When the National Judicial Council (NJC) recommended in May 2012 that the suspended president of the Court of Appeal, Justice Ayo Isa Salami, be reinstated, not a few of those who had followed the matter closely felt that the Council was offering President Goodluck Jonathan a decent way to end one of the ugliest episodes in Nigeria’s judicial history.
That the recommendation bore the imprint of two of the nation’s most distinguished jurists who stood at opposite ends of the ideological spectrum made the recommendation all the more resonant.
If the liberal Justice Kayode Eso, judge of the Supreme Court, since deceased, and the conservative senior attorney and former Minister of Justice and Attorney-General of the Federation, Chief Richard Akinjide (SAN), could sign off on the document along with the majority, it would seem that the Council had decided to take politics out of the matter and had considered it purely on its legal merit.
The NJC, I thought, had thereby placed in President Goodluck Jonathan’s hands a powerful weapon to rein in the hawks in the PDP who would settle for nothing less than Justice Salami’s scalp because his Court stripped them of their stolen gubernatorial trophies in Osun and Ondo and restored the people’s mandate to those who had earned it at the polls.
I was hoping that Dr Jonathan would seize the opportunity to play statesman rather than party chieftain. And when he was reported to be “studying” the recommendation, I thought he was trying to find a way of appeasing the hawks, aforementioned.
Dr Jonathan had something else in mind. He ran down the clock on Justice Salami, calculating that the books would be closed on the matter once the jurist reached the mandatory retirement age of 70 years.
And so, two years after being consigned to judicial purgatory, Justice Salami served notice of retirement, effective October 15, 2013, victim of an epic injustice that Dr Jonathan could and indeed should have ended.
Justice Salami’s ordeal began, as I once recalled in this space, when he presided over the sitting of the Court of Appeal that voided the purported election of the PDP candidate, Engineer Segun Oni, in the 2007 Ekiti gubernatorial election and declared Dr Kayode Fayemi of the ACN winner.
The election was marred by fraud on a staggering scale. In a court-ordered partial re-run to ascertain the true voice of the people, the PDP, the election umpire INEC, Maurice Iwu presiding, and the police, executed a more brazen heist that a 3-2 majority of the Election Petitions Tribunal nevertheless consecrated with transparent sophistry.
The Court of Appeal reversed, and Justice Salami became a marked man.
Five weeks later, the Salami Court, Justice Clara Ogunbiyi presiding, vacated the stolen mandate under which yet another PDP candidate, Prince Olagunsoye Oyinlola, had governed Osun for three years and seven months–or seven years and seven months if one believes, as one now positively must — that Oyinlola and the PDP never won the 2003 election, on the basis of which he had served a four-year term.
As in Ekiti, the Osun poll was vitiated by massive rigging and violence. The ACN candidate, Engineer Rauf Aregbesola, headed to the Elections Petition Tribunal for review and redress. Obtaining neither, he took his case to a superior body, which held that the verdict of the court below amounted to a miscarriage of justice and ordered that the petition be heard de novo.
The new tribunal rejected Aregbesola’s petition in a “unanimous” judgment signed by four of the five judges. The text was festooned with alterations and interpolations that called the integrity of the process into question.
In finding for Aregbesola, Justice Ogunbiyi wrote for a unanimous Court of Appeal that the Tribunal was “lackadaisical” in its handling of the case, that it dismissed vital evidence as “mere allegations”; that it set at nought compelling forensic evidence; that it wantonly misrepresented evidence of key witnesses; in sum, that the Tribunal’s conduct was “a travesty, and a mockery” of the judicial process.
That verdict sealed Justice Salami’s doom. He would have to be taken out of the Court of Appeal, the terminus for all election petitions except those arising from the election of President.
First they offered to promote him to justice of the Supreme Court. He demurred.
Several years earlier, when there was a vacancy on the Court, he had declined to apply for the position.
Then, they accused him, first in whispers and subsequently in unsigned newspaper advertorials of all manner of misconduct, including consorting with attorneys of parties to the case he was handling. Leading the charge was Senator (as he then was) Iyiola Omisore who, despite his apparent conversion to probity and propriety, nevertheless remained a principal suspect in the murder of the former Federal Minister of Justice and Attorney-General, Chief Bola Ige.
Then there was talk of giving Justice Salami a “soft landing” if only he would just quit.
Why would they contemplate, much less make such offers to a judge they claimed was tainted irredeemably? Why would they reward him with a promotion to the Supreme Court? Why would they offer him a “soft landing”? Why not make a public example of him?
If you had the facts on your side, if you were serious about cleansing the judiciary, if you were truly desirous of prosecuting a Transformation Agenda in which fighting corruption was a core element, why would you pass up such a great opportunity to nail the judge?
But Justice Salami’s saga was never about law. It was about politics through and through, politics in its rawest form.
A pending judgment in the disputed gubernatorial election result in Sokoto before the Salami Court would provide the final pretext for caging Justice Salami and ultimately terminating his career. The judgment could overturn many a political applecart, and the authorities were taking no chances.
According to Justice Salami, the sitting Chief Justice of Nigeria, Justice Aloysius Katsina-Alu, requested that the judgment be withheld, for political reasons. Justice Salami cited Justice Dahiru Musdapher, of the Supreme Court, as a witness to this encounter.
Justice Katsina-Alu said he had merely informed Justice Salami that the judgment had been leaked, and that it might be wise to put off issuing it. But at the material time, the judgment had not been leaked. It turned out that documents alleging a leakage did not surface for at least another week.
Justice Musdapher whom Justice Salami had cited as witness would only say with diplomatic tact that he could not recall the occasion. Not categorically that the encounter never happened; merely that he had no recollection of it.
For all practical purposes, that was the end of Justice Salami’s career. Those determined to teach him a lesson wove Justice Musdapher’s diplomatic answer into a charge of perjury, with Chief Justice Katsina-Alu as accuser and prosecutor and witness and judge while in office and even after he retired.
Not even the NJC could save Justice Salami from their vengeful wrath those who had a vested interest in “arresting” the pending judgment of the Court of Appeal.
Justice Salami left the scene bruised and battered, and not entirely on his own terms. But his head was unbowed. He refused to submit to blackmail and blandishment. While they hurled every weapon in their arsenal of dirty tricks at him, he sought vindication through the law.
A vindication of sorts came last week. The NJC named Justice Salami to head the Crime Cases Trial Monitoring Committee, charged to fast-track corruption trials and free them from the delays and detours, the twists and turns contrived by lawyers and judges alike.
Something tells me that posterity will remember Justice Salami more kindly than those who, when presented with a chance to end an epic injustice, chose to perpetuate it.
