Nigeria’s Attorney-General and Minister of Justice Michael Kaase Aondoakaa is again ensnarled in a conflict-of-interest controversy arising from his February 16, 2009 directive to the chairman of the Independent Electoral Commission, Nigeria’s election regulatory agency, urging him to withhold the issuance of a “certificate of returns” to a certain Emmanuel Obot whom the Court of Appeal has declared as the legitimate winner of the election into the Uyo Federal Constituency in the House of Representatives.
The Nigerian Appeal Court, the court of last resort in House of Representatives election matters, had ruled that the current occupant of the seat, Bassey Etim, who is a close business ally of the attorney-general, was fraudulently substituted as a candidate of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) after Emmanuel Obot handily won the primary election of his party and can therefore not legitimately represent the Uyo Federal Constituency.
This ruling has the potential to disrupt an ongoing mutually beneficial financial relationship between Attorney General Michael Aondoakaa and Bassey Etim.
Sahara Reporters has been reliably informed that Aondoakaa and Etim struck up friendship and business association through their common membership of the board of the Nigerian drugs and narcotics agency and also through their constant interactions by virtue of Etim’s membership of the Financial Crimes Committee of the House of Representatives, the House committee that has oversight duties over the once vibrant but now thoroughly compromised Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC). The EFCC is now directly supervised by the office of the Attorney-General and Minister of Justice.
The minister and the now legally ousted House of Representatives member are also said to be united in their “personal interest in the Utan Brama victim’s compensation,” according to a document Sahara Reporters is in possession of.
Aondoakaa’s perversion of the office Attorney-General and Minister of Justice in the service of the protection of his friend and business ally has a long history. Documents at the disposal of Sahara Reporters show that when the Court of Appeal on December 5, 2007 overruled the judgment of an election tribunal and ordered a retrial of Emmanuel Obot’s petition challenging his fraudulent substitution, Aondoakaa immediately wrote a letter to the President of the Appeal Court in his, as he put it, “capacity as the Chief Law Officer of the Federation and the traditional leader of the bar as well as a stakeholder of the legal profession/judiciary” urging him to disregard the ruling.
The Appeal Court President, however, ignored Aondoakaa’s histrionic subversion of his office to shield his friend and business associate and went ahead to set up a fresh panel to retry the petition. On April 8, 2008, the panel ruled that Emmanuel Obot was the duly elected representative of the Uyo Federal Constituency.
Not satisfied with the ruling, Aondoakaa’s friend, Bassey Etim, filed an appeal. However, on February 12, 2009, the Court of Appeal ruled that Etim’s appeal had no merit and therefore declared that “Emmanuel Obot is the duly elected candidate in the election of 28th April, 2007 into the Uyo Federal Constituency of Akwa Ibom State.”
Section 76 of the Electoral Act setting up the Independent National Electoral Commission stipulates that in the event of the nullification of an election by the Court of Appeal, INEC should issue a “certificate of return” to whoever the court declares a winner within 48 hours.
However, 48 hours after the Court of Appeal nullified Bassey Etim’s election, Aondoakaa, his friend and business ally, wrote to the chairman of the INEC instructing him to subvert the Electoral Act by not issuing a “certificate of return” to Emmanuel Obot. “I have just been served with a petition dated 12th February 2009…on behalf of Elder Bassey Etim, drawing my attention to a set of facts suggesting an obvious desecration of the institution of the judiciary and an affront on it as well,” Aondoakaa wrote in his letter to the INEC chairman on February 16, 2008. “As the Chief Law Officer of the Federation, therefore, I feel obligated to perform my onerous constitutional role in the circumstances, hence this correspondence.”
The “onerous constitutional role” Aondoakaa performed in his letter to the INEC chairman was to call attention to the fact that his friend, Bassey Etim, had appealed to the Supreme Court against the nullification of his election by the Court of Appeal on the basis of which the “Chief Law officer of the Federation” implored “the good self” of the INEC chairman “to please exercise a little patience and defer further action, such as issuance of Certificate of Returns” to Emmanuel Obot.
Legal experts have, however, faulted the Attorney-General’s letter on two counts. First, they point out that all matters relating to election petitions in respect of the House of Representatives constitutionally end at the Court of Appeal. Only presidential elections can proceed to the Supreme Court. Second, Emmanuel Obot’s lawyers said it is misleading, even dishonest, for the Attorney-General to state that his friend’s appeal had been “entered” in the Supreme Court.
What is pending in the Supreme Court, they insist, is “an application for extension of time to appeal against the ruling,” which legal experts say is itself a frivolous application that cannot a constitute sufficient basis to invalidate the ruling of the Court of Appeal.
As matters stand now, Aondoakaa has already caused the chairman of INEC to act in flagrant violation of the Electoral Act by not issuing the “certificate of return” to Emmanuel Obot more than 48 hours after the Court of Apeal ruling. It remains to be seen how long this will last and what consequence this would have for the health of the judiciary and Nigeria’s democracy.
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