The unholy alliances between some politicians and judges are dangerous to our democracy. Millions of people will come out on the day of the election, queue, collect ballot papers, and cast their votes for their preferred candidates, results will be announced, and everybody will jubilate only for three, five, or seven judges to upturn the popular will of the people.
“The best the judiciary must do in political cases is to adjudicate, and where there are discrepancies, order a rerun without giving victory to party A or B”.
“It is wrong to remove the electorate’s power to elect political leaders and for the judiciary to tell us who the winners are. This is not good for Nigeria. This is not good for our electoral system. A compromised judiciary is dangerous” – That was Commodore Olabode George – turned his Lordship, Mr Justice Bode George, this past week, parodying his one- time Commander – in – Chief, General Olusegun Obasanjo, who had earlier lampooned the Nigerian judiciary in like manner, teaching the judiciary how to perform its constitutionally prescribed function of interpreting Nigerian Laws.
Who will tell these people that Nigeria has long thrown away the military yoke under which they ruled Nigeria roughshod for decades?
It will also be apposite to ask them whether they were both in Siberia when only five days to the swearing in of victorious candidates in Zamfara state after the 2019 general election, the supreme court sacked all the APC candidates who had swept the polls, resulting in the party losing seven house of rep seats, three senatorial seats, 24 Assembly seats as well as the governorship? Where can we find Obasanjo’s comments or those of Bode George on that occasion, condemning the judiciary?
It will not be too much either, enquiring as to whether they were on military duty in the Congo when the Supreme court, in February, 2019 overturned a ruling of the Court of Appeal, and barred, all APC candidates from contesting elections in Rivers State? Where, in the name of fairness did Bode George or Obasanjo address their Press conferences when, hours to his being sworn in as Bayelsa state governor in February 2020, the Supreme court nullified the election of gentleman, David Lyon, for no fault of his, but in accordance with the law of the land?
This is always the problem with haughty politicians who believe themselves wiser than everybody else.
Left to these men of yester years, it was not “3, 5 or 7 persons calling themselves judges” who ruled on those occasions but a BATTALION of judges. Indeed, how many judges sat on the Supreme court panel that quashed Bode George’s jail term, one hundred?The earlier these people realise they are in the past the better, or is it now, after 24 years of Tinubu’s successive, progressive government in Lagos state that Bode George will lead PDP to power? On what basis?
Attentive Nigerians must have noticed how, of recent, these once powerful men have, one way or the other, been clogging our eardrums with their jeremiads over all manner of things.
These men, who had said they would be in power for 60 years had been swept into political Siberia shortly after their party Chairman, the late Prince Vincent Ogbulafor, made that public announcement to Nigerians and,ll being men of unaccountable power who saw elections as ‘do or die’, not many Nigerians doubted them.
Their party, the PDP, which the U.S Council on Foreign Relations saw as not a political party, “judging by conventional Western tenets, but rather as merely an oil – loot sharing cartel since it has no distinctive political colouration or ideology”, merely out to rip Nigeria to shreds.
And how did they do that?
Below is how Sahara Reporters captured the expose by Mike Achimugu, an aide to former Vice President Atiku who brandished a video of the VP, saying the following
:“What happened was when Obasanjo and I came into office, I advised the president against open corruption. “I told him to give me three people he trusts and I will prepare three companies in which they will be subscribers or rather, the directors, so that any contract we award they will act like consultants, and they will be given a fee. That fee is what we shall use to fund the party.”
“I now incorporated companies and put them as subscribers. One of the companies was Marine Float”.
There is copious evidence, home and abroad, that these Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) companies were used in stealing tonnes of Nigerian money and ended up landing Nigeria where it is today, broken and broke.
Apart from a U.S Congressional hearing finding Atiku “guilty of laundering over $40 million in suspicious funds into the United States between 2000 and 2008”, a Nigerian Senate investigating panel also agreed with the findings that Atiku “diverted $145m from Nigerian government accounts”.
These people are now still lusting after power, and relevance, simply because none of them was punished for their malfeasance, nor did the crooked Nigerian system saw to it that they were barred from, any longer, holding public office, or eligible to contest any future elections,⁰ as would have happened in any sane country.
Also, as reported by Tony Orilade in Sahara Reporters of 28 February, 2007 both President Olusegun Obasanjo and his deputy, Atiku Abubakar, were indicted by the Senate Ad-Hoc committee which investigated the controversial Petroleum Trust Development Fund (PTDF) which saw both men hauling fraud charges against each other.
The committee, specifically accused them of abuse of office and diversion of PTDF funds to purposes other than for which the funds were meant. But in spite of the indictment, the committee failed to recommend any punitive measures, preferring instead, that the Senate should decide on that.
That was how Nigeria missed it to our eternal chagrin.
On the contrary, however, Bode George’s excesses in power saw him get punished with a jail term; a sentence that was later quashed by the Supreme court in December, 2013, two days after former President Olusegun Obasanjo accused President Goodluck Jonathan of the same PDP, of condoning corruption.
Had Nigeria taken appropriate measures then, these men would not be back now tormenting Nigeria with all of them calling judges, even Supreme court judges, names.
Last Sunday on these pages, I sketched how thoroughly inconsolable Obasanjo had become that he completely wrote off liberal democracy, not only in Nigeria, but in the whole of Africa. He barely stopped short of imploring extra – democratic entities to take its place.
Or what is his ‘African democracy’, if not the rule of the mob, and how exactly would that have satisfied his utmost desire for a Peter Obi presidency?
Why, if he truly meant well for Nigeria, did he not use all his might to canvass a unicameral legislature for the country, seing that the present system, which he brought about, is not only wasteful but destructive in the long run.
Had he done that, he would have felt sure he would leave behind a legacy worth the name, and no longer need any fight with the Nigerian judiciary or indulge in his enervating, one – sided war with President Tinubu, all in his long running desire to supplant Chief Obafemi Awolowo in Yoruba land – an outright impossibility.
Atiku Abubakar cemented his love for power through becoming a perennial presidential candidate. Now after the 6th attempt, it has become a matter of the more you look, the less you see; even though he is currently proposing a fusion of all opposition parties which will, hopefully, adopt him for his 7th attempt. This lust, no doubt, has, obviously turned to paranoia.
When he is not doubling down on the government, he is petulantly dismissing the judiciary; the same judiciary he ran to when Tinubu lent him a place in the ACN as Obasanjo was trying to crush him.
As for Bode George, not a few would wonder why he is still in town after all those promises of fleeing Nigeria if Tinubu became president. Or are we wrong in taking him for a gentleman officer?
If he is serious, at all and not unduly haughty, shouldn’t he ask himself why the likes of Musiliu Obanikoro, my good friend, Seye Ogunlewe and, last but not the least, Moshood Salvador, erstwhile PDP chairman, Lagos state, who defected to APC with over 10,000 members, left him and his drowning PDP to team up with the same President Bola Ahmed Tinubu in the APC?
Nothing lasts for ever except the grace of God. These gentlemen should now take their knees off the neck of Nigeria.
