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How to Stop Judicial Coups Against Democracy in Nigeria

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1 year ago

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“It’s now so bad that courting the votes of the electorates is no longer an important component of the democratic process since politicians can get from the courts what they lost at the ballot box. That’s a dangerous state for any democracy to be in.”

How to Stop Judicial Coups Against Democracy in Nigeria
By Farooq A. Kperogi
Twitter: @farooqkperogi

The Civil Society Legislative Advocacy Centre (CISLAC), one of Nigeria’s most prominent pro-democracy NGOs, invited me to make a virtual presentation from my base in Atlanta to a national seminar it organized last Thursday on “targeted judicial reforms and enhanced judicial integrity in post-election litigation.” Unfortunately, I couldn’t make it, but here are the thoughts I would have shared on the topic.

It’s oddly ironic that the judiciary, which should be the bulwark of democracy, has become such a dreadful terror to democracy that people are seeking to protect democracy from it. The courts have become the graveyards of electoral mandates. Judges have not only descended to being common purchasable judicial rogues, but they have also become juridical coup plotters.

The major preoccupation of pro-democracy activists is no longer how to keep the military from politics and governance but how to save democracy from the judiciary. In other words, in Nigeria, our problem is no longer fear of military coups but the cold reality of frighteningly escalating judicial coups.

A “judicial coup,” also called a juridical coup d’état, refers to a situation where judicial or legal processes are deployed to subvert the choice of the electorate or to unfairly change the power structure of an existing government.

In other words, a judicial coup occurs when the courts are used to achieve political ends that would not be possible through standard political processes. In a judicial coup, the courts make rulings or interpretations of the law that drastically alter the balance of power, often favoring a particular political group or leader.

This can include invalidating election results, removing elected officials from office, altering the constitution through interpretive tyranny, or other significant legal actions that have profound political implications.

Before 2023, judicial coups happened in trickles and were barely perceptible. The big, bad bugaboo used to be INEC. When the Supreme Court made Chibuike Rotimi Amaechi the governor of Rivers State on October 25, 2007, without winning a single vote, we thought it was merely a curious, one-off democratic anomaly that was nonetheless morally justified because Celestine Omehia—who won the actual votes cast on April 14, 2007, and sworn in as the governor on May 29—was illegally replaced as PDP’s candidate after Amaechi won the party’s primary election.

Our collective toleration of this strange supersession of normal democratic procedures to produce a governor conduced to more aberrations.

On January 14, 2020, the Supreme Court produced its first unofficial “Supreme Court governor” in Hope Uzodimma of Imo State when it used dazzlingly fraudulent judicial abracadabra to subvert the outcome of the governorship election in the state.

The Supreme Court’s judicial helicopter zoomed past PDP’s Emeka Ihedioha who won 273,404 votes to emerge as the winner of the election; flew past Action Alliance’s Uche Nwosu who came second with 190,364 votes; zipped past APGA’s Ifeanyi Ararume who came third with 114,676 votes; and glided gently into the yard of fourth-place finisher Uzodimma of APC with only 96,458 votes.

It then declared that the fourth shall be the first, enthroned Uzodimma as the governor, and dethroned Ihedioha whom Imo voters and INEC had chosen as the legitimate governor.

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I recall being too numb by the scandal of the judgment to even experience any sensation of righteous indignation. Then came the Ahmed Lawan judgment, and I was jolted to my very bones. A man who didn’t run for an election, who admitted he didn’t run for an election, and who gave up trying to steal an election that he himself admitted he didn’t run for, much less win, was declared the “winner” of the election.

Because I closely followed the case and shaped public discourse on it, I was so incensed by the judgment that, in a viral February 6 social media post, I called Supreme Court justices “a rotten gaggle of useless, purchasable judicial bandits,” which prompted an unexampled official response from the Supreme Court, which dripped wet with undiluted bile.

However, many judges, including some conscientious Supreme Court judges, agreed with me. For example, in his farewell speech last month, Justice Musa Dattijo Muhammad re-echoed my sentiments about the Supreme Court and cited former Court of Appeal justice Oludotun Adefope-Okojie who, in her own farewell speech, approvingly quoted my description of Supreme Court justices as “a rotten gaggle of useless, purchasable judicial bandits.”

The judicial banditry I talked about has assumed a different, worrying dimension. It has now become full-on judicial sabotage against the soul of democracy itself. In unprecedented judicial roguery, the Appeal Court has invalidated the election of all 16 PDP lawmakers in the Plateau State House of Assembly and handed unearned victories to APC. It also nullified the victory of PDP’s Governor Caleb Mutfwang and asked that APC’s Nentawe Yilwatda Goshwe, who lost in the actual election, be declared the winner.

The case of the judicial theft of Kano State’s governorship election from NNPP to APC is too well-known to warrant restating. In all these cases, the judiciary invoked matters that were extraneous to the actual vote (called “technicalities”) to decide whom to crown as winners of the elections.

It’s now so bad that courting the votes of the electorates is no longer an important component of the democratic process since politicians can get from the courts what they lost at the ballot box. That’s a dangerous state for any democracy to be in.

The judiciary is becoming an unacceptably treacherous but overpampered monster that is exercising powers that are beyond the bounds of reason. It needs to be stopped through a holistic reworking of the electoral act.

The first thing that needs to be spelled out more clearly and more forcefully in a revised electoral act is that pre-election matters are not litigable after the winner of an election has been announced. All pre-election petitions should be litigated before the conduct of elections. Post-election litigations should be limited to the conduct of the elections. Since this happens once in four years, it should not be too much of a burden for the judiciary.

The second change that needs to be enshrined in a revised electoral act is a provision that divests courts of the powers to declare winners and losers of electoral contests. I am the first to admit that this is problematic because it limits the mechanism for redress available to politicians in cases of INEC-engineered electoral robberies.

But in situations where courts can glibly overrule the will of the electorate by invoking procedural inanities that are extrinsic to elections to declare winners and losers, I would rather deal with INEC alone.

The conduct of elections can be improved in the future to the point that manipulations can be significantly reduced. But I can’t say the same for a rapacious, unjust, and mercenary judiciary such as we have today.

In any case, in all functional democracies, it is voters, not the courts, who elect and remove people from positions of political power. If the courts find sufficient evidence of irregularities in the conduct of elections, they can order a rerun. But they should never be invested with the power to declare winners and losers.

The last suggestion I have for the revision of the electoral act is to constitutionalize the imperative to finalize the adjudication of all election petitions before the inauguration of elected officials into their offices. There are two reasons for this.

First, it is disruptive to put elected officials through the hassles of post-election litigation while they are already officially in office. Governance is often put on hold during the pendency of litigations, and lots of state resources are expended to bribe judges, hire lawyers, and bring witnesses. That’s unfair to Nigerians.

Second, at least at the presidential level, once someone has been declared the president and is inaugurated, they automatically assume enormous symbolic power that is almost impossible to reverse. They also have access to enormous resources that they can deploy to influence the course of justice.

Whatever we do, we must curb the excesses of our out-of-control judiciary before it finally murders what remains of our democracy.

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Opinion

Tax Reform, Barau and Assisted Misconceptions

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1 day ago

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December 2, 2024

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By Abba Anwar

Part of the objective of this piece, is to look at the trending issue of Tax Reform as enunciated by President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s administration, legislative innuendo and how, from the scratch, the Executive arm of government, confuses the process with little or no proper communication strategy for the needed engagement of the citizenry.

The piece does not intend to go into the nitty gritty areas of the document, Tax Reform Bill, for x-raying the good, the bad and the ugly sides of the document. A lot has been said by tax experts and celebrated economists. I believe such technicalities should be left to technical people. For honest and proper comprehension of the process.

I am not interested in discussing whether Senator Barau was trapped, or what he did was deliberate to give him access to other corridors come 2027. My major concern as a student of media and communication is, where is the missing communication link, that creates all hues and cries?

The approach to inform citizens about the Bill and other embedded explanations is highly elitist. Even at that, a significant percentage of our elites do not understand the document well.

My area of great concern is, how the communication aspect of the entire process was pushed down the ladder, not minding the far reaching consequences of the byproduct, if you wish. Whose fault? Those saddled with the responsibility of handling the project. By that I mean the gamut from abstract expressionism to realistic portraiture of the entire project. Not Presidency, in my view.

Even if the inputs from the public would not be regarded to be part of the process, but at least Nigerians deserve clearer understanding of the entire process. As per the content, direction, actions, responsibilities, historical position of the existing tax laws within the framework of the new Bill and specific roles of the stakeholders, among many other factors.

As loaded as it appears, the Bill has 4 parts or aspects. These are, Nigerian Tax Bill, Nigerian Tax Administration Bill, Nigerian Revenue Service Bill and Joint Revenue Board Bill. Which some commentators call four-in-one.

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With good communication strategy and for the sake of gaining popular support from the public, I thought the Executive would have design some proactive media and communication interventions to tell Nigerians what has been in the offing.

Most of the critical commentaries are louder from the North. Which many see and believe that the script was made to further impoverish the North. I also observe that, some of the comments and commentaries hovering around in the last few days are critically objective, some quasi-critical and quasi-objective, some pseudo-critical and pseudo – objective, some critically subjective and some embedded on the premise of ignorance of the entire process.

But I also believe that, the Executive fueled that with their flagrant disregard to effective media and communication plan. That is why I said, in the caption of this piece “… Assisted Misconceptions.” Assisted by who? By the Executive themselves. Particularly the main actors playing the script to screen.

Nowhere in the North where I saw aggressive campaign for awareness creation of this Bill. Northern Nigeria, has listening audience when it comes to media usage. Yes, social media is also visible in youth. That is basic. So even at the level of the social media, the engagement in the North by the government is poor, poorer and poorest!

Nothing like aggressive radio programmes, phone-in programmes with experts sponsored by government. In Kano for example, where we have about 30 radio stations, I doubt very much if there are 5 radio stations that run either special bulletin or special programmes or documentaries on retainership basis, sponsored by the people handling this new Bill. Not to talk of other Northern states.

I therefore call on the National Assembly, not to repeat what the Executive entertains. Which could be by ommission or commission. Both Chambers, I suggest, should push for clearer understanding of this document to the public.

It is glaring to all of us that, the Executive was not able to employ scientific communication strategy in creating spaces for proper engagement for the newly introduced document.

That could be the explanation why, even legislators, some of them do not comprehend the document. As revealed by the Deputy Senate President, Barau Jibrin, in the interview he granted to the BBC Hausa Service.

At the level of the Governors’ Forum, the new Bill is not a darling document to many. Reason for boxing it down. With this (mis)conception of the document among elites, what then can stop people from rejecting the entire process?

Right from day one, I thought the authors of the Bill, the Executive, would create amplified awareness creation strategy around the process and its content.

As Senator Ali Ndume was arguing that, he was not against the Bill, but his concern is the timing. It is therefore pertinent, for our legislators, to first an foremost, paint a picture of clearer understanding of the process and the content, before throwing it to Nigerians for public hearing.

From the way I see it, because of these heated debates there is every likelihood that, some adjustments may come into play. This is just an opinion, anyway.

Anwar writes from Kano and can be reached at fatimanbaba1@gmail.com
2nd December, 2024

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Opinion

That’s AA Zaura/Peter Obi Meeting’s: Signifying The Importance Of Zaura In The Nigerian Grassroots Politics

Published

2 days ago

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December 1, 2024

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The Labour Party (LP) Presidential Candidate in the 2023 polls, Peter Obi, private visit to the Abuja home of a-born chieftain of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), Abdulsalam Abdulkarim Zaura, popularly known as AA Zaura, has once more raised the craft significance of Zaura importance in the Nation Grassroots Politics.

Although, one might think the Visits is just one of those Obi’s Visits to his Friends and Political Poe’s, but is per beyond that,many who knows the strategies touches of Zaura in capturing the minds of Nigerians through his philanthropist magnanimous historic attendances, will appreciate the Political strategy of Peter Obi in making the realignment with Zaura.

Although the only things that could be reported from the meetings was the two politicians engagement in a closed-door meeting that lasted over an hour, many Analysts believes that there is more than meets the eye’s in the Obi/Zaura meetings.

It is true that, neither Obi nor Zaura disclosed the motive of the meeting after their discussion, as both maintained that it was a private matter. But reports has it that the realignment of the two old friends is a strategic moves towards 2027.

Although the meeting between Obi and Zaura has been described as highly confidential, sources close to both parties suggested that the visit was part of Obi’s broader efforts to engage with influential political figures across Nigeria ahead of the 2027 Presidential Election.

AA Zaura, who is the President of the AA Zaura Foundation International, was the APC candidate for Kano Central Senatorial District in the 2023 general election, and a key figure in the Kano political scene.

Zaura influence and Obi’s push for broader political alliances ahead of 2027, the timing of the meeting could signal strategic moves aimed at fostering unity among diverse political forces.hile the specifics of their talks were still unknown, the meeting’s private nature has only added to speculations about possible collaboration between the two leaders in the near future.

Before the duo went into the private talks, Obi openly commended Zaura for his exceptional leadership and philanthropic initiatives, particularly through the AA Zaura Foundation International, which has been instrumental in lifting many Nigerians, especially those from his region, out of poverty, former Anambra State governor lauded Zaura’s passion towards lifting ordinary Nigerians from being consumption-focused to a people with production mindset through his empowerment initiatives, stressing the long-term impact such initiatives bring to the country at large.

AA Zaura expressed his admiration for Obi’s consistent posture on national issues, particularly his commitment to a more prosperous and self-reliant Nigeria, a statement that could clearly be seen as a thumps Up to Obi’s commitment and courage in his Presidential pursue.

It could be recalled that Zaura calculative Political Moves was among several efforts that gave President Tinubu victory in 2023, where he openly predicted that Bola Ahmad Tinubu will be the next Nigeria President no matter what. Zaura at that time insisted that zoning formula must be maintained and out of that the only Person that will benefit from it was Bola Ahmad Tinubu because of the fact that he was the last Man standing as far as South is concerned and that his struggles for the survival of the Polity can only be paid by allowing him to be the next President, the remaining is History.

Many saw that position as just a political jester coming from a desperate ally trying to sold his Friend (Tinubu) backs in 2022, more so that Zaura not only stick to his position but went on campaigning for Tinubu even before the commencement of proper Campaign stipulated times.

Today, Zaura dogged stand for Tinubu Presidential Candidature is history because it had well being achieved and the President has already fully taken the mantle of Leadership trying his best for a better Nigeria.

In a sum up, AA Zaura is one person that could not be played with because of his Political influence, courage, zeal and passion for a better Nigeria, that enough could trigger Peter Obi to run back to his old Political Friend for a prosperous Nation.

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Opinion

EXCLUSIVE: How FG Director Abandon Posting, Release Funds Against Civil Service Rules

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3 days ago

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November 30, 2024

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A Director of Accounts in the Ministry of Labour and Productivity has continued to stay in the Ministry despite approval of his Posting to the Ministry of Defence.

POLITICS DIGEST exclusively gathered that the said Treasury Officer who doubles as Director of  Accounts has continued to approve the release of funds despite his posting to another Ministry which is a breach of the civil service rules under the watch of the Permanent Secretary who is aware of what the civil service rules.

In a letter dated 12th November, the Accountant General of the Federation Oluwatosoyin Mudsin approved the Posting of the said Treasury officers with immediate effect but the officer in question Bala Saleh has continued to serve in the Ministry of Labour instead of Defence where he was posted to with immediate effect.

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A staff of the Ministry who pleaded for anonymity told this paper that he abandoned his new posting because of the support of a retired permanent secretary while both the Minister and that of State were not aware of the said letter which is totally against the civil service rules.

However, some staff of the Ministry have confided to this paper their readiness to petition the Director in question to the ICPC.

When contacted over the matter, the spokesperson of the Ministry declined to comment and promised to call our reporter back after his findings on the matter.

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