart from that date. And when they did that we filed a notice of appeal insisting that that judgment was invalid by reason of the fact that it was wrongly dated. Immediately they saw our notice of appeal they went to go and alter their records by issuing another ruling.

I have the certified true copy of the ruling given to me dated 7th of July but they now called on me that I should come and collect another ruling dated 8th.” He said he refused to go for the altered copy because professionally he knew it would tantamount to compromising the interest of his client.

On what he sensed about the strange behavioural disposition by the Tribunal judges, the ACN lead counsel said, “I discovered that suddenly, they became hostile to us, the counsels from ACN and I discovered that they were not ready to allow us to argue our case the way we were doing it before. So I knew that something else must have happened but the next thing was that, from the way the proceedings were going, they tilted the scale of justice in favour of the Labour Party.

“If you look at the second case, which is Idanre House of Assembly case of which we have also filed a notice of appeal, that ruling was given on the 7th of July but the paper given to us was dated 7th of June! That is, before they actually gave the ruling, they had already prepared the ruling and signed it. If it was a mistake, how can three judges with their secretary make such mistake?

“In respect of the last case which has to do with Ilaje-Ese Odo and of which we have already done inspection of the INEC documents and we have confirmed that in not less than 120 of the about 200 polling units there was no accreditation, no vote. We have certified true copies of voter register of those polling units.

So when they gave us the ruling dismissing our petition, I pointed the attention of the secretary of the Tribunal to the fact that, “This document is not signed!” She said the judges said they should give it to me like that and that I should know that it is authentic because she signed and certified it.

That is by the secretary of the Tribunal because before the Tribunal you don’t have a registrar and it is secretary that acts as a registrar before Tribunal. So she signed and certified it and she gave it to me and then I went ahead to file my notice of appeal. By virtue of the Constitution, the ruling… is invalid. We are saying the Court of Appeal should set it aside.

The ACN lead counsel has however attributed the bugling and ransacking of his house by hoodlums, who took nothing in the process but aimed at documents, to a dangerous dimension being taken by the Tribunal in retrieving the ruling papers in his possession which he had already filed before the Court of Appeal.

Confidence in Bwari’s Tribunal lost

In a situation that Appeal Court grants our prayers and orders a retrial of the case, let me tell you, this Tribunal can no longer decide over the case because we have raised in our notice of appeal and in our arguments before the Court of Appeal that they are biased. They descended into arena and they are compromised. Because the attitude of the secretary of that Tribunal shows that they have been compromised the way they handled the matter.

We may not be able to know who but we know that they seriously compromised. And one of the issues we put before the Court of Appeal is that the matter should sent back to the lower court before a fresh panel of judges because we have lost confidence in this present panel of judges. We had written two petitions against before now at the Court of Appeal.

The third one was when we noticed that they were biased and they were not ready to take our application querying their jurisdiction and when they were not willing to release their rulings to us, we wrote the President of the Court of Appeal because we knew that what they were doing was to frustrate our cases.