Lawyers were at the forefront of the revolution that gave rise to the American declaration of independence. Majority of delegates to the constitutional convention that gave birth to the American independence were lawyers. Britain and America, the two leading democracies in the world were, at the same time, simultaneously led by lawyers. Lawyers were at the vanguard of a new constitution in Ghana. Lawyers led the constitutional reforms in South Africa and Zambia. Nigeria has produced its sizeable number of great lawyers who are untainted by the common vices that afflict ordinary folks. Lawyers are nation builders. They are influential agents of change in the society with prominent responsibility to build practical and pragmatic democracy founded on the Rule of Law and the constitution – Elder Dele Adesina SAN, in Kunle Ogunsakin’s ‘FOR THE LOVE OF THEIR NATION(Lawyers as agents of change in Nigeria).
Pray, if the above is true, why are some senior Nigerian lawyers, even judges, doing everything to subject the noble profession to outright profanity by putting financial gratification before national interest?
All of a sudden, it became the fad that a state Election Returning Officer must be a university professor and sitting vice-chancellor. Ordinarily, with their erudition and high profile, you would reckon this is in order and when you factor in the fact that the immediate past Chairman of INEC was both professor and former vice-chancellor, you are forced to concur with its reasonableness. But do their performances meet their high profile? Hardly; not with what Nigerians saw one of them do at the presidential votes collation, literally unable to read what he claimed he wrote personally, and this recent one in Kogi State where Professor Emmanuel Kucha, vice-chancellor, Federal University of Agriculture, Makurdi, was in action . PDP’s reaction, rejecting INEC decision that APC should replace its late candidate with another, did not come as a surprise. Granted, though, that this decision itself has no backing in the Nigerian constitution, I had, much earlier in the day, foreseen that some opportunistic forces would rapidly step into the electoral conundrum to try to make money. I had consequently written as follows on my Face book wall: ‘ …take the Kogi case which lawyers will soon turn to billion naira briefs representing both sides, for instance, whereas the only thing that needs be cured is that silly mistake by INEC. That is why APC should promptly head to the Supreme Court to get INEC to reverse itself. This is because, if Governor Wada and PDP get ALL the less than 25,000 votes at the intended supplementary election, they will still be losers. Why then should there be any supplementary election? But look through the newspapers or listen to the television networks and all you find are lawyers obfuscating things and confusing everybody’.
Read the statement by PDP’s Metuh, and you can see that lawyers are already fast at work, edging the country to a constitutional crisis which would go all the way to the apex court to resolve rather than proffering the most reasonable way out in an election that was already won, and lost, before some complicit INEC officers, and a listless professor created an unnecessary logjam. For truth be told, the Kogi election was already clearly over and so what needs be cured, now, is the totally unpardonable mistake of declaring it inconclusive. But since INEC cannot legally reverse itself, APC should go to court to put a finality to the needless controversy.
And this, exactly, is where I suspect that a grand conspiracy, agreed to by the leading Igala members of both parties, NEVER to allow a non-Igala rule the state comes in. Governor Wada, with all the intelligence and security resources at his disposal, and particularly at such a sensitive period, cannot, in good conscience, claim ignorance of Audu’s death even within an hour of its happening. That is the point at which I think top Igala politicians must have gone to work on the grounds that it was better an Igala, any Igala at all, than any minority, no matter on which party platform. That’s why, I suspect, INEC DELIBERATELY messed up an election that had been won and lost.
A word then about the PDP and its fishing expedition with Wada reported as heading to court to ask to be declared winner on the laughable grounds that he is the candidate with the highest number of votes alive. Such morbid thoughts from a state governor cannot be laughable at all. It is a shame that not even its massive shellacking at the last presidential election would suffice in taming the PDP and return it to the path of rectitude. Among other claims, the PDP, in its laborious press release, claimed that APC was being permitted to transfer the votes of a dead man – note the arrant insensitivity – to another candidate, easily forgetting that PDP provided the precedent in the transfer of votes at an election. I quote below, how a veteran journalist, Wole Olujobi, captured that episode on ekitipanupo: “One thing strikes me about Metuh’s hallucination in his eagerness to return PDP to winning ways after clearly losing the election. Olisa Metuh ?agonised over transfer of a dead Audu’s votes to another candidate, conveniently forgetting that his own party created history in Nigeria when the votes of a sitting governor were transferred to another person, who neither pasted a campaign poster nor attended a campaign rally to become the governor in Rivers State. I refer here to Celestine Omehia who won an election on the platform of the PDP and was sworn in as the governor before another PDP aspirant went to court, claiming to be the rightful PDP candidate. At the conclusion of that case the Supreme Court held that Amaechi? was the candidate of PDP and ordered that Omehia’s votes be transferred to him on the grounds that the votes belonged to the PDP and whoever won its governorship primary election. Obviously, Metuh must have suffered a momentary loss of memory to claim as he did’.
I was almost completing this article when I ran into Professor Lai Olurode’s interview on Channel’s television and I came to perfectly understand why Nigerians have had to endure INEC for so long. According to the Professor of Sociology and former INEC commissioner, in his own reasoning, all that matters in an election is the register of voters which contains the names of registered voters many of who are, of course, long dead, did not collect permanent voters cards nor would ever come near a polling booth on election day. For him, PVCs are mere INEC internal product with no probative value in an election and, if his incredible thought process is followed, accreditation too, means nothing to the process either. Were these not his totally incredible postulations, he should have known that with less than 25,000 accredited for the election in the areas where elections were cancelled, there is no magic, except there is an INEC magic, by which PDP can now overtake APC. By his thoughts, you would never think Olurode had ever seen the inside of an INEC office. It’s such a shame.
NATION
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