The Nigerian judiciary is in a total mess and needs to be urgently saved from itself through immediate disbandment. These fellows who giddily address themselves as “learned friends” are indeed some of the greatest clowns and jokers on God’s earth. Andy Uba’s backdoor quest to be foisted on Anambra State as an unconstitutional “governor-in-waiting” is about to get judicial blessing courtesy of the Court of Appeal.
Sir Celestine Omehia who was sacked as Rivers State Governor by the Supreme Court has thus been heartened to return to the selfsame Supreme Court, asking it to eat its own vomit by reversing its earlier verdict. Anarchy has been loosed on the Nigerian judiciary, and one cannot stop laughing at the Alawada theatre blokes of the wig and gown profession. They are masquerading as the last hope of the common man when they are indeed the foot mat of corrupt politicians.
Who needs a judiciary that does not know that a case ought to have an endpoint? The Supreme Court has apparently ceased to be the apex court in the land; whence the Andy Uba gambit of going back to the Appeal Court when the Supreme Court had ruled that he ab initio contested for a non-vacant position. All the legal rigmarole being manufactured here and there to cover up the shenanigans of the so-called Uba appeal only amounts to a death-knell for the Nigerian judiciary.
It beggars belief that the Court of Appeal sitting in Enugu last Wednesday indefinitely reserved judgment in the application brought by Andy Uba who is seeking to take over power in Anambra State at the expiration of Governor Peter Obi’s tenure on March 17, 2007. Curiously Uba was represented by four Senior Advocates of Nigeria (SAN), namely Wole Olanipekun, A.A. Aribisala, C.E.I. Nwofor and Dipo Opeseyi. The high octane SANs were of course supported by 10 other ordinary lawyers.
The judiciary’s dance of shame is coming at a time the so-called Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has fixed gubernatorial election in Anambra State for February 6, 2010. In the matter at hand, the INEC lawyers are backing Andy Uba to the hilt even as they are making believe that they are making arrangements for the conducting of the scheduled Anambra election. Fela Anikulapo-Kuti would have dismissed it all as “Confusion break bone”, but this is no laughing matter. It is obviously too late to ask the bench and the bar to bring order to their house. Where seniority is not respected there is nobody out there to call anybody to order. The otherwise respected National Judicial Council (NJC) cannot come up with any meaningful intervention, having apparently been knocked into stupor.
INEC chairman Prof Maurice Iwu is already lapping up the judiciary for providing the escape route as a means to undermining the scheduled Anambra gubernatorial elections. According to Iwu, “In the forthcoming Anambra election, there will be no violence and thuggery if the courts will allow it to hold.” (Emphasis mine.) Just like in the June 12, 1993 presidential elections the courts are being deployed to devious use to undermine democracy. It is very obvious that the country has learnt nothing and forgotten nothing.
Poor Nigerian judiciary, it has become the butt of jokes everywhere. When the Supreme Court made the landmark judgments in sacking Uba and Omehia it earned so much applause, but now the selfsame judiciary is being brought down to murk through the brazen reversals of the initial successes. In short, the Nigerian judiciary is dead, and as the French master of comedy, Moliere, wrote, “We only die once; and it’s for such a long time.”
Now that the lawyers have thoroughly confused themselves and are thus constituting a menacing danger to the Nigerian polity it is my prayer that the entire edifice of the judiciary be dismantled with “immediate effect and automatic alacrity”, as the clowns of the theatre world would say. In disbanding the judiciary, this country will be saved from the sight of the bewigged clowns mouthing Latinisms to no effect. These comedians of the judiciary are too far gone in confusion not to be allowed free rein in a sane society. Since they have turned themselves into errand boys and girls of the politicians I make bold to suggest that they all be employed in all the state houses from Abuja to Zamfara as court jesters. Their colonial wig and gowns will serve as appropriate costumes.
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