By Emmanuel Ogebe
2023 Election Court Diary Part 2: Paper fight: Russia, Ukraine and Trump feature in courtroom fireworks at PDP hearing.
June 20 – the barristers brawl that ended yesterday’s Labour Party hearing shifted to a replay between PDP and INEC albeit not as stormy.
Uche SAN, Petitioner’s lead counsel sagaciously and graciously thanked INEC for the document dump from INEC the previous day but lamented late production of sub subpoenaed evidence.
“Getting documents from INEC is like Ukraine asking Russia to provide weapons to fight it. We need laws for INEC to provide elections to the court.”
Incidentally this was the precise recommendation I made over a month ago at the NADECO summit in Washington:
“Another recommendation I want to make is that it should be incumbent on INEC to deposit all election materials with the court. The court has no business ordering the petitioner to go and beg INEC for access to the material. Those materials are public materials. They should be provided to the courts so that everybody has access to them. Instead of INEC playing hide the ball and trying to run out the clock.”
Firstly it is shocking and preposterous that INEC still cannot produce complete paperwork proving the election of a candidate four months ago who is already in office.
Furthermore it is criminal as LP pointed out yesterday that INEC rejected service of court processes upon itself. This means a government agency evading a court order of the government. That is anarchy and lawlessness.
In the USA, Mr. Bannon titanic former Assistant to President Trump was arrested, tried, convicted and jailed by the courts for refusing to comply with a subpoena for him to appear before a congressional committee how much more a court subpoena from the second highest court in the land which can remove even the president?
The US takes rule of law seriously and even the Buhari regime’s collaborator in attacks against my human rights advocacy and sponsorship of the Chibok girls in America, Doug Wead a former Assistant to President Bush was arrested and charged with fraud in September 2021 before his death and his co-defendant who had previously been pardoned by Trump, sentenced in 2023 to 1.5 years imprisonment. President Trump himself has been charged with more than 70 criminal counts and had to personally appear in state and federal courts as recently as two weeks ago!
INEC’s obdurate intransigence can only inure two inferences:
- Either INEC DOES NOT have evidence proving that APC won or
- INEC is sabotaging the other parties and subverting the justice system by untoward delay tactics.
INEC has not only hijacked democracy it is now attempting to frustrate the rule of law – the two non-negotiable sine qua non for a truly free country.
However Uche, SAN’s proposal for future electoral advances including electronic voting met some critique from the court which said “if you ask Trump, he will tell you that even that has problems.”
It was an orbiter and not a official pronouncement of the court but for avoidance of all doubt as I stated in a post-election Arise TV interview, “this has been called by an American jurisprudentialist “the tyranny of an oligarchy ” when you have a court of 12 or 9 as they have in the US decide an election for a hundred or millions of people, it appears unjust. Now as you know, elections in the US are generally not contested until we had Trump who filed over 50 lawsuits claiming election fraud and he lost all of them and even his lawyers are facing disciplinary charges from the Bar. Former New York Mayor Gulianni was suspended by the New York Bar. So it’s not something that happens often there but in Nigeria it is something that comes with the territory. Today I was on the phone with a retired Justice of the Supreme Court, he laughs and says “listen, this happens all the time in Nigeria.”
Finally, and sadly, seeing all the bags of evidence reminds me of how practice here remains atavistic. After an hour, the court rose to allow the lawyers figure out the papers in sacks and bins. I left. Nothing had been achieved except announcement of appearances.
INEC’s IREV was the democratisation and decentralisation of election results in Nigeria until the bogeyman notoriously known as the “Nigerian factor” befell it. The electorate have exercised “their right to vote” but seldom ever “their rights to the vote count” – results.
February 25, 2023 is like it’s close cousin June 12, 1993 though 30 years apart not simply because it was also a Muslim/Muslim Yoruba headed ticket.
The crux of the matter essentially boils down to this two points: – midway through an election that was generally free and fair and massively expressive of the burning will of the people, retrogressive forces in government truncated the process thus annulling the true election outcome by a dubious dark of night court declaration by the infamous justice Bassey Ikpeme then and a dubious dark of down declaration by the infamous INEC chair Mahmood Yakubu now.
June 12th’s legitimate winner declared himself president and was arrested for treason and imprisoned while Feb 25th’s known rigger was illegitimately declared and inaugurated as president.
Those who re-annulled another Nigerian election result electronically thus hijacking a nation virtually are scant different from those with guns who annul democracies by declarations at radio stations 40 years ago and must be held accountable for history and posterity.
It cannot be that only the evil-minded rush to obey mischievous high court orders meant to sabotage elections 30 years ago while refusing to obey legitimate orders of a constitutional five-judge panel of the court of appeal to validate the basis of an election today.
Emmanuel Ogebe, Esq, is a prominent US-based international human rights lawyer and Nigeria pro-democracy advocate with the US NIGERIA LAW GROUP in Washington. This month, he marked the 27th anniversary of his abduction and torture by Gen. Abacha for demanding an investigation of the assassination of pro-democracy icon Kudirat Abiola over the June 12 election annulment. His advocacy led to the naming of Kudirat corner by Nigeria house in New York, the US designation of Boko Haram as a foreign terrorist organization and International Criminal Court Prosecutor’s determination of crimes against humanity in Nigeria amongst others.
