PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA

Tribune, the CJN and the PCA

ndajika@yahoo.com

 

Last weekend the Nigerian Tribune attempted what was clearly a hatchet job for the Chief Justice of Nigeria (CJN), Justice Aloysius Katsina-Alu in his recent faceoff with the President of the Court of Appeal (PCA), Justice Isa Ayo Salami. Because he’s been unable to prove his allegations of unethical conduct against the CJN, the newspaper said in the edition’s cover story, “...pressure is reportedly being piled to get the President of the Court of Appeal, Justice Isa Ayo Salami, to publicly apologize and step down from his post.”

“Top jurists,” the newspaper claimed in the lead story headlined “Jurists Push For Salami’s Resignation,” were the ones piling the pressure. However, throughout the 20-paragraph story there was not one word about the real identity of those top jurists. Chances are, there were none.

The closest the newspaper got to identifying any of the jurists was when it claimed that the “top jurists, who reportedly tried to mediate in the crisis, were said to have been scandalised when Salami could not produce concrete proof on his allegation against the CJN.”

To my knowledge three retired senior justices have offered to reconcile the two feuding justices, namely, Salami’s predecessor, Umaru Abdullahi, and two former CJNs, Muhammadu Uwais  and Alfa Belgore. It beggars belief that as intelligent and experienced as these three gentlemen apparently are they would imagine that getting one party in a feud to publicly apologize to the other – and quit his job to boot – even before they have started their mission is anyone’s idea of reconciliation.

In any case it is simply not true that Justice Salami could not produce any evidence of his allegation that the CJN has tried to interfere in the Court of Appeal’s handling of the Sokoto State governorship election case. Anyone who has followed the media coverage of the controversy that has surrounded the case, especially from its appeal stage in April 2008 to date, knows that there have been a series of correspondences between the two senior judges over at least the composition of the appeal panel.

Those correspondences clearly reveal that the CJN believed the panel constituted by Salami would not do justice by the state’s governor, Aliyu Magatakarda Wamako.

Was the CJN right to think so? Perhaps he was. But to proceed from his belief and get the Supreme Court to stop the Court of Appeal from giving its ruling on the matter as provided for by the Constitution looked, at least to me, like the classic case of hiding behind a presumably virtuous end to justify a dubious means.

I say, presumably virtuous, because as a review of the case from its beginning in October 2007 would show, it was not beyond any reasonable doubt that the sacking of Wamako by the Court of Appeal, as the CJN apparently feared, would indeed amount to a gross injustice.

The background to all this was the determination by former president, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, to snatch the five North-Western states (Kano, Jigawa, Kebbi, Sokoto and Zamfara) in the grip of the opposition All Nigeria Peoples Party (ANPP) out of the seven in the zone – Kaduna and Katsina were the only PDP states in the zone - from  the party  in the 2007 elections as he had succeeded in doing in 2003 against the other opposition party, the now comatose Alliance for Democracy, in his own South-West, with the exception of Lagos State where the then governor, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, proved more than a match for the wily old general. 

Of the five, Sokoto State, whose two-term governor, Attahiru Bafarawa, had left the ANPP after it had become crisis ridden in the run-up to the 2007 elections,  to form his own party, the DPP, as a vehicle for his presidential bid in the 2007 elections, seemed to have had a special attraction for the general.

Bafarawa’s choice of his successor was the Secretary of his government, Muhammadu Maigari Dingyadi. Wamako, who had been Bafarawa’s deputy but had become estranged from his boss towards the end of Bafarawa’s second and final term, stayed back in ANPP to contest against Dingyadi. Also by then Obasanjo’s minister of Water Resources, Mukhtari Shagari, had picked the ruling Peoples Democratic Party’s (PDP) governorship ticket for the state.

However, what seemed set to be an interesting three-horse race soon turned into one of two horses when Obasanjo prevailed upon Wamako to cross over to the PDP and subsequently forced Shagari, kicking and screaming, to hand-over his ticket to Wamako and settle for his running mate.

This horse trading by Obasanjo ahead of the April 14 governorship election was what set the stage for what has since turned into a legal fiasco that may yet consume two of the most senior judges in the country.

The fiasco began with Dingyadi’s petition to the Sokoto State election tribunal against Wamako’s victory on grounds the governor violated Section 38 of the electoral law which forbade double nominations; Wamako, his lawyers argued, was already the ANPP governorship candidate when he was given the PDP ticket. The tribunal dismissed Dingyadi’s petition in October 2007.

He then appealed to the Court of Appeal sitting in Kaduna under the Presiding Justice, Zainab Adamu Bulkachuwa, leading four others. This time Dingyadi succeeded. In April 2008 the CA not only reversed the ruling by the election tribunal. It made highly scathing remarks about the conduct of Wamako, his party and the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC).

“The first and second respondent” the CA said in its unanimous judgement, “have been guilty of none-compliance with the provisions of the Electoral Act and the Constitution and no court of law or a reasonable tribunal will close its eyes to such flagrant abuse of privilege as arrogantly exhibited by the respondents in this case.”

The court’s angst was that Wamako’s waiver for not being old enough in the party to qualify as a contestant for its ticket of any elective public office in accordance with the party’s constitution, was given to him in arrears when there was no provision in the party’s constitution that it could do so. “Those who disrespect their own party’s constitution,” the court said in apparent anger, “should not be expected to be true protectors and defenders of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.” (A prescient echo of the debate on the party’s zoning controversy, some people would say).

On INEC’s part, said the CA, its officers “have in this case, portrayed the Commission as an irresponsible organisation which is ready to perpetuate illegality and scuttle the nascent democracy for whatever reason best known to them.”

The court said it also found that the deputy governor, Mukhtari Shagari’s INEC Form CF 001 “was manufactured purposely to meet the challenges of the election petition.” The receipt upon which the form was deposed showed that it was paid for on April 27, 2007 whereas the form itself was purportedly deposed on February 12.

The court, accordingly, annulled the April 14 election on the grounds that Wamako was not qualified to contest the election and awarded the cost of 50,000.00 Naira against him and his party. It also ordered INEC to conduct fresh elections within 90 days but then inexplicably, or so it seemed, ordered that the fresh election “shall be between the same parties and candidates as appear on Exhibit R8” i.e. to include DPP and PDP, Wamako and Dingyadi.

It was the incongruence of the court’s harsh words against Wamako, his party and INEC, on the one hand, and its order allowing Wamako to remain in the race in the fresh election it ordered which sowed the seed of the controversy that, as I have said earlier, may yet consume the CJN and the PCA.

Clearly the editors at the Tribune were not fair to themselves and to their profession when they accused the PCA of “cry(ing) wolf publicly where none existed,” in their cover story of February 19.

Without doubt there was a wolf - actually two - and it stalked the judiciary first, in the shape of the CJN’s attempt to force the hands of the PCA over the composition of the Sokoto panel, and second, when that failed, the wolf took the shape of an unprecedented attempt to elevate the PCA to the Supreme Court against his wish and, as the highly respected former PCA, Justice Mustapha Akanbi, said in press interviews, in breach of court procedure and precedence.

Yes, there was no doubt that there was wolf when the PCA cried that one existed.

What is doubtful is the wisdom of the manner he decided to cry bitterly about it, spilling out sordid details of confidential matters that were best left within the four walls of the courts.

In the end both justices may have done tremendous, if not irreparable, damage to themselves and to the judiciary.