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PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA
A President’s Sour Grapes?
Penultimate Monday, President Umaru Yar’adua read a riot act of sorts to judges at the All Nigeria Judges Conference that opened in Abuja on that day. Judges, he said in apparent reference to recent court decisions that have not gone down well with his political party, the Peoples Democratic Party, should never play to the gallery. “It is important,” he said, “that the judiciary does not fall into the temptation of delivering decisions merely because it appears to be popular at that point in time… A decision may be apparently popular because it accords with the sensitivity of the people at a given time but may be wrong according to law.”
Before the president’s remarks the PDP had lost many petitions entered against it by opposition parties on the last general elections, notably those over the governorship elections in Kebbi and Kogi States. More importantly the party had lost its control of Anambra State in a landmark decision by the Supreme Court and, although it retained its control of Rivers State, the court’s decision on the petition by one of the PDP candidates for the party’s governorship ticket against the party’s choice had gone against the party.
Most important of all the proceedings in the petitions brought against the election of the president himself by the two main opposition candidates, General Muhammadu Buhari of the All Nigerian Peoples Party and former Vice-President Atiku Abubakar of the Action Congress, have been going very much against the ruling party.
Against this background of PDP’s judicial setbacks, it would not have come as a surprise to many Nigerians that the president spoke to the conference of the judges in the vein he did. Even then most people, I suspect, would consider his remarks as unwise because, first, it sounded like sour grapes and, second, it looked too much like a not-so-subtle blackmail.
The president was right to caution against the courts playing to the gallery. If courts do or say only those things that are popular instead of those things that are right they risk plunging the country into chaos and instability. The question, however, is have the courts’ recent decisions been merely popular rather than both popular and right? As the president knows very well popularity and propriety are not necessarily mutually exclusive.
Unfortunately, the answer to the question about whether the courts have merely played to the gallery in recent times is not a simple yes or no for the simple reason that except in very few cases, judgments, like beauty, are often in the eyes of the beholder.
In reading his riot act to the judges, President Yar’adua did not spell out which cases he had in mind. It is, however, reasonable to suspect that the ones he had in mind were those of Anambra State where PDP lost the governorship seat to the opposition APGA, and Rivers State where a rebellious PDP candidate won against the candidate of the party’s choice.
Of the two cases, easily the more controversial one was that of Rivers State where the Supreme Court awarded the governorship to a candidate who never stood for election even though he had initially won the PDP primaries. He did not stand for the election because the PDP leadership vetoed his nomination and, in spite of his successful petition at the courts against the party’s veto, the party simply defied the courts.
Not surprisingly the Supreme Court’s decision of awarding the governorship of Rivers State to the rebellious candidate seemed popular because the court sided with the underdog. However, not a few lawyers, notably the activist lawyer, Chief Gani Fawehinmi, saw the court’s decision as merely playing to the gallery.
Such lawyers who questioned the court’s decision have argued that what it should have done, having satisfied itself that the INEC and PDP acted illegally in foisting Chief Celestine Omehia as governor of the state, was to have cancelled the election and ordered another one. To have gone beyond this by awarding the governorship to Chief Rotimi Amaechi, the petitioner, these lawyers believed, was to have exceeded its brief of only interpreting existing laws.
As a layman, this argument sounded reasonable to me. If an election is faulted because an electoral body and a political party worked hand-in-glove to defy the courts, I would have thought the right thing to do was to void the election since to merely replace one person with another amounted to sustaining the same illegality.
However, even though the Supreme Court sounded like merely playing to the gallery in the Rivers State case I would have thought the president’s remarks at the judges’ conference would have given equal, if not even greater, consideration to the inconsistent manner in which the election tribunals have ruled on election petitions before them which in many instances are essentially of the same nature.
Take the cases of governorship elections of Kebbi and Sokoto States for example. In both cases some opposition parties petitioned against the victory of the PDP candidates on the grounds, among others, that the PDP candidates were not validly nominated, particularly on the grounds of Section 34 of the 2006 Electoral Act which says a party cannot change its candidates beyond 60 days to the election and cannot, in any case, do so without “cogent and verifiable reasons”. In both Kebbi and Sokoto the petitioners argued that the changes of the PDP candidates were made in violation of Section 34 of the law.
Yet whereas the election tribunal in Kebbi State granted the petitioners’ main prayer, in Sokoto State the tribunal not only completely rejected their prayers, it followed its rejection with what seemed to be gratuitous abuse. Alhaji Muhammadu Maigari Dingyadi, the governorship candidate of the Democratic Peoples’ Party who was a co-petitioner before the tribunal, was, said its judges, “a busy body, meddler and interloper as well as a stranger on the grounds raised.” This, to me, sounded like playing to the powers-that-be which, the reader will agree with me, is worse than playing to the gallery.
Before the cases in Kebbi and Sokoto there were cases in Borno, Kogi, Ebonyi, Imo, Osun and FCT where the tribunals had accepted the potency of indictments by judicial and administrative tribunals on corruption and other charges against candidates as long as such candidates did not evacuate their own indictments before High Courts prior the elections. Yet the election tribunal in Abia state ruled against the indictments of the Peoples’ Progressive Alliance and the PDP candidates that came first and second in the questionable election even though the candidates either made no attempt at all to evacuate such an indictment or did so unsuccessfully.
The Abia tribunal rejected the indictments on the grounds that they did not satisfy the constitutional requirement for fair hearing. This may have been a perfectly valid argument but it was a matter for the High Courts and not an election tribunal to decide upon.
The inconstancies in the decisions of the election tribunals surely open judges to suspicions that their decisions are influenced more by considerations other than the law. No doubt differences would occur in the interpretations of laws, but where the differences are completely contradictory as we have witnessed of recent then there are bound to be cause for widespread concern about the personal and professional integrity of judges.
President Yar’adua was right to have expressed his concern about judges of the superior courts playing up to the gallery in reaching their decisions. Trouble is he should have also expressed similar concern about judges at the lower benches playing to the powers-that-be is reaching their own decisions.
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