The Court of Appeal has returned to a familiar turf; eyes of the storm, over its considered opinions in political cases, widely held to be below acceptable standard, SUNDAY EJIKE and LANRE ADEWOLE report.
Before the Supreme Court crushed the Court of Appeal last Friday over the sacking of three governors, the court below had tried to rationalise its ruling in the controversial cases, especially the Plateau case, which earned it wide-ranging opprobrium.
After it sacked the Plateau helmsman on November 19, 2023, the attendant brouhaha forced the leadership of the intermediate court to attempt an explanation to the bar and members of the public.
On December 12, 2023, about three weeks after the Plateau judgment was delivered, a member of the three-man panel that sacked the governor and other elected parliamentarians belonging to the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Justice Abdulaziz Waziri, had to publicly defend the ruling.
He did, in faraway Yola, Adamawa State, at the 2023 Law Week of the local bar.
Speaking on why the intermediate court returned the All Progressives Congress (APC) to power in the home-state of the president of the court, Waziri said the critics of the judgment clearing out PDP were missing the point.
Justice Waziri, who addressed participants at the event, said critics did not factor in the fact that the party had no structure on ground at the point of presenting its candidates.
According to him, the case against the PDP in Plateau State was not a pre-election matter, while urging the bar and the bench to always stand on the side of the law.
“The issue in Plateau State is not a pre-election matter per se. There was a subsisting court order given by the Plateau State High Court that PDP should go and have their congresses. They flouted the order of that court. So, the matter as it stood at that time was that they had no structures on ground.
“So, any candidate they have fielded would have no place to stand in the eyes of the law, so that is what happened,” Justice Waziri said.
SAN knocks CJN’s court
The Supreme Court, however, refused to share Justice Waziri’s perspective and reversed the Plateau sacking, while famously mourning for the sacked parliamentarians whose cases couldn’t constitutionally get to the zenith court.
Amid the outrage that trailed the sacking and the continuous plaudits being received by the apex court, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN) was, however, not impressed by the higher ground claimed by the Supreme Court in the Plateau debacle. Chief Yomi Alliyu couldn’t understand the pounding of the Court of Appeal by the apex court, noting that the latter had also made egregious calls in governorship cases in the past.
According to him, “The Supreme Court, with respect, is abandoning the age-long tradition of deciding only that which is on appeal before it when it was delivering judgment in Plateau State matter. The apex court suddenly became police of the judiciary in matters not before them!
“I believe a Supreme Court no matter how vexed, should await a matter to come before it before delivering a gratuitous judgment seen by many as drawing public sympathy to itself with a view to assuaging the public for its own ‘sins’ in previous judgments.
“The pertinent question to ask is whether the Supreme Court has not made mistakes in the past and bragged that they are infallible because they are final? Are there no instances where the Supreme Court blatantly failed to follow its previous judgments or even provisions of statutes?
“For example, the Electoral Act, with a view to averting Amaechi case, stated that in no circumstance will a person that did not participate in election be declared a winner. Did the Supreme Court follow this in voiding elections of National Assembly members in Katsina State in 2014? See inter alia, Yardua v Yandoma (2014) LPELR-24217(SC).
“Will the mantra of being infallible because you are final not also applicable when the Court of Appeal is sitting as final Court in some election appeals? Should this principle of infallibility of a final court not have guided the Supreme Court in ensuring that it does not make unguarded and unguided statements that could set the country on fire, especially when there is no way, at least by way of the Constitution, in remedying the “mistake”?
“If it were to be at the Supreme Court any counsel who dares to ask for a revisit pays through their nostrils. Ask Chief Afe Babalola, Chief Wole Olanipekun and (Mike) Ozekhome SANs who had dared the supremacy of finality of the Supreme Court in the past!
“Also, the Supreme Court, being a promotional court for justices of the Court of Appeal, one would have expected that being alumni of the said court, they ought to know that that the Court of Appeal has no power to set aside its judgment.
“Election appeals being sui generis cannot be decided or revisited after the time frame set down by the Electoral Act and the Constitution, then why acting Pontius Pilate? The justices of the Supreme Court have succeeded in using the Court of Appeal as cannon fodder, forgetting that when you bend down to spy at the anus of another in a dunghill many behind you are starring at yours too!
“On the above premises, the Supreme Court in making statements and/or holdings on a matter not before it, acted unsupremely against the interest of the judiciary. Their comments are nothing but self-serving apart from dancing to the gallery!
“The judiciary and the profession stand to suffer for this aberration in the minds of right thinking persons.”
Don fires PCA
While Alliyu was berating the court of the Chief Justice of Nigeria, another leading lawyer and professor of Law, Chidi Anselm Odinkalu was skewering the court below.
The perennial critic of his primary constituency said, “Plateau was the state where the Court of Appeal was most willful. It is also the state of origin of Court President, Monica Dongban-Mensem. Two days before her 63rd birthday, on June 11, 2020, Mrs. Dongbam-Mensem became the seventh President of the Court of Appeal. At the time, the governor of the State was Simon Bako Lalong, a lawyer who, like Mrs Dongbam-Mensem, hails from Shendam in the Central Senatorial Zone of the Plateau State.
“Nearly one year after the country began voting in February last year, Nigeria’s Supreme Court is still casting the final votes in the 2023 elections. It has been a long, tortured and traumatic election season. First, the people voted, then the Independent National Election (INEC) decided what it announced as the results. By March last year, those two phases were done.
“The following year, Mr Lalong appointed Monica’s daughter, Buetnaan Mandy Dongban Bassi, a judge of the High Court of Plateau State. Her mother sat on the National Judicial Council (NJC) which approved her appointment. Two years later, in September 2023, the same NJC sent Buetnaan’s husband and Monica’s son-in-law, Paul, to the Court of Appeal.
“In that election also, Mr Lalong ran on the platform of the APC to represent the people of Plateau Central in the Senate. If he had won, Mrs. Dongban-Mensem would have been his constituent. They come from the same neighbourhood. In the event, he lost to Napoleon Bali of the PDP.
“Mr Lalong thereafter challenged his loss before the election petition tribunal. For parliamentary elections, all disputes end at the Court of Appeal. The court sits in panels of three Justices designated by the president of the court. In Plateau State, all appeals went to a panel presided over by Justice Oluwayemisi Williams-Dawodu, who has been a Justice of Appeal since March 2014. She was joined by Justice Abdulaziz Waziri, who was appointed to the court in 2021; and Okon Abang whose term on the court began only in October 2023” he stated.
Odinkalu, a former chairman of the National Human Rights Commission, further alleged that, “On November 7, this Court of Appeal panel nullified the election of Senator Bali. In his place, the court returned Simon Lalong as the winner of the election in which he had been roundly defeated.
“Lalong was one beneficiary among many from a judicial (outcomes) reached by the Court of Appeal in Monica Dongban-Mensem’s home state. By the time it was over, the court had sacked two PDP Senators from the state and five members of the House of Representatives elected on the PDP ticket.
“In the 25-member state House of Assembly, the Court of Appeal removed 16 members elected on the platform of the PDP, handing their seats and control of the state parliament, to the APC.
“The sacked lawmakers included: Timothy Datong (Riyom); Rimyat Nanbol (Langtang); Moses Sule (Mikang); Salome Waklek (Pankshin); Bala Fwangje (Mangu South); Maren Ishaku (Bokkos); Dagogot (Quaanpan North); Nannim Langyi (Langtang North); Nimchak Rims (Langtang South); Danjuma Azi (Jos North-West); Gwottson Fom (Jos South); Abubakar Sani Idris (Mangu North); Happiness Akawu (Pengana); Ibrahim Abalak (Rukuba/Irigwe); Philip Jwe (Barkin Ladi); and Cornelius Deyok (Qua’apan South).
“In all these cases, the Court claimed that the PDP should not have fielded candidates. Their reasoning overruled a long line of Supreme Court decisions. This was not a mistake; it was judicial malpractice on a very corrupt scale. At the minimum, the panel should have been called to order when they issued the first decision.
“Instead, one of the members, Justice Abdulaziz Waziri, travelled to Yola in Adamawa State last December to celebrate the mandates they had laid to waste, claiming that the PDP “had no structures on the ground at the point they were presenting their candidates.” He alone could explain what he meant. This was a judicial hatchet job. Any claim that the president of the Court of Appeal was not herself a member of the panel is laughable.
“Such is the state of the judiciary in Nigeria at this time that the three-person panel whom Monica Dongban-Mensem sent to Plateau State could not have wrought that amount of destruction without her active consent, if not instruction. It is simply inconceivable that a Justice of Appeal, like Okon Abang – sworn in only in October 2023 – could have gone to the home state of the president of the court to confidently wreak so much political damage.
“Last Friday, the Supreme Court ruled that the Court of Appeal in Plateau was rogue, procured and perverse. It set aside the reasoning of the court which denied the people their chosen representatives. But because the Court of Appeal is the final court in these matters, the decision of the Supreme Court is no remedy for the political ruin.
“The legislators whose mandates (have been) stolen, are entitled to feel done over.
The people of the Plateau are entitled to feel cheated. Selected judicial mobsters have brought the judiciary into irreparable disrepute.
“Even now, those three Justices on the Plateau Court of Appeal panel should still be brought to account,” he demanded.
NJC can’t help —Owonikoko
Abiodun Owonikoko (SAN) in his analysis of the issues, said the National Judicial Council to which PDP is sending its petition against the Court of Appeal, is almost a toothless dog in the matter.
According to him, “The NJC does not review judgment, cannot review judgment and cannot reverse judgment. It does not appear to me as a viable option to pursue, except the whole idea is to simply have the judges affected to be sanctioned and that would not actually address the real issue of justice that the public and the affected people are looking at.
“In that respect, I have never heard it being said that the justices that were involved in those cases were in any way guilty of malpractice or fraud. If it is about the judges getting it wrong which of course is the implication of the Supreme Court upholding the plateau governor’s case; that is also one of the prerogatives of judges.
“They can be right and they can be wrong, they can be grossly right and they can be perverse. That also does not impact the judgment as a valid judgment until it is set aside. It, however, says a lot on the quality of the judgment and the judicial officers involved, which, in any event, reflect on their career progression, especially as they are court of appeal justice; they still have one more ladder to climb.
“Judges who are involved in these kinds of things, especially where the Supreme Court had to come out heavily to sanction them, should by now be reticent.”
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