The International Society For Civil Liberties And The Rule Of Law, Intersociety, is worried over legal gimmicks which the said matter has been subjected to, since the 15th day of September 2008, when Mr. Emmanuel Ubah returned to the Supreme Court for the third times. (Pictures show Andi Uba (right) and Emeka Umeagbalasi (left)
Recall that sequel to the June 14, 2007 Judgment of the Supreme Court, which declared the office of the Anambra governor not vacant as at the 29th day of May, 2007, on the ground that governor Peter Obi’s tenure was still running, Mr. Emmanuel Ubah, who contested the governorship election in the non-vacant gubernatorial se
at on the 14th day of April, 2007 and was declared “elected” by the INEC, approached the Supreme Court of Nigeria, via a motion filed on the 31st day of October 2007, urging same to reverse herself.On the 29th day of January, 2008, the Supreme Court knocked out all his grounds of Appeal. He went back to the Court of Appeal on July 15, 2008; from here he got to the present stage. Before his notice of withdrawal, dated the 6th day of May, 2009 and notice of re-enlistment, dated the 8th day of May, 2009, the Supreme Court had resolved on April 23, 2009 to constitute a seven –man full panel to hear the matter on its own merit and to communicate the hearing date to the parties in a later date. Though no reasons have informed the withdrawal and re-enlistment, but legal experts say such things are rountine in prosecution of civil and criminal matters. Our deep concern is the snail-pace nature of the matter, especially a matter that had been decided by the same Apex Court. In handling such important matters, with public interests in limbo, time is of extreme essence.
The implications of Mr.Uba’s judicial quest are so monumental. If it is to be upheld, then Governor Peter’s stay in office, from May 29, 2007 till date, will be a nullity, Dr Chris Ngige’s illegal stay in office from May 29, 2003 to March 15, 2006 will become legitimate and lawful. Others are: The 2003 governorship election in Anambra State was never rigged; Mr. Emmanuel Ubah’s occupation of Anambra gubernatorial seat from May 29, 2007, stands; there will be no staggered electoral calendar for Nigeria; the interpretation of Section 180(2) of the Constitution of Nigeria, 1999 never took place and no fresh tenures for those who reclaimed their stolen mandates, etc.
Though, Mr. Ubah as a citizen has a constitutional right to ask that a decided matter be revisited, but reversing this landmark judicial decision would be catastrophic and amounts to a serious threat to Nigeria’s democracy. By Peter Obi’s case, election riggers who steal people’s mandates, loot and plunder their commonwealth are doomed irreparably. Apart from the real winners being allowed to serve their full terms of office, riggers stand condemned by man, law and posterity.
For instance, while Mr. Peter Obi; Governor of Anambra State is revered as the icon of Nigeria’s democracy and the rule of law, as well as the inventor of staggered electoral calendar in Nigeria, Dr. Chris Ngige has earned an infamous name as Nigeria’s Guinness Book of Record’s Man of Electoral Infamy and the longest serving illegal governor in Nigerian history. As a result, Ngige’s necessity has become Peter Obi’s mother of invention. Having achieved this great height, what remains to be done is for our electoral offences to be criminalized so that those found involved in various categories would be made visitors to our nation’s 227 prisons, in addition to their legally sanctioned abstinence from politics for a decade.
Further more, the continuation of Mr. Uba’s Supreme Court matter, has put a clog in the wheel of INEC’s electoral calendar for Anambra State and this has served as an unholy excuse for same not to give Anambra people a participatory and credible poll in January or February 2010. By the relevant provisions in the INEC Act, Laws of Nigeria, 2004, the 2006 Electoral Act and the 1999 Constitution, INEC ought to have started intensive and extensive civic education, especially in the areas of registration and updating of voters’ register, designation and publication of electoral wards and polling units or booths and their numbers.
Hundreds of thousands of Anambra’s registered and unregistered voters are by this kept in the dark. Unfortunately, none of these processes has been commenced, partly due to the pendency of Mr. Ubah’s case. The second phase of the preparations by the Commission, according to the laws so cited, will be ripe in 150 days (five months) to the election, during which the Commission will release a time-table and other guidelines for the election, which is to be accompanied with intensive and extensive civic education. We urge Anambra People to shun apathy and docility and not to be deterred by the Ubah’s matter, but to prepare for the said poll as soon as the said matter is dispensed with. Politicians of Anambra stock should stop robbing, kidnapping and killing in the name of “politics”. They should garner credible electoral values and engage in issue- based politicking. They should also emulate Mr. Ubah who took his case to the Supreme Court instead of forming and arming armed robbery and kidnapping gangs.
Similarly, we respectfully wish to renew our call upon President Umaru Yar’Adua and the leadership of the Senate to overhaul the leadership of INEC. What remains of INEC’s independence and corporate integrity is gone. Corporate infamy is now hung around its neck. No day passes without the Commission being made a laughing stock. Today, it is Ekiti macabre of shame and the N250 million bribery scandals and tomorrow it will be a nullification of an election conducted by the Commission. INEC now allegedly lobbies electoral judges to “temper justice with mercy”.
Since the Presidency has started the process of reforming legal components of electoral reforms, by causing the Executive-sponsored Bills to be sent to the National Assembly for their passage into law, the administrative aspect, which is less tedious, ought to have led the way. All the twelve National Commissioners and some State Resident Electoral Commissioners of INEC, including Professor Maurice Iwu and Madam Ayoka Adebayo have outstayed their usefulness and they shall be so removed. We also wish to acknowledge a letter from the President of Senate, dated April 8, 2009, with reference number: NASS/S/SP/COS/COMPT/25/1/209, and addressed to Intersociety. It was in response to our earlier letter to him on INEC. We appreciate the Senate President’s sound ethical conduct in this respect and urge appropriate attention to our earlier letter.
Ekiti State Re-run Poll:
It is our sacred view that the Ekiti State re-run poll is a compounded shame on the part of INEC. The last opportunity for the present crop of INEC leadership to redeem their brutally battered image was irredeemably wasted. If Heaven and Purgatory are to be provided for all the senior and clerical personnel of the Commission as an alternative to Hell, none of them, certainly, will see the gate of Purgatory, not to talk of Heaven. And the only alternative available to them outside these two is the hottest place in Hell. The voting exercise in the 63 wards of the ten local government areas, of the State’s 16 local government areas, was like a staff audit in a civil service set up where the ghost workers (dead votes) were made by crook, to outnumber the real workers (real votes), with Ido-osi accounting for 15,939 ghost votes and 3,639 real (live) votes alone. At the end, dead/ghost votes dominated the “winner”’s 111,140 votes and the real (live) votes dominated the “loser”’s 107,017, and the winner is ghost vote!!!
While we commend those who genuinely participated in the said re-run poll, either as voters or monitors, we commend the AC leadership and their Candidate for going back to electoral court so as to trounce the infamy and restore the mandate of the people under the principle of “ Vox Populi Vox Dei”. The President of the Court of Appeal is also called upon to constitute, as a matter of uttermost immediacy, the governorship electoral panel for Ekiti State, in accordance with Section 285 of the Constitution of Nigeria, 1999, so as to enable the genuinely aggrieved parties file their petitions. Going by Mr. Peter Obi’s case, a secured or substantive tenure awaits the AC leadership and their Candidate no matter how long it takes them to get justice. We cannot run away from the destroyers of our collective heritage and commonwealth. We must rebuild as many times as they destroy.
Union of South Africa: South Africa’s Future Is Gloomy with Jacob Zuma’s Presidency
The April 2009 general elections in South Africa, in which the African National Congress, ANC, credibly won 66 percent of the total vote cast, have come and gone, but the tragedy of the said elections was the choice of Mr. Jacob Zuma as the ANC presidential candidate and South Africa’s newly elected president. Though, democracy is beautified when the people’s choice, even if it is a goat, is respected and allowed to stand. But the choice of Mr. Jacob Zuma means that the Union of South Africa and her people have embarked on a suicide mission. South Africa is a consolation gift to the African Continent.
The personality of Mr. Jacob Zuma is nothing to write home about. Apart from the fact that he has no records of formal education, not even primary school, his marital and extra-marital life-style is grossly tainted. Presently, he is said to be living with atleast three wives and he has reportedly divorced many, including the former South African foreign minister, Mrs. Nkhozana Zuma. One of them allegedly committed suicide in 2000. It is also alleged that he has up to eighteen women, both married and divorced.
Between 1999, when he was appointed deputy president to Mr. Thabo Mbeki, to 2005 when he was sacked over charges of corruption, Mr. Zuma had reportedly faced up to 75 count charges, which bordered on felonious offences of corruption, rape and other sexual offences, and abuse of office. Interestingly, the prosecuting authorities had been forced, against their will, to drop all charges against him, saying the criminal charges would never be revived. One of such bribery charges against Mr. Zuma was that he solicited bribes connected to the multi-billion dollar arms deals in the 1990s. His prosecutors alleged that political interference and prosecutorial misconduct hampered their cases against him, despite the strong substance in the said charges.
Mr. Zuma is also accused of injecting moral decadence into the young population of South Africa because of his alleged lust for promiscuity and partying. Apart from the foregoing, South Africa, under Mr. Zuma’s presidency will still grapple with her 1000 aids related deaths per day and one quarter of her population, who are still unemployed. Between the last quarter of 2008 and first quarter of 2009, 208,000 jobs were lost, no thanks to global economic meltdown. South African economy has also comedown, from 221 billion dollars in 2007 to between 122 billion dollars and 150 billion dollars in 2009.
In the areas of human rights and foreign policy, South Africa is steadily loosing her credibility. When she transited from repressive rule to credible majority rule in the 1990s, she adopted a constitution and body of laws that contained some of the strongest affirmations of human rights on African Continent. She became a beacon of hope to those in Africa and elsewhere who continued to endure repression. But that prime legacy has since been threatened by State-sponsored ethnocentric violence and South Africa’s romance with world leading human rights violators, such as China, Iran, Burma, Zimbabwe, etc.
South Africa’s leading roles in the invention of modified “diarchy” (marriage of autocracy and democracy) in Kenya and Zimbabwe is totally unacceptable. It is strange to credible tenets of democracy, good governance and rule of law. As a member of the International Criminal Court and the UNO, her tacit support to Sudanese President, who is wanted by the ICC on seven-count charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity, is very despicable and condemnable. From Sudan, Democratic Republic of Congo, Somalia, to Zimbabwe, South Africa’s roles must be firm, unambiguous, credible, human rights, rule of law and democracy-oriented.
Finally, with the exit of Mr. Travor Manuel, South Africa’s economy engine house, from finance ministry to office of the national planning, and the tainted personality of Mr. Zuma, South Africa may go the way of Zimbabwe, which was an economic giant in the late 1980s and early 1990s, but lost it to political instability, which was accessioned by autocracy, ethnocentrism, egocentrism and visionless leadership. South Africans must rise above independence consciousness to the consciousness of the nation- hood and the nation building. They should transform from “parties and individuals that gave us independence” to “parties and individuals that possess know-how for modern nation building”. The South African Justice system, which is under a serious threat of balkanization and bastardization by her tainted politicians, must watch its back before it becomes too late.
Signed:
Comrade Emeka Umeagbalasi
Chairman
Board of Trustees, Intersociety, Anambra- Nigeria
+234(0)8033601078
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