By Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.
Twitter: @farooqkperogi
I’ve always had a sneaky suspicion that judgments on
election petitions in Nigeria are influenced by political pressures from the
presidency, but a conscientious judge who is familiar with the issues and who is
deeply concerned about the brazenness of the politicization of election
tribunal judgements confirmed my suspicions last week.
One of the thrills and burdens of public commentary is that
it connects you with every strand of the society— and with all sorts of information.
When I received communication from someone who initially just identified themselves
[the use of the singular plural pronoun is deliberate] as a “senior member of
the judiciary” who wanted to confide in me, I was a little hesitant.
But being IT savvy— and security conscious—I was able to uncover
their identity without letting them know. In time, they sensed that I knew whom
they were, so they came clean. They called because they read my columns and have
read my opinions on election tribunal judgements.
In September 2019,
for instance, I wrote on Twitter that members of the Presidential Election
Petition Tribunal who delivered a predictably questionable judgement in favor
of Buhari would be rewarded.
“Let me give you guys a little homework. From now till 2023,
observe what happens to the judges that delivered the laughably tendentious
& predetermined #PEPTJudgement,” I wrote on Twitter on September 11, 2019.
“Buhari will reward
them and/or their children. He already rewarded INEC's Mrs. Amina Zakari by
appointing her biological son as his SA on Infrastructure. Recall that Buhari
has openly admitted that he appointed 84-year-old retired Justice Sylvanus
Nsofor as Nigeria's ambassador to the US because he wrote a dissenting judgment
at the Court of Appeal in his favor. He rewarded many others.
“The PEPT judges are salivating right now in anticipation of
their rewards. The already universally reviled and corrupt INEC boss and his
minions are waiting for their rewards. Some have already been rewarded. Supreme
Court justices are waiting in the wings….”
As if to prove me right, just one month after their
judgement in favor of Buhari, Justices Mohammed Garba and Abdul Aboki were
recommended for promotion to the Supreme Court. It took the protest of
opposition political parties and of senior judicial officers for the National
Judicial Council to withdraw their promotion to the Supreme Court.
But on Friday, August 14, Buhari elevated the same people yet again to the Supreme Court. Justice Mohammed Garba, in case you didn’t
know, headed the patently prejudiced Presidential Election Petition Tribunal in
2019 that gave legal imprimatur to Buhari’s electoral heist. Justice Abdul
Aboki was also a member of the Presidential Election Petition Tribunal.
Well, the judge who reached out to me last week told me
“there is a judicial cabal at the Court of Appeals of Nigeria that writes
judgments for election petition tribunals.” They said it was the cabal that wrote
“the recent ludicrous judgment of the Bayelsa State Governorship Election
Petition Tribunal, which the legal community and commentators have unanimously
condemned for daring to overrule the Supreme Court.”
I am unable to share the details they shared with me about the
Bayelsa tribunal judgement because doing so will ruin many lives. As a
demonstration of the confidence in the authenticity of their information, the
judge gave me the contact details of other judges who were in the know of the
wiles and pressures that preceded the Bayelsa judgment.
The judge said, “Indeed, the judicial cabal in the Court of
Appeal was created by the late Chief of Staff to President Buhari, the late
Abba Kyari” with the help of a senior judicial officer whose name I have chosen
to omit for legal reasons.
I learned that judges who resent the overt politicization of
election petition judgements were ecstatic when Justice Monica Dongbam-Mensem
was appointed President of the Court of Appeal through external pressures,
particularly the open letter Colonel Dangiwa Umar wrote on her behalf when it
became apparent that she was going to be passed over by the Buhari regime.
Justice Dongbam-Mensem was thought to be independent-minded,
scrupulous, opposed to politically motivated judicial activism, and capable of
dismantling the judicial cabal. “However,
there are indications that she lacks the courage to do so and, may have
compromised her integrity,” the judge said.
Apparently, this issue is well-known to most lawyers. Most
of them know of this cabal that works in cahoots with the Aso Rock cabal to
subvert justice. “The actual writing of the judgments is usually done by a
consortium of justices and legal practitioners,” I was told. This subversion of
justice by a conclave is a low-risk-high-reward undertaking. Members of the judicial cabal are routinely
compensated with promotion and financial reward.
I know that most people won’t be shocked by this revelation.
I wasn’t. But I am sharing it nonetheless for just two reasons. The first
reason is archival or, as my late friend Pius Adesanmi put it, “archaeological.”
I want it to be noted somewhere in the records that a civilian junta that
initially came to power through a popular election later thoroughly
subverted the judiciary and made election tribunal judgements predictable charades.
The second reason for publicizing this is that it just might
spur decent and ethical people in the judiciary to resist the cabal and their
sponsors— and possibly inspire a reform.
It’s entirely possible that previous civilian
administrations had their own judicial cabals. I have no evidence to make this
case. I hope that the conversations that this will provoke would address that.
But no one disputes the fact that no civilian administration
in Nigeria’s history has ever arbitrarily removed the Chief Justice of Nigeria
because it fears he won’t give a judicial stamp of approval of its electoral malfeasance.
How Many Nigerias Does Tinubu Believe In?
A screenshot of an April 13, 1997 interview Bola Tinubu
granted ThisDay with the headline “I Don’t Believe in One Nigeria”
trended on social media this week.
In my social media commentary on the headline, I pointed out
that, “Nigerian politicians are shamelessly situational ‘patriots.’ They're
irredentists when they're outside the orbit of power and exaggerated ‘patriots’
when they have access to the public till. A man who didn't believe in Nigeria
when he didn't have his way now wants to lead it. Ha!”
Tinubu’s defenders said his repudiation of Nigeria was
informed by Sani Abacha’s brutal dictatorship, which disillusioned even the
most optimistic patriots at the time. Well, Abacha wasn’t Nigeria. You
could—and people actually did—condemn Abacha’s villainy without losing faith in
Nigeria. To conflate Abacha and Nigeria was shortsighted.
Olusegun Obasanjo was jailed by Abacha, but I don’t recall
him ever saying he no longer believed in Nigeria because of Abacha’s
ill-treatment of him. In fact, it was precisely his unbending faith in Nigeria
in spite of what he suffered under Abacha that inspired northern leaders at the
time to support his presidential bid in 1999.
Of course, as I’ve always said, there’s nothing inviolable
about Nigeria, and no one should be ostracized for questioning the desirability of
its existence. But it is legitimate to
wonder if Tinubu, who wants to be president in 2023, now believes in Nigeria
and what has caused him to change his opinion.
The government he is a part of now is, in many ways, worse
than Abacha’s. Abacha’s fascistic excesses are being replicated many folds.
Only that he is not at the receiving end this time. Is he an opportunistic,
fair-weather patriot?
