Go forth, electoral bandits. In the next bout of re-runs in Rivers and elsewhere, kill, maim, rape and raze! It is perfectly legal!
Besides, if Ezenwo Wike and co can get away with electoral murder, so could you!
Isn’t that the latest message from the Supreme Court of Nigeria, by its decision on the Rivers gubernatorial poll?
Without a doubt; though legal puritans would hee-haw, and insist on awaiting their Lordship’s formal reasons for what appears an outrageous slaughter of electoral reason.
Still, don’t we all feel a sense of déjà vu? Haven’t we traversed this path before?
No, this is not making a Judas of the Nigerian judiciary. But by its characteristic softness on electoral turpitude, and its seeming penchant to aid and abet electoral larceny, hiding behind narrow legalism, it would appear as guilty of undermining Nigeria’s political evolution, as the executive and the legislature.
The Supreme Court, in 1979, found that the twelve-two-thirds of 19 states was 12 two-thirds states; not 13. That was clearly more of legal gerrymandering, given that the apex court only canonised the legal opinion of an involved partisan, Chief Richard Akinjide, SAN, national legal adviser to the then National Party of Nigeria (NPN).
Besides, the pall of politics, on a matter that ought to be 100 per cent judicial, rested on two troubling pillars: the then Federal Electoral Commission (FEDECO) had, in previous decisions, always interpreted twelve-two-thirds of 19 states as 13, even in registering political parties. Also, the Supreme Court decreed its clearly controversial decision would not serve as precedent.
But why — if it was so sure its decision was unassailable: in law, in good conscience and in common sense?
Still, what if the judiciary had let the 1979 election run its legal course, and not given political cunning a legal jab in the arm?
For starters, President Shehu Shagari and his NPN would have escaped that crushing legitimacy burden, which they never overcame, all through their four years and three months in power. Besides, they probably would not have imbibed that fatal electoral permissiveness; bating them to rig first, and sort out the messy aftermath with an indulgent, if not collusive, judiciary.
Besides, the 2nd Republic would probably have survived. If it had, Nigerians would have been saved the trauma of the most vicious strain of military rule, spanning 1984 to 1999, not discounting the diarchy from January 1992 to November 1993, during which the freest election in Nigerian history was annulled.
That era hit its nadir with Sani Abacha’s fist-of-mail tyranny, his brazen raid on the public till and the near-unravelling of the Nigerian military.
In 2008, the Justice James Ogebe-chaired Presidential Election Tribunal, with the full complement of five justices, beatified the odious Umaru Yar’Adua presidential mandate. Among its infamous stands was that non-serialisation needed not invalidate a ballot. The Supreme Court later gave that rotten election its blessed kiss.
But thank God, the goodly Yar’Adua himself (God bless his soul) was unconvinced, though surrendering the most looted presidential ballot in Nigerian history would appear a no-option. He set up the Lawal Muhammadu Uwais-chaired Electoral Reforms Panel.
That panel had a certain Attahiru Jega, later to become Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) chair. The foreign and domestic flak the 2007 elections drew must have made quite a mark on Prof. Jega and his INEC. A direct response, at saner and more sanctified polls, were the computer-chip voter card and its authenticator, the card reader.
With that technology, the prospects that the 2015 polls would be free of soulless ballot-stuffing and criminal figure-cooking were quite high. Besides, the instant audit of voters, with the card-reader recording accredited voters, against the ones that actually voted, would give electoral transparency a fillip.
Though the final details of their Lordships’ decision are yet to be out, unlike the two lower courts before it, the Supreme Court, perhaps itself buried in arcane legality, has all but buried the card reader as a force in sane elections! Yet, that technology appears the scientific curb on the self-destruct Nigerian politician, merrily eager to poison his own ecology, en route to grabbing power.
And how sweet, of Nigeria’s apex court: betraying hardly any institutional memory, no sense of history, neither a sense of sociology nor morality, hardly any antenna to pick the angst of the cheated and the bullied, just narrow and crass legalism! For all you know, the apex judicial conclave in the land was in Mars when the Rivers electoral shame unfolded!
Yet, here was the damning verdict of the Independent Election Monitoring Group (IEMG), South-South zone, dated 12 April 2015, and signed by one Esther Achor, Esq.
On Rivers’ general electoral anarchy: “Shocking cases of cold blooded killings and beheading, obstruction of votes, arson, voter intimidation, ballot snatching, missing result sheets, presenting of fake ballot papers, multiple thumb-printing, campaigning at polling units, compromise of ad-hoc staffs, absence of level playing environment, violence against media personnel and impunity were witnessed in different magnitude across the length and breadth of the state. These acts were brazen.”
And on the card reader: “In a number of cases, the card reader functioned well. In others, it was abandoned for manual accreditation, contrary to the rule of INEC; and this facilitated irregular thumb-printing/massive rigging.” Did anyone smell wilful sabotage, for a preconceived end?
That is the profane Rivers poll that the Supreme Court has given its sacred kiss!
Besides, where is the correlation in all of this judicial anomie? A judiciary that voided almost all of the Rivers House of Assembly seats, contested same place, same time as the governorship, is the same judiciary — and the brightest of its flower, to boot! — okaying the Rivers gubernatorial poll, even after the Governorship Election Tribunal and the Court of Appeal had held it was a grand fraud!
When the Supreme Court played blatant politics with the law in 1979, the ultimate result was a collapsed democratic republic; and trauma of military rule as Nigerians never knew before.
The eventual cost of this Rivers electoral brutality looms in the belly of time. But on one thing,Ripples is sure: the organised anarchy of military rule is gone and best forgotten. But if our courts continue to aid and abet electoral pillage, against good conscience and common sense, they may well be working overtime to birth free-wheeling anarchy.
If that comes, even their Lord Justices would realise, in Fela-speak, wig-and-gown na stuff, na tailor dey sew am! At the earliest hint of the military’s overarching power hubris, the immortal Fela had declared: uniform na khaki, na tailor dey sew am!
The moral? Only an ordered society respects persons, positions and institutions. If you doubt, ask brother jurists in Somalia!
In the immediate, however, the Rivers re-runs come with great peril. The bandits that pulled Wike’s electoral barbarity are probably ready to pounce. But the other side, latterly weaned from the folly of awaiting justice, and now buoyed by “federal might”, would certainly not lay to be slaughtered.
Is this then a judiciary-paved road to electoral Mogadishu? Ripples hopes not!
NATION
END
It was a shameful outing that, in the face of damning loads of evidence, “little leopard” still found it auspicious to upturn the outcome of two earlier and saner concluded stages of a corrective process. To them, one compromised head is better than two right-thinking ones.