HOW does the criticism against the decisions of a panel of three judges be tantamount to bringing the entire judiciary to public odium and ridicule? Is it not the realisation of the fact that courts could make mistakes that led to the establishment of appellate courts? Just recently, the Chief Justice of Nigeria, Justice Walter Onnoghen admitted that there is evidence that the courts could be compromised by parties in court? For this candid opinion, would Osakue call for the resignation of the Chief Justice? No matter how beautiful a judgment may be to a party who is its beneficiary, precedents exist where verdicts of lower courts are overturned. Would Osakue say that the judgments that are overturned were not before then as well considered by those who benefitted or stood to benefit from them? So why the platitudes for the Ahmed Badamasi Judgment that is yet in the crucible?
Sadly, the ingratitude of the beneficiaries of the Adams Oshiomhole/APC Governorship is nauseatingly evident in Osakue’s article where he derisively refers to Ize-Iyamu as building a political structure since 2005 to further his governorship ambition. Osakue fraudulently refrained from telling us that the biggest beneficiary of that Osagie Ize-Iyamu’s huge political investment is Comrade Adams Oshiomhole whom Ize-Iyamu picked up from political anonymity and irrelevance, polished, empowered and made governor. But for Osagie Ize-Iyamu’s Grace Group, Oshiomhole had no chance of becoming governor either in 2007 or thereafter.
A case of one biting the fingers that had fed him! What one hears today from the APC, many of them like Aiyevbekpen Osakue, who were in the PDP until the party lost power in the State in 2008, is simply attempts to needlessly berate Ize-Iyamu for showing the ambition to become governor so he can articulate his personal vision that could lead to unprecedented prosperity for Edo State.
What is wrong, one may ask, in someone else pushing the same ambition which saw Oshiomhole in 2006 go from PDP to Labour Party to the ANPP and finally the AC in his quest to becoming governor? What will APC apologists tell the world is wrong in Ize-Iyamu going to court as Oshiomhole did in his time to have the declaration of INEC reversed in his favour? Definitely, Oshiomhole would not have stopped at the Tribunal stage if the Tribunal had upheld the victory of Osunbor in March 2008. Would Obaseki and APC not have exploited the cycle of litigation if INEC had declared Ize-Iyamu winner of the 2016 election? So, why the unwarranted attacks on the personality of Ize-Iyamu who is convinced that he scored the highest number of valid votes cast, vide copious oral and documentary evidence he presented to the Tribunal in pursuit of deserved justice?
One funny proposition of the APC critics of Osagie Ize-Iyamu’s appeal in a bid to justify the judgment of the Tribunal is the notion that the number of witnesses that the petitioners presented within the 14 days allocated and the seven hours per day sitting was not sufficient to prove their case. How logical is this, when the court being privy to the fact that the petitioners have up to a thousand witnesses to present, allocated 14 days of 7 hours a day sitting and a 20 minute examination of each witness and not discounting the time wasted during cross-examination? If it was a judicial requirement for proving a case that all deposed witnesses must be examined, justice demands that the petitioners ought to have been given the opportunity to do so.
The logical thing in that direction is for the petitioners to have been given time commensurate to the number of witnesses they had listed. The petitioners needed not less than 60 days to have come close to presenting a quarter of that number of witnesses. If the judgment was partly predicated on the fewness of petitioners’ witnesses as the APC agents would want us to believe, such would be akin to judicial ambush. Nonetheless, the reality of this case is that it owed its essence far more to documentary evidence than oral testimonies, the former of which the Tribunal seemed to have ignored in writing its judgment although in the course of proceedings it had made some rulings for which one could say it was cognizant of the relevance of documentary evidence. In spite of the accolades of the vested interests, it is now left for us to see what the Appeal Court would make of the Tribunal’s processes and verdict.
Finally, it is pertinent to say that the idea of the popularity of the APC candidate, Mr. Godwin Obaseki, which the APC is trying to sell to the public, post election, is false. The narrative that Edo people had celebrated the declaration of the APC candidate as elected governor is merely designed to impress people who live outside the state. We know the truth. Even after the judgment of the Tribunal, Edo people have largely remained indifferent to the judicial success of the relatively unknown governor.
As a party, the APC had lost confidence in its ability to win the September 10 governorship election. This was made worse by the fact that the party had lost too much goodwill of the people in the run-up to the election. The popularity of Pastor Osagie Ize-Iyamu against a relatively unknown Godwin Obaseki posed an insurmountable challenge. Thus, in order to put the machinery that would aid the party to recapture power, INEC, ostensibly acting at APC’s behest, postponed the election on its eve, to September 28 based on spurious security breach.
This was the genesis of the suspicion of the party’s recruitment of the electoral body, INEC, to influence the election in its favour. However, all that is now history. The present reality is that the matter is doing its rounds at the courts. Despite the decision of the Tribunal, it is now incumbent on the Appeal Court to, in its tradition, rely on well settled legal principles which operate as pedestals on which an appellate court rests its decision to review a case before it, one way or the other. Therefore, APC, Osakue and his co-travellers should stop being busybodies. The clock ticks on and the day of reckoning beckons.
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