President Bola Tinubu appealed to Nigerians residing in the diaspora to return home to Nigeria, emphasising the nation’s current state of growth and progress during a presidential town hall meeting in New York.

Speaking at the meeting organised by the Nigerians in Diaspora Commission (NiDCOM) during the 78th session of the UN General Assembly, Tinubu highlighted the need for a change in mindset to grasp the abundant business opportunities available in Nigeria.

“I want to give you a measure that will resonate with you. I was once a diaspora. What you have been through, I have been through. A change of mindset is necessary.

“Take it this night that Nigeria is home for business opportunities.

“Also, anywhere you stay, there is always going to be an opportunity, and in everything you do, there is always going to be an opportunity if you know how to search and put your mind into it,’’ he said.

The President expressed pride in the achievements of Nigerians excelling in various fields abroad, urging them to contribute to Nigeria’s development.

He stressed the abundant opportunities in Nigeria and encouraged diaspora Nigerians to make a positive impact.

“You are lucky to be among those who are celebrated for good manners and behaviour and are operating in an acceptable manner.

“I’m very proud of you; I have also been a source of inspiration, determination, commitment, and perseverance, and that is all you need to pull through.

“But we need you back home; Nigeria has arrived; forget the frustration of the previous year’s leadership,’’ he said.

Tinubu praised efforts targeting out-of-school children, healthcare programmes, and poverty eradication, asserting that Nigeria is a blessed country.

The judge of the United States District Court for the Northern District, Jeffrey Gilbert, on Tuesday, disclosed reasons he ordered Chicago State University to release President Bola Tinubu academic certificates to Nigerian opposition leader, Atiku Abubakar.

The judge said the need to confirm the genuineness or otherwise of the certificate Tinubu submitted to the Independent National Electoral Commission outweighed Tinubu’s personal concerns over its consequences.

Atiku Abubakar of the People Democratic Party (PDP) had sought a subpoena to obtain Tinubu’s academic records following several inconsistencies that characterised the submissions Tinubu certified under oath to the Nigerian electoral office.

Tinubu had fought to have his records blocked and inaccessible to Atiku, who argued he applied for the subpoena directing discovery of his credentials from Chicago State University (CSU) in order to seek Tinubu’s nullification at Nigeria’s Supreme Court.

Tinubu said granting his opponent access to his records would infringe on his privacy rights under Family Educational and Privacy Rights Act (FERPA), a U.S. law that protects academic records of students.

But Judge Gilbert, in his ruling on September 19, said that Tinubu weakened his education privacy rights when he submitted a contentious certificate to run for office in 2022.

He also added that the opposition candidate’s election petition, in which the records he sought would be used, far outweighed Tinubu’s privacy interest, because he himself exposed his records to public scrutiny by submitting a controversial diploma to INEC, knowing the political stakes of other contenders.

Gilbert said FERPA permitted records disclosure “if it is necessary to comply with a lawfully issued subpoena or judicial order.”

“Here, the court finds that applicant’s interest in obtaining Intervenor’s records from CSU outweighs intervenor’s privacy rights because intervenor put his diploma at issue by submitting it to the INEC.”

“There is, however, a ‘significantly heavier burden’ on the party requesting educational records to show that the interest in obtaining the records outweighs the privacy interest of the student,” the court ruled.

The judge said Abubakar satisfied the burden and met the criteria for Section 1782, the statute that allows the U.S. to turn over records “for use in a proceeding before a foreign tribunal.”

Gilbert ordered CSU to provide the former vice-president with all the requested records within two days.

“For all of the reasons discussed above, Atiku Abubakar’s application pursuant to 28 U.S.C. § 1782 for an order directing discovery from Chicago State University for use in a foreign proceeding [ECF No. 1] is granted,” Mr Gilbert ruled. “Respondent CSU shall produce all relevant and non-privileged documents in response to requests for production Nos. 1 through 4 (as narrowed by the court) in applicant subpoena within two days of the entry of this memorandum opinion and order.”

Thought leader Kel Armstrong Amobi, popularly known as KAA on social media, has exposed the inner workings of witch doctors who demand human sacrifices from internet fraudsters (‘Yahoo’ boys/girls) seeking power and riches.

He stressed that human sacrifices are not for any god to make people wealthy, but purely human organ-harvesting ventures.

He also stressed that many witch doctors are becoming rich not because of the money Yahoo people and the like pay them, but because of the sales of human organs.

“You believe that once you take a member of your family, friend, or an unsuspecting stranger to a witch doctor, he will sacrifice the person and the gods will go to the Central Bank of Nigeria and start printing money for you with unique serial numbers and the CBN governor’s signature on them?” he asked.

KAA revealed that most Yahoo people either do not know that they are enabling black-market, human-organ trafficking or are aware but will not tell the truth.

He explained that the vital organs of those they kill are usually missing not because the gods like such organs, but because the witch doctors sell the organs to the highest bidders in the black market.

KAA noted that either the perpetrators of this crime are taught how to harvest human organs or how to defraud people.

He stated that the money-ritual scenes many Nigerians watch in Nollywood movies do not apply to real-life situations

No one can replace Papa Anthony Enahoro and Awo but we can inculcate their ideas, their beliefs, their feelings, their irrevocable commitment, to humanity, to human progress and the development of our country”.

This was Bola Tinubu celebrating chiefs Anthony Enahoro and Obafemi Awolowo, as   celebrated Nigerian visionaries who left their footprint in the sand of time. They served as role models and guiding star during his war with Obasanjo and the predatory buccaneers that held the old southwest hostage. Tinubu celebrated his victory over Obasanjo with the return the old West from Edo to Lagos to its old glory of a pacesetter administered in the main by men of ideas who understand that their own wellbeing is contingent on the wellbeing of their neighbours.

Tinubu incidentally was not one of those that Pa Awo and Enahoro heavily invested on to carry on the battle. But his principled stand on divisive issues of Nigerian politics such as fiscal federalism, devolution of power, revenue allocation, credible census exercise, free and fair election naturally positioned him as the one to continue his father’s unfinished battle. Today, his illustrious fathers who in spite of their heroic efforts, could not spread their epistle to the critical segments of Nigerian society, will be proud of Tinubu’s exploits from their graves for winning over many of the  descendant of those who once persecuted them for spreading the light. The struggle for liberation from colonial rule and institutionalization of an egalitarian society might have sounded attractive; most northern leaders of the period were probably put off by Awo, Enahoro and their other members’ abrasiveness.

Thus Enahoro’s March 31, 1953 motion for independence in 1956 left a permanent scar between the west and the north. Professor Banji Akintoye, not too long ago told a story of how a prominent northern leader accused the Yoruba of arrogance for trying to preach the epistle of ‘free education’ to the northern masses. “Who by the way told the Yoruba that the north wanted free education?”, the northern leader was quoted as asking not without a touch of some cynicism. Incitement of northern masses by their leaders against Akintola, the chief evangelist of free education to Kano led to the 1953 Kano riot with about 46 people dead. In Sokoto, Awo’s helicopter would not be allowed to land. A Sokoto convert who cleared his groundnut farm where Awo’s helicopter eventually landed paid the supreme price. Hawking his fathers’ same old wares during the 2023 election, Tinubu secured the bulk of the 2.7m votes that came from the northwest. The epistle was the same. What was different was Tinubu’s marketing skill.

The Old West evangelists had underestimated the role of culture. They had thought the value of free education and other social policies will be so self-evident to be resisted by the north which they also believe will have no choice but embrace federalism because of the heterogeneity of the north where some state with 24 LGAs speak as many as 48 languages. They forgot that free education succeeded in the West because it is part of their culture and federalism because by nature, Yoruba are federalists.

In spite of Tinubu’s gains in the north, he lost the critical voice of the Igbo without which Nigeria can make progress. History tells us that Nigeria is doomed without the critical voice of the Igbo. It was obvious from the outcome of 1959 election that the three dominant groups, Hausa/Fulani, Igbo and Yoruba have diametrically opposing world views. We can today see the hypocrisy in Dr. Azikiwe “with this giant step, Nigeria is no more a geographical expression” claim during the independence night cross-over celebration  at the Tafawa Balewa square on independence day in 1960. It was obvious by 1963 that “Nigeria was not a geographical expression’ only when the Igbo is inside.

Igbo response to the loss of influence during the 1964 constitutional confrontation between Zik and Balewa was no less duplicitous just as the method of taking control in January 1966 was disingenuous. And very little has changed in Igbo strategy during their reaction to PDP betrayal in 2023. It is perhaps only Igbo that would believe Obi their adopted candidate would win Nigerian presidency by fighting his former benefactors while also waging an open war against the west and its candidate.

 But if we need one more evidence that Nigeria is still a geographical expression, it was Igbo’s violent opposition to Tinubu’s candidacy in the 2023 election and continued questioning of his legitimacy by majority of Igbo in spite of judiciary’s verdict.

Tinubu was roundly rejected in the east which gave Obi 95% of their to vote to Obi whose support spread among all segment of Igbo society, from the unquestioning ‘Obidients’, to elder-statesmen like Chukwuemeka Ezeife, accomplished intellectuals like Prof Pat Utomi who stepped down for him as Labour’s presidential candidate, to Igbo world acclaimed writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Except for the Igbo, most Nigerians understand why Obi couldn’t have won an election in which his party fractured into three on the eve of election in which ethnic and religious sentiments were placed in the front burner by major actors. 

Igbo leaders have generally owned up to their control of commerce in the country. And since in commerce, profit is the driving force, cutting corners is a model. And this may include importation of substandard manufactured goods which has in recent years led to the collapse of our pharmaceutical, ceramics, automobile accessories, textile, batteries, electronics or their relocation outside the country. That this has become a threat to our survival as a nation underscore the need for us to ensure Igbo remains inside.

The challenge before Tinubu is politics. It is not running abroad to seek foreign investors who at the end will be frustrated out of forced to relocate to Ghana by those who control commerce. And Tinubu’s job has been well cut out for him since we know what the Igbo want is a wholesale importation of everything even when they are given license to manufacture locally as was the case with a company that, according to Prof. Mojisola Adeyeye, the Director General of the National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC), “has not manufactured one bar of the soap in Nigeria since the its registration in 2013”. Instead the banned soap ‘was imported seven times in 2021 alone and each consignment is not less than three containers with 4,500 cartons of the soap’.

Instead of playing the ostrich, it is time to return to restructuring. Nnewi can become Dubai of Nigeria and destination for all those who want substandard imported goods including medicines. That will save those who control commerce the trouble of having to ask their customers for their preference between fake and original. With the pioneering work of Aminu Masari, Nasir el-Rufai and Abdullahi Ganduje, northwest naturally becomes the zone for animal husbandry. Of course the Middle Belt will remain the food basket of Nigeria. President Tinubu only needs a fraction of billions of naira frittered away under Buhari on fighting herdsmen sponsored and armed by those who hide under his government to serve other tendencies.

Edo Governor Godwin Obaseki has allocated the office of his Deputy, Comrade Philip Shaibu, in Government House, Benin to Alaghodaro as  secretariat. 

This is contrary to Obaseki’s claim of renovating the one-storey building.

Alaghodaro, a Benin catch phrase meaning progress or moving forward, is an annual investment drive by Edo State Government, which is Obaseki’s initiative.  

In a leaked memo on Thursday dated September 18, 2023, Edo Governor asked the Secretary to the State Government (SSG), Osarodion Ogie, to “immediately” allocate the deputy governor’s office building to the trustees of Alaghodaro summit as their  Secretariat.  

The chairman of Alaghodaro, through its secretary, had written to Obaseki for a permanent secretariat building to aid planning and logistics for the 2023 summit holding in the second week of November. 

According to Edo Governor ‘s leaked memo, the office space closest to the venue of the summit, the New Festival Hall of Government House, which until few days ago, was occupied by Shaibu, should be allocated to the board of trustees of the Alaghodaro summit, expected to attract potential investors from different parts of Nigeria. 

 Shaibu was pushed out of Government House, and allocated new office at No. 7, Dennis Osadebey Avenue, GRA, Benin with a bold inscription “Office of the Deputy Governor, No. 7, Dennis Osadebey Avenue, GRA, Benin City,” at a location not far from the Government House.

Conspicuously at the entrance of the one-storey building is an unveiled inauguration plaque,with this inscription: “Edo State Public Procurement Agency – This building was commissioned by His Excellency, The Comrade Governor, Adams Aliu Oshiomhole, MNI, OON, Edo State Governor, on Tuesday, 16th December, 2014.”

Shaibu’s aides and civil servants attached to his office moved two weeks ago in line with the directive of Edo Head of Service, Anthony Okungbowa.

On September 5, Shaibu withdrew his anti-impeachment suit with reference number: FHC/ABJ/CS/1027/2023 but remains determined to succeed Obaseki on November 12, 2024. 

[Nation]

India has suspended visa services for Canadian citizens, the country’s visa service provider, BLS International, said on Thursday on its website.

The company cited a notice from the Indian mission.

The announcement came amid a diplomatic tussle between the two countries, where Ottawa accused New Delhi of involvement in the killing of a Sikh leader in Canada. 

[Vanguard]

Alan Louis Charles Bullock (1912-2004) was one of the foremost British historians. His book, Hitler: A Study in Tyranny”, caught the attention of the world for its exhaustiveness and pondering on the meaning of evil.  He said: “If evil means anything in this world, it means the corruption of people to behave in an inhuman way.” He would know. He was reported seeing the most obvious evidence of evil in the Nazi death camps. Of course, since Nazi days, the world has witnessed comparative horrors even though Nuremberg trials were intended to prevent subsequent such mass killings. Hate and its manifestation was let lose in some other places in what was to be known, for example, as Bosnian Serb massacre or the genocide in Rwanda. Can we easily forget 9/11 which anniversary was marked only last week suffused with sad and terrifying memories of the attack on the World Trade Towers in New York by Osama Bin Laden’s minions? The establishment of the United Nations Organization today known simply as the United Nations (UN), succeeding the League of Nations, followed to forge understanding among nations another attempt to prevent future holocaust. The UN charter, therefore, sets out to maintain international peace and security; to protect human rights; deliver humanitarian aid; and support sustainable development and Climate Action. How far has the UN gone in achieving these laudable objectives, especially in checking evil and what would have happened if the UN had not existed? The 193-member states are having the yearly meeting at present in New York during which speeches are being made and voluminous papers are ritually presented.

How far we human beings and organizations, global or regional, have gone in proving right Prophet Isaiah’s prediction and warning unwarranted remains to be seen. The great prophet had said: “Take counsel together and it shall come to nought; speak the word, and it shall not stand: For God is with us.” God being referred to in the prophecy is the Holy Spirit, the Will of God and Whose Name is Imanuel. All in Christendom are quick to tell us that we are in the Age of the Holy Spirit; the proverbial End-Time and He is to appear when mankind has reached its wit’s end. We now know through the enlightenment of these times that the signs of His time comprise perplexities, distrust and conferences that lead to nowhere. In his exceedingly invaluable work, A Gate Opens, Herbert Vollmann says: “It is the great time of perplexity, in which one conference follows another, when distrust is everywhere, unrest and great uneasiness, when hopeless confusion spreads ever more.” He goes on: “…it is a time when it becomes physically manifest that nothing that is not resolved and carried out according to the Will of God can last; all else must perish, ‘it must come to nought.’”

Horrors of death are in all parts of the world. Only on Tuesday, a family of four was shot dead in their home in Illinois. Between our own South East and Middle Belt, 38 soldiers were killed in less than a month. The devastations resulting from the Ukraine- Russian war and the war in Sudan continue. Imagine it: There have been 174 school shootings with injuries in the United States since 2018; 15 with injuries or deaths last year, the most gruesome since Education Week publication began tracking the incidents since 2018. The statistics was 35 in 2021; 10 in 2020; 24 each in 2019 and 2018. Permissiveness is on the rise as well. A dress code has just been introduced in the United States Senate which allows whoever among the Senators to wear shorts, jeans and shirt on the floor of the Senate. Senator Tommy Tuberville, a former football coach, commenting said: “It bothers me big time. You get people walking around in shorts; that doesn’t fly with me.” A lady Senator, Shelly More from West Virginia called the relaxed rules “terrible.” Another lady Senator mocking the Republicans that control the Upper Chamber on the rule, said: “I plan to wear a bikini.”

Many a man can’t but wonder: Where does evil come from? The question arises from a conclusion borne out of conviction that evil does exist. Lance Morrow, the distinguished journalist and columnist of Time Magazine spent some time reflecting on the nature of evil and to what end is it perpetrated. In what was captioned, “Evil: An Investigation,” he said of Bosnia which he visited in 1992,   “… it struck me at that time as an extremely evil place. It struck me as an atmosphere of evil, evil has descended upon this place. And I had a palpable sense that people were doing terrible things.” In one of his essays on Evil, he asks: “Is there more evil now, or less evil than it was five years ago, or five centuries ago?”

Evil is certainly on the rise, and it will go on escalating and soulless until it burns itself out, until its minions exterminate themselves. Man has always wondered about where evil comes from. But reflected as he has on the question, the answer seems ever elusive. Some believe that, like good, evil is a Creation work without which life on earth would be unchallenging, drab and monstrous. They equate both poles of the good-evil continuum with the day-night counterpoise. Some others assume that evil came into the world with the fall of Lucifer, a once wondrous beauty to behold, who was actually charged with the supervision of the flowering of man in this world, but who went his way and dragged a great many weaklings to the murky swamps. Very few, it would appear, seek the roots of a solution in man and the exercise of his free will, that inalienable attribute of his spiritual nature which obliges him to live the way he wishes, a choice for which he bears personal responsibility — however, an attribute without which he will not be man.

Good portends beauty, luminousity and lightness, but evil scum, darkness and heaviness. The fact that each goes by a different name suggests different ancestry. For  the name expresses the nature and essence of the bearer. Good, therefore, cannot give rise to evil nor can evil come out of good as is assumed in some circles, since like begets like or, put differently birds of the same feather flock together.

Creation is a work, which like all works, natural or man-made, is not without a purpose. The Author of the Creation work stands outside His work as an artist outside his carving or painting. But His work bears His Will, in this case to provide an opportunity for the flowering of the human of the human species. After all, does a seed germinate and come to flower which is not immersed in the soil under the right conditions of temperature, moisture, air and nutrients? Creation lives, sustained by radiation connections with its Author. In these connections lie mediated powers which the growing seed grains may tap for their strengthening. The human spirit seed grain stood pure in the beginning, using this pure power aright and reaping bountiful beautiful harvests in the Law which obliges reciprocal experiencing in the excise of the free will. But that was before. Due to various reasons, the knowledge of how to tap aright was lost and consequently his harvest like sowing turned evil.
That knowledge of how to tap aright was simultaneously lost  with the eclipsing of the knowledge of Creation which arose from the Fall of Man. Man fell when he cut off himself from all help with self-inflicted damage to his pathfinder. Man, who as his language admonishes him, is not his body. Man whose body is his tool is a spirit. The body is the tool or vehicle of the spirit and the spirit manifests through the body. It was willed that it affects the body through powerful radiations, impressed through the blood system on the hind brain from the connecting point with the body at the solar plexus. The hind brain is the spiritually receptive part of the brains. It receives messages in pictorial form and passes them on to the frontal brain or the seat of the intellect, as I explained last week. The frontal brain decodes and makes earthly meaning out of the pictures such as dreams. The frontal brain draws from its environment in reverse manner. Man is in a state of balance when both parts of the brains are functional. When as is the case today, one is over-cultivated at the expense of the other, the equilibrium is lost and man is cut off from promptings, guidance or information from higher Light Realms. The spirit is trapped in materiality which negates the purpose of his sojourn on earth — a spiritualized and complete man, the man who, according to higher knowledge, “has furthering and ennobling effect on the whole Gross Material Creation.” That is the secret of the seemingly inexplicated material suffocation confronting us human beings today. With severance from help, man begins to reason upside down which may be expressed eloquently and for which he invites applause, but is empty, lacking in upbuilding substance.

The fall of man happened when the frontal and back parts of his brains developed disproportionately, the frontal but more known as big brain bigger from overuse, the back or small brain atrophied from little or no use. He thereby went ‘out of balance’.  Nature loves symmetry balance. We do not speak of big eye and a small eye, a big arm and a small one. Likewise, a time there was when both parts of the brain were of equal size. A reminder of that time plays back even today at a definite stage in the development of the forming body in the womb which growth rapidly traverses in nine or so months all epochs of human history. In a state of mental balance, the inhabitant of the body intuitively draws higher and noble features from connections with his high origin. It can be seen from the foregoing that to trace the origin of evil, we must permit ourselves knowledge of other correlation of life. When a person does good, thinks aright to benefit others, his goodness is reinforced by rays from luminous realms in On High. The author of goodness thus becomes strengthened in goodness, happy, unfettered by pressure, and joyous and full of warmth. But an impure thought brings deposit on the soul, casts shadows and darkness around it. The thought is strengthened through attraction from similarly unworthy conduct by others. The author, connected by radiation threads, is linked with his dark thoughts. The expanded shadows envelop him, and increase with every unworthy act. And a time comes when the soul becomes dark such that it is cut off from help and enlightenment. He is completely on his own, impervious to correction, ennobling values dead to virtues. With narrowed horizon, he becomes callous, vicious, uncaring, unfeeling, calculating and cruel. Wrong doing becomes a propensity and evil. The origin of evil thus remains with man himself who uses the neutral power streaming from On High out of self-will, to do evil and produces evil forms and correspondent ugly forms for himself in the beyond. Envy for instance produces the form of a snake as his garment with his human face impressed on the figure. For many the figures are unbelievably weird. And so the Lord, Jesus Christ, said: “It is that which cometh out of the man that defileth the man. For from within, out of the heart of men proceed evil thoughts…”

When man became dark, he became thereby a tool of Lucifer whose self-will brought about his downfall. Evil is alien to Light Realms, and totally strange to the Creator Who is an embodiment of goodness and purity and from Whom all virtues flow down to this earth. There are, therefore, no two powers, but one, which is why goodness always overcomes evil and Light triumphs over Darkness. What has made evil to be widespread is that thoughts of hate, murder, lust, avarice, debauchery, and envy to mention but a few pervade the world. Such is the conduct of a majority of mankind that he has made his world homogenous with the Dark World, called nether region more widely referred to as hell where aberrations are the order of the day. A bridge has been built down there.

As revealed in higher knowledge available on earth today, the consequences are that more than 50 percent of human beings on earth at present do not belong here. And that is talking in general terms. In many places we can reckon with more than 80 per cent. In the present time there is an awakening through the pressure of the Light on all that is dead, or in slumber such that the aberrations are animated. The higher the degree of the animatedness the higher the rate of evil, in acceleration and intensification, while the good soars, floating protectively and as if in an impenetrable armour from minions of Darkness and their arrows of evil doing. Once the majority of mankind change to doing good, concerned with what is honourable and noble, the societies will change in reciprocity, gradually at first but open afterwards, with all dross gone, in a flourish of beauty and splendour. In the words of Goethe: “He, who desires good, should first of all be good.”

In a bid to prevent the looming indefinite strike, minister of labour and employment, Simon Lalong, has expressed optimism that the issues at stake would be resolved following a crucial meeting with Vice President Kasshim Shettima.

Speaking to State House correspondents after the meeting yesterday, Lalong emphasised the government’s commitment to the welfare and prosperity of Nigerian workers.

He stated, “We have fully spent time with the Nigerian labour, and the posture of the president too is towards the welfare and prosperity for workers. We have no doubt.”

When questioned about the strike threat by the labour unions, Lalong remained reassuring, saying, “Don’t worry about that. That’s why I said it’s a friendly engagement we are doing with them. We don’t have any fears about some of the things they put forward and also the suggestions and the package of the federal government.”

On his part, the secretary to the government of the federation (SGF), George Akume, expressed confidence that labour leaders are committed to the nation’s welfare and are unlikely to resort to a strike action.

Akume emphasised the government’s determination to improve the standard of living for all Nigerians and create prosperity.

He stated, “Labour leaders are very patriotic Nigerians, and we want to believe correctly that nobody will want to cause a strike. It’s not in the interest of the workers; it’s not in the interest of anybody.”

Akume highlighted the government’s ongoing efforts to address the nation’s challenges.

He pointed out that the current government came into power on May 29th and has a tenure of four years, indicating that substantial changes cannot be expected overnight.

It’s not often that you meet Supreme Court justices, serving or retired. I first met retired Justice Sunday Akinola Akintan casually at a reception in Abuja, for my friend and radical lawyer, Yinka Olumide-Fusika, who had been admitted to the inner bar. Then, we met again about one year later, this time, through his book.

Years after his retirement from the Supreme Court in 2008, Justice Akintan wrote a book, entitled, “Reminiscences: My Journey Through Life,” which Olumide-Fusika, SAN, asked me to review. What struck me was one of Akintan’s motivations for writing the book. It was an answer to T.O.S Benson’s advice not to be buried without writing a book, which would be a waste of a life’s worth of library. 

If his lordship decided to write just to remember the road he travelled and to share his odyssey, it would still have been a good book. But it was even better because in a profession where the burden of office elevates discretion almost to the oeuvre of a cult, his desire to shed light is a valuable gift. 

There are a couple of rare insights in the book. One of them, which has assumed significant monstrosity over the years, is how the judiciary could not see that getting more and more involved in deciding electoral outcomes would drag it in the mud. 

Or maybe the judiciary saw it but decided, with a helping hand from the inner bar, to take Oscar Wilde’s advice to overcome the problem by yielding to it. And now, it’s beyond entanglement; the Bench is enmeshed!

Over 10 hours of studiously reading a judgment which five judges of the Court of Appeal must have thought was their utmost to deliver justice still left behind a trail of disenchantment, suspicion and criticisms. Not a few, rather sadly and regrettably, still believe it was the judicial equivalent of a grudge match.

As it was…

The judgment of the Presidential Election Petition Tribunal (PEPT) last week in the case involving the presidential candidates of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Atiku Abubakar; Peter Obi of the Labour Party (LP); and the Allied Peoples Movement (APM) in which the panel dismissed the petitions against the February 25 election of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, has once again put the judiciary in the spotlight.

In the midst of the outrage that followed the judgment, especially among the supporters of Abubakar and Obi, I turned, once again, to Justice Akintan’s book for help to find my way through the maelstrom. And he should know. He’s seen election petitions since 1979.

It’s a measure of how we have learnt to forget that the account of the retired justice of the Supreme Court of what happened 20 years ago reads like excerpts from today’s newspapers. If we had paid any heed then, it’s unlikely that the country would be in a place today where the outcome of virtually every election depends not on who voters choose at the ballot, but on who the courts decide.

In Reminiscences, Akintan writes that one of the two most significant things that happened to him when he returned to the Port Harcourt division on a rare second tour of duty as Presiding Judge of the Court of Appeal, was dealing with matters arising from the 2003 general elections. 

There was something about the 2003 election that set his hair on edge and raked his conscience over the coals of the sacred pledge he had made to himself and his family at the beginning of his career not to stain his name. Post-election litigations up and down the country were fierce and bitter. 

But the one between ANPP’s presidential candidate Muhammadu Buhari and candidate of the PDP, Olusegun Obasanjo, after the 2003 election was so bitter and so fierce that Buhari called for nationwide protests, because he said the judiciary had been compromised.

Clear, present danger

That was only a foreshadow of what was to come. As the years went by the judiciary came under increasing strain. The stakes, for politicians, got even higher. “They exposed the judges and the entire staff of the judiciary to contacts with the politicians,” Akintan writes, “with the attendant possibility of exposing them to corruption.” What was then a possibility is now a consuming danger.

Akintan was assigned 52 petitions in Port Harcourt alone. On top of that, the President of the Court of Appeal told him he had to go to Jos for eight pending governorship election petitions, which the president of the court obviously needed a trustworthy judge to handle.

To avoid contact with litigants and their lawyers, never mind the felicity of some determined folks even thinking of sending him Sallah ram directly or by proxy as we heard in a recent case in Kano, Akintan moved his base from Port Harcourt to his home town, Idanre, Ondo State.

In spite of the severe scarcity of petrol at the time, it was from Idanre that he commuted weekly to Jos through Abuja. Even in Jos, he still could not trust his driver would not be used to get him.

“Once we arrived in the court in Jos,” he recalls, “I used to collect the car ignition key from my driver to ensure there was no breach of the car being taken into town for any reason.”

According to Akintan, by the time he retired from the Supreme Court in 2008, the system had almost been overwhelmed with politicians working hand-in-gloves with lawyers to suborn elections. Trust and confidence had become casualties.

“The position grew so wild after the 2015 elections,” he writes, “that the number of election petitions far outstripped all other cases filed in all the courts in the country. Many of the senior lawyers who had cornered the very lucrative briefs from the election petitions amassed stupendous wealth.” 

Unfortunately, and in spite of the valiant efforts by a few conscientious judges still on the Bench, the cloud of suspicion has, regrettably, thickened. 

Abuja special status

Apart from Akintan’s personal decision to be different, there was something else in Reminiscences that caught my attention: the judgment in Joseph Ona & another V. Diga Romani Atenda (2000), 5 NWLR (Pt. 656) 244 in which he played a leading role. This judgment by the Court of Appeal, in my view, addressed one of the vexatious points in Obi’s petition that a candidate must have 25 percent of the votes cast in Abuja or else cannot be declared validly elected. 

Until I read the summary judgment in the book, I was under the impression that Abuja residents had two heads; that apart from having a special political status, the dichotomy between “settlers” and “indigenes” was also real.

But in the judgment in the case under reference – a case of trespass, harassment, humiliation and defamation in a land dispute – which was, in fact, referred from the High Court to the Court of Appeal for determination, the court made it clear residents of the Federal Capital Territory are by no means special.

In the words of Akintan, “It is (therefore) totally illegal for any of them to claim any special right over any other Nigerian occupier of the territory.”

Conclusion of the matter

If there is no dichotomy in the status of residents, and they have no exclusive proprietary right over and above citizens anywhere in the country, how can they claim a casting vote that holds the country to ransom at elections? It would be interesting to see how the Supreme Court answers this and other questions that would come before it in the Abubakar-Obi appeal. 

What I hear former Supreme Court Justice Akintan say, clearly in Reminiscences, is that the fewer court-imposed candidates we have – and one might add, the less crooked the political parties, the election management body and the media – the better for the electoral system and the judiciary.

The People’s Democratic Party presidential candidate, Atiku Abubakar, has asked the Supreme Court to hold that the judgment of the Presidential Election Petitions Court dismissing his petition against the election of President Bola Tinubu was allegedly coated with disparaging words and bias against his person.

Atiku said expressions against his petition, such as “clever by half,” amount to a violation of his right to a fair hearing and a grave miscarriage of justice.

The five-man panel of the PEPC led by Justice Haruna Tsammani had, in a unanimous decision about 15 days ago, faulted Atiku’s legal team for failing to provide credible evidence showing that he won the February 25 presidential election with a majority of lawful votes cast.

But Atiku’s legal team, led by Chris Uche, SAN, filed 35 grounds of appeal at the Supreme Court.

In his 34th ground of appeal, Uche contended that the choice of words and expressions by the lower court shows the lower court’s contempt and disdain for the appellants.

Uche maintained that the lower court failed to use civil, modest, moderate, and temperate language that is befitting of the exalted position of the court in line with the Revised Code for Judicial Officers of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, promulgated by the National Judicial Council.

He argued that coming to court was Atiku’s right, and the PEPC was not expected to make light of it through disparaging words.

He called for the setting aside of the PEPC judgement on the grounds of bias, among other reasons.

“While discountenancing the arguments and contentions of the Appellants, the lower Court in the Court’s judgment used expressions such as ‘ludicrous’ (page 721 of the judgment), ‘clever by half’ (page 557 of the judgment), ‘dishonourable practice’ (page 507 of the judgment), ‘smuggle’ (page 557), ‘fallacious’ (page 721 of the judgment); ‘foul play’ (page 560 of the judgment),’cross the line of misconception’ (page 644 of the judgment); ‘collect evidence from the market (page 765 of the judgment); those who are not used to reading preambles’ (page 726 of the judgment);”hollowness in the argument of the Petitioners” (page 727 of the judgment); etc.

“The use of the said words and expressions substantially affected the lower court’s consideration of the Appellants’ case, peremptorily striking out their witness statements on oath, their exhibits, their pleadings, and discountenancing the evidence of their witnesses, and thus occasioned a grave miscarriage of justice,” Atiku’s team submitted.