|
PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA
Turai, the Court of Appeal and Citizen Musa’s Advert
Lord Atkin, one of the more famous English judges, it was who once said “Justice is not a cloistered virtue; she must be allowed to suffer the scrutiny and respectful, even though outspoken, comments of ordinary men.” The Leadership of last Friday, April 18, published a full page, 12-paragraph advertorial from one Ibrahim Musa, who gave his address as 36 Kabala Road, Kaduna. Musa, for all we know, is as ordinary as the next bloke. As if prompted by Lord Atkin’s wise words, he subjected the Court of Appeal’s April 11 reversal of the judgments of the Election Tribunals in the somewhat similar cases of the Kebbi and Sokoto Sates governorship elections to scrutiny. Musa’s scrutiny was outspoken but no one who has read it would consider it respectful. Indeed most readers are likely to regard it as downright rude. Yet few, if any, of those readers would dismiss his “disrespectful” scrutiny as unjustified. Musa’s grouse was with the Court of Appeal’s judgment in the case of Kebbi State only. On October 20, 2007, the Election Tribunal in the state had voided its governorship election on the grounds that the governor, Alhaji Usman Nasamu Dakingari, was not qualified to contest the election because he was not a member of the Peoples’ Democratic Party when it nominated him as its candidate. The PDP nominated him on February 5 following a mass migration of the leadership of the All Nigeria Peoples Party in the state led by its former governor and Dakingari’s godfather, Alhaji Adamu Aliero, to the PDP in the run-up to the April 14, 2007 governorship election. The PDP filed his nomination on February 9. However, his PDP membership card showed that he joined the party on February 10. This was a clear breach of the Section 147(c) of the Constitution which says a person can stand for an election only “if he is a member of a political party and is sponsored by that political party.” In reversing the Kebbi Election Tribunal’s verdict, the Court of Appeal clearly chose to ignore this unambiguous constitutional provision. Citizen Musa condemned this reversal as “PARALOGISM – THE LAW ACCORDING TO BULKACHUWA”, Justice Zainab Adamu Bulkachuwa being Her Lordship who read the verdict of the Court of Appeal sitting in Kaduna. By now, I am sure, President Umaru Yar’adua must have heard that many, if not most, Nigerians believe that in reversing the verdict of the election tribunal, the Court of Appeal ignored Dakingari’s constitutional breach because he is his son-in-law. In the words of Citizen Musa, such Nigerians believe the judgment was “induced by the powers that be.” Specifically, Musa fingered Hajiya Turai, the First Lady, and Justice Umar Abdullahi, who, as President of the Federal Court of Appeal, has been in charge of all election tribunals. This was in addition to Justice Bulkachuwa. He did not call Justice Abdullahi by his name but any one with even half an eye could see the cap he described was meant to fit the judge. The word in town, in case the president, his wife and Justice Abdullahi haven’t heard, is that the judgment in the Sokoto case was to have been delivered the day before Kebbi’s. Speculations were that the court had not only reversed the decision of the Sokoto election tribunal which had upheld Alhaji Aliyu Wamakko’s election as governor, it had decided to confirm the opposition Democratic Peoples Party’s candidate, Alhaji Muhammadu Dingyadi, as the new governor. All this – well, almost all – changed, as the speculations go, when pressure was mounted by the powers that be on the courts to sacrifice Sokoto state in order for the president’s son-in-law to remain the governor of Kebbi State. Thus, the Sokoto judgment was brought forward by a day in order to blunt the public outrage that any blatant miscarriage of justice was bound to provoke. One strong indication that there may have been a miscarriage of justice in the Kebbi State appeal was that more that a week after the verdict was delivered there was still no certified true copy or even a manuscript of it. I said almost all, because although Wamakko’s election was voided, the court shied away from doing the next logical and legal thing, which was to have declared Dingyadi as governor, as the next candidate with the highest vote and who had satisfied the stipulated spread among the state’s local governments. In contrast to Kebbi’s election, the Sokoto election tribunal, contrary to all facts and commonsense, had upheld Wamakko’s election. It was a notorious fact that he had double nominations, first from his old party, the ANPP, and then from PDP which he, like his Kebbi counterpart, had moved into in the run-up to the April 14 governorship election. He claimed to have resigned from ANPP on January 31, 2007, but minutes of an ANPP national caucus meeting held on February 7, 2007 showed that he was listed as number 23 in attendance and he even had some nasty things to say about the PDP. Not only that, at the time of his nomination, he legally had no running mate, a fact which meant that constitutionally his own nomination was invalid; at the time the state election tribunal ruled in his favour, there was evidence to show that an affidavit Alhaji Mukhtari Shagari Esq swore to as Wamakko’s running mate was a forgery, something which the Court of Appeal eventually confirmed. In the light of all this, should it surprise anyone if the public adopts the cynical attitude that it has adopted to the Court of Appeal’s verdicts on the Kebbi and Sokoto governorship elections? Again should it surprise anyone that Citizen Musa would call what he apparently believed was a spade by its name? “In Islam,” he said in the advert in question, “a husband is supposed to be on top of the situation in his household. He gives permission for the movements of his wives. Can Yar’adua explain what Turai was doing in Kaduna at 3.00am of Friday morning of 11th April, 2008? Allah will ask him why his wife goes about doing the untoward which he had been alerted about but he did nothing… One day, we shall come to know the Katsina born very senior justice of the Court of Appeal that sat behind in the office of the presiding justice of Kaduna Court of Appeal division while his judgment was being delivered.” Musa’s comment on the controversial Court of Appeal verdict on Kebbi and Sokoto, may be outspoken and, indeed, rude. It is also possible that it is not even accurate, but when the verdicts of a court flagrantly fly in the face of notorious facts and logic, they leave ordinary men with little or no choice but to speculate about the ulterior and selfish motives of those in authority. As if all this was not bad enough, the Court of Appeal published an advertisement in the Daily Trust of penultimate Monday, April 14, which changed the two most critical of the six orders it gave in respect of the Sokoto case, i.e. orders 2 and 4. Here it is instructive that it is INEC, which the court itself had condemned as “spineless” in the face of PDP’s blatant intimidation that has since petitioned the court to retract the advert because of the serious divergence it had observed between the court’s original orders and what it published in the Daily Trust. “Whereas”, said INEC, “in the second order in the judgment it was stated that: “The Sokoto governorship election held on the 14th day of April 2007, is hereby annulled for substantial irregularities in the conduct of the election and on the ground that the last Respondent was not qualified to contest the election as at the 14th day of April 2007 (underlining ours), what was published was; ‘That the Governorship election held in Sokoto on the 14th day of April is hereby set aside.’” Similarly INEC said whereas the 4th order said “The fresh election herein ordered shall be between the same parties and candidates as appear on Exhibit R8,” what was published was; ‘That the Independent National Electoral Commission shall conduct a fresh Governorship election in Sokoto State within 90 days from today and candidates shall be those who participated in the governorship election of 14/4/08.’” The difference between the two, my lawyer friends have explained to me, is like the difference between darkness and light. Whereas the original orders meant that Wamakko and Shagari are not eligible to re-contest, the new version specifically said they are. This difference, as INEC pointed out, has already raised political tension in an already tense Sokoto State. Obviously there is some high-stake political mischief going on here. On June 19, last year, I said on these pages in an article titled “President Yar’adua – the Home Front,” that he needs to dispel the widespread perception that on his home front – and beyond – Turai’s word, and not his own is final. I also said in effect that the consequence of such a perception can be catastrophic. And it makes little or no difference whether the perception is true as long as people have reason to believe it is. I gave this unsolicited advice in good faith because I believed the president’s decisions, good or bad, are bound to reflect on me as a fellow Northerner, as a fellow Muslim and as a classmate and friend from our days in Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria. I repeated this advice in not so many words on these same pages on February 27. The stories surrounding the Court of Appeal rulings in the Kebbi and Sokoto governorship elections suggests that either those in authority believed one was trivializing matters of state or that one wrote in bad faith. Either way I must say, once again, that unless the president is seen to take charge of his home front, the public may chose to believe far worse things about his administration than the rude remarks Citizen Musa made in his advertorial in the Leadership of last Friday April 18.
|