By Chidi Odinkalu
Supreme Courts are places where lawyers and judges regularly encounter one another. On 17 November 2023, one of such encounters occurred, not in the regular halls of Nigeria’s Supreme Court in Abuja but in its Mosque.
There, Abdulaziz Waziri, a
Justice of Appeal wedded Zaynab Bashir, a Judge of Nigeria’s National
Industrial Court. The wedding reception followed thereafter at a well-appointed
venue in up-market Maitama, in Abuja.
Justice Waziri has been nothing if not busy this season. For his duty station in this election petition appeal season, Justice Waziri was stationed in Jos, Plateau State, where the Justices of Appeal, in the state from which the President of the Court of Appeal hails, have been busy re-writing the results of the elections, taking seats from one party and generously handing them to another party on the bases of jurisprudence that can most charitably be described as extraordinarily specious.
But let’s not get ahead of
ourselves. From Jos, His Lordship went to Abuja for his matrimonial rituals at
the Supreme Court. The location and duration of the ensuing honeymoon was,
advisedly, ensconced in discretion.
A mere 25 days after the
wedding, however, the aforesaid Justice Abdulaziz Waziri was listed to deliver
the opening keynote at the Law Week of the Nigerian Bar Association in Yola.
Rumours that the jollities of a richly earned honeymoon would distract His Lordship
from this appearance proved to be admirably unfounded.
Yola is the place where His
Lordship honed his skills in the law and where his judicial career began. The
arrival in power of the All Progressives Congress (APC) has coincided with a
career break-out for His Lordship. In March 2016, Governor Jibrilla Bindow
elected on the platform of the APC swore him in as a judge of the High Court of
Adamawa State. A mere five years later, in June 2021, he became a Justice of
the Court of Appeal following appointment by the party leader, Muhammadu
Buhari.
Regular judicial duties and
election petition season conspired to keep His Lordship away from home. So, the
invitation by the Yola Bar served a healthy purpose. On 12 December, Justice
Waziri arrived Yola in person and went swinging with the gusto of a man whose
virility had been recently tested and proved.
Speaking to the Yola Bar,
Justice Waziri launched into a wanton defence of the jurisprudential
proclivities of the Court of Appeal in the Plateau State election petition
appeals.
He invited participants – in a
manner of speaking – to understand why the judges know better than the voters
who should rule over them and asked them to show greater understanding for the
generosity of the Court of Appeal Bench in overriding the voters of Plateau
State and dutifully handing their mandate to persons other than those whom they
had chosen.
Urging his listeners to “always
stand on the side of the law”, His Lordship panned those belly-aching about the
Court of Appeal, saying that the “critics of the judgment were missing the
point as the (Peoples’ Democracy) Party – whose victories the Court of Appeal
has systematically stolen – had no structure on ground at the point of
presenting their candidates.” He claimed that the “structures” of the party had
been wiped away by a high court decision and that they did not exist for the
purpose of conducting the party congresses that yielded their candidates in the
elections of 2023.
These remarks by a relatively junior Justice of Appeal were considered
sufficiently weighty to make the headlines across all platforms in the country.
As befits the trajectory of a man whose recent life has been rife with
consistent coincidence, the beneficiaries of the seats which he has been busy
handing out as a Justice of Appeal just happen also to be his appointive
benefactors, the APC.
It is impossible to be devoid of
fraternal feeling for a man in mid-life crises battling the exertions of an
unfinished honeymoon. Any effort to address him must afford him the mitigation
that his head may be located elsewhere as an anatomical proposition, and not
just a figure of speech. These extenuating circumstances notwithstanding,
Justice Waziri’s remarks must detain us.
The traditional view is that
judges speak most credibly and authoritatively through their judgments. It is
at best unusual and mostly ill-advised for them to resort to the soapbox or its
diction to rationalize what they do on the Bench. But we are in extraordinary
times in Nigeria. A generation ago, it would have been considered judicial
malpractice for a judge to speak in public about whether or not a political
party has “structures” going into an election because few would think that to
be judicial province.
In this case, the judge did more
than just go out of his substantive province. Jos, the capital of Plateau
State, where the Justices of Appeal have done their thing, is located in
north-central Nigeria. It is a drive of over 520 kilometres from Yola in the
north-east, where His Lordship mounted his judicial soap-box.
But it is not altogether
unwelcome that His Lordship in this case feels called upon to mount a spirited
defence of the detour by the Court of Appeal into the realm of electoral
burglary clothed in the ruse of law. His bid for the judicial soap-box relieves
one of any of the usual constraints invoked when encountering a judicial figure
on the Bench.
The facts are less complicated
than his Lordship sought to portray them. Following the state congresses in
Plateau State in 2022, one Augustine Timkuk sued to challenge the legality of
what transpired. The defendants included the Independent National Electoral
Commission (INEC) and the Peoples’ Democratic Party (PDP).
After failing to set aside the
congresses and the resulting slate of candidates at the High Court, Mr. Timkuk
appealed to the Court of Appeal in appeal number CA/J/300/2022 between
Augustine Timkuk v. INEC and 6 Others. Days before the onset of election season
in 2023, on 11 February 2023, the Court of Appeal sitting in Jos, Plateau State
validated the state congresses and dismissed Mr. Timkuk’s case. There was no
appeal against this decision and no judgment existed prior to the election
nullifying the party congresses or the slate of candidates from them.
Sitting in a post-election
capacity, however, Justice Waziri and his colleagues on a separate panel of the
Court of Appeal have acted with injudicious premeditation, ransacking decisions
of the self-same court of appeal and inventing justifications for things that
endanger the standing of the judicial organ as a deliberative institution
constrained as it ought to be by norms of evidence, precedent, logic, and
institutional self-restraint. They have done worse than infantilise the people
of Plateau State, telling them that they are unfit to choose who represents or
governs them. Instead, they assert in words as in their deeds that they as
Justices of Appeal know best.
The most charitable one can be
about this is to describe it as judicial overreach. Others inclined to be less
charitable may see Plateau State as the site of a criminal judicial
transaction.
Plateau State, the victim of
this perverse transaction is also one of the most chronic atrocities sites in
Nigeria, going back to 1994. Official literature abounds to prove that the
state does not need much provocation to unhinge. The consequences for elective
government as for coexistence are destined to be very corrosive. Justice Waziri
knows this and so must his colleagues on the Court of Appeal.
But there are also precedents
from nearby in case they wish to be reminded. In April 2020, Mali’s
Constitutional Court overturned the results in 31 parliamentary seats won by
the opposition. Its decision to hand these seats over to the ruling party
sparked an uprising that led first to the dissolution of the Constitutional
Court, later followed by the overthrow of the government in a military coup.
Former Nigerian President,
Goodluck Jonathan, mediated that situation unsuccessfully. When Justice Waziri
considers himself in need to some distraction from his honeymoon and from the
peregrinations of an itinerant jurist, he may benefit from paying a visit to
Otuoke for a private seminar on how not repeat the Mali crisis in
Nigeria.
*A lawyer and a teacher, Odinkalu can be reached at chidi.odinkalu@tufts.edu
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