21 Jan 2006 |
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Wherever His Excellency Senator Rashidi Ladoja may be, he must be rolling dollops of amala, and throwing same into his mouth with great relish and excitement. If he had completed his tenure as Governor of Oyo state peacefully, without the coup that was hatched and executed against him by General Lamidi Adedibu and his army of thugs, Ladoja would have left office as a great unknown. His right place in the public diary of performance in public office would have been in the footnotes. But today, Ladoja has become a hero of sorts. He is now the symbol and the rallying point for conscientious objection by civil society to the odious manipulation of the law by a group of lawmakers, and their sponsors and collaborators. In the past week, Ladoja's name has been in the front page of media reports. He is being defended by the Nigerian Bar Association, the Body of Senior Advocates of Nigeria, the West African Bar Association, the Nigeria Labour Congress, the Central Council of Ibadan Indigenes, the National Union of Road Transport Workers (NURTW), the House of Representatives, the Campaign for Democracy, as well as Professor Wole Soyinka, - in his personal capacity as an international statesman and as leader of a Coalition of Civil Society groups which will tomorrow take over the streets of Ibadan to raise the people's voice in protest against the criminal conduct of the Oyo State House of Assembly in purporting to have removed a sitting Governor contrary to the law and all known rules of decorum. If Ladoja were to step out of his home today or any time in the future, he would have stories to tell and an audience to listen to him. By organising a coup against him, General Lamidi Adedibu wanted to teach Ladoja a lesson; he wanted to show as he told one newspaper, that "he is the man on the ground in Ibadan". In a country where power means everything in the public arena, the orisa Molete wanted to demonstrate to all and sundry that he is a powerful man. But this Godfather has shot himself in the foot. He needs to do a content analysis of the media coverage of what he and his thugs have done in Ibadan. He will discover matter-of-factly that he has lost so much in seemingly winning his battle against Ladoja. He has cast himself unwittingly in the mould of a brigand, a villain, a self-seeking power-monger, political contractor, and crude party apparatchik. Newspapers and broadcast stations have given him much space because let's face it, Lamidi Adedibu is a good copy. He sells newspapers. Each time he opens his mouth, he infuriates decent people and says such scandalous things that offer the reader much insight into the deracinated nature of Nigerian politics. Last week, for example, he had boasted in one interview that Tokyo, one of his henchmen who is standing trial for murder will be released from prison custody on Friday, January 20. Tokyo and others were indeed taken to court, but thank God, the judge did not release them! In another interview with The Sun yesterday, General Adedibu also boasted that his Personal Assistant must be made the next Deputy Governor of Oyo state, and that no one could have prevented the coup against Ladoja, not even the President "who knelt down for me more than six times". We must thank Adedibu for this piece of information. Now we know that there are some people in this country before whom President Obasanjo kneels down! All things considered, Adedibu has done much damage to his own cause. The effect is that Ladoja can safely use him henceforth as the alibi for whatever failures he may have recorded as the Governor of Oyo state. Students of the sociology of Nigerian politics should file this away as an example of the limitations of the powers of a Godfather. As for Adedibu, he may have to do a new, updated version of his political memoir, What I Saw in the Politics of Ibadanland, to include the details of how he turned Rashidi Ladoja into a man of history by default. But Rashidi Ladoja must develop the right perspective in this matter. The emerging struggle is not about him as a person. Professor Wole Soyinka is not leading civil society back to the trenches because he likes Ladoja's face. Femi Falana, Bayo Ojo and members of the body of SANs, NBA, NLC, WABA and CCII are not protesting because they think Ladoja is such a fantastic fellow whose position should be protected. Ladoja can eat as much amala as he wants and sweat out his excitement. But the matter is no longer about him. He may not return to office as Governor, but Nigeria would have gained something more important from this crisis. The first major gain is the renaissance of civil society. In the past six years, civil society gave the Obasanjo government, the ruling Peoples Democratic Party and politicians too much latitude. Because the people wanted democracy to survive by all means, they soon came to accept the manner in which the politicians turned democracy into a form of blackmail. The people were willing to give democracy a chance but Obasanjo and co were only interested in the use of power. The crisis in Ibadan has now given the people an opportunity to say "No!, No!, and No!". Ibadan has become the test ground for the extent to which the people can tolerate executive recklessness. Civil society must refuse to be intimidated. The protest against the manner of Ladoja's impeachment is a protest against tyranny. It is a vote against President Obasanjo and the PDP. It is a rejection of the politics of "thugfatherism". What now can Adedibu do? He may have removed Ladoja from office, but he and his sponsors have lost the moral high ground. The pervasive opinion is that the public space cannot be left to Adedibu and his thugs. When such persons are allowed to dictate the pace of public affairs, the public order is disrupted and the objectives of a good society are lost. Indeed, the protests in Ibadan may on the long run set in motion the chain of events that will push Obasanjo out of office. Professor Wole Soyinka has already advised him to "go, just go". This then is the second gain: the realisation that the public space cannot be left to power-mongers, political contractors and thugs. This moral aspect of the debacle is perhaps more important than the legal. I had argued last week that the matter has been taken beyond law. My fear is that the various legal tussles may end in a cul de sac in terms of remedy for the plaintiff. I admit however that the enlightenment that the hearings of the case will offer would be most useful. At issue is the observance of due process by the 18 members of the Oyo State House of Assembly pursuant to Section 188 of the 1999 Constitution on impeachment proceedings. It has been argued, and this cannot be faulted that virtually every section of that provision was violated by the lawmakers. Hence, their purported impeachment of Governor Ladoja is unconstitutional, illegal, unlawful and null and void. The second issue is whether or not the impeachment can stand in the face of a subsisting ruling, not yet set aside by a superior court, that the investigating panel set up in the light of Section 188(4) was illegal. A third issue is whether or not the courts have the powers to intervene in impeachment proceedings as Section 188(10) expressly ousts the jurisdiction of the courts in the matter. A fourth issue is whether or not Ladoja is still the Governor of Oyo State in the eyes of the law. The debates will be useful, and one early indication is how the Ladoja case has turned virtually every commentator into a lawyer. Nigeria has become one big court room. Even Adebayo Alao-Akala, the beneficiary of the coup against Ladoja has been quoting the law and the Constitution. My tailor has also said that the Constitution must be respected. When I asked him to refer to the relevant section, he said he was only parroting what he heard on radio! If precedents are anything to go by however, it would appear that the position of the courts has been to treat impeachment as a strictly political affair, and to lend a positivist, formalist interpretation to Section 188 (10) of the 1999 Constitution, previously Section 170 (10) of the 1979 Constitution. In May 1981, Alhaji Balarabe Musa faced impeachment proceedings as Governor of Kaduna state and he had gone to court to seek an injunction to stop the process pointing to outright violations of the Constitution in the composition of the investigating panel. The court held that it had no jurisdiction according to Section 170 (10) which stated that "no proceedings or determination of the Committee or of the House of Assembly on any matter thereto shall be entertained or questioned in any court." On June 23, 1981, the Governor was impeached, and he filed another suit asking the court to nullify the impeachment as unconstitutional. Again, the court upheld the ouster clause in Section 170(10). The Deputy Speaker of the House of Assembly also went to court to challenge the impeachment, once more the court upheld the impeachment. In a similar case, the Deputy Governor of Kano state was removed in November 1981. He too went to court. But the courts could not help him. In a more recent case, Abaribe vs Abia State House of Assembly, decided by the Court of Appeal sitting in Port Harcourt, the appellant himself has reminded the public of the holding in that case which is on all fours with previous rulings in Balarabe Musa vs Speaker of Kaduna House of Assembly and Others and Abba Rimi Musa vs Speaker of Kaduna State House of Assembly and others, namely that the courts cannot interfere with impeachment proceedings by the legislature. On the surface of it, the Constitution grants the legislature the final say in matters of impeachment. Section 188 (10) is plain, clear and unambiguous. The framers of the Constitution had by this section sought to protect the doctrine of the separation of powers. They did not envisage a situation whereby lawmakers would use this provision to engage in mischief and absurdity and exempt themselves from the law. It is worth noting that both Section 188 (10) and section 47 of the Land Use Act represent exceptions to the provisions of Section 4 (8) of the Constitution. In the light of Section 188 (10), however, the legislature, it seems, is empowered to exercise quasi-judicial powers. This is a grey area on which legal disputations in the Ladoja case, taken all the way to the Supreme Court can help to offer a definitive interpretation. What, for example, is the intention of the lawmaker? Should section 188(10) be given its "plain, evident meaning"? Or should it be read "ex entecedentibus et consequentibus" (that is from what goes before and from what follows). And in responding to this how can the courts avoid the pitfall of judicial legislation? But until then, it may be presumed that the lawmakers in framing Section 188 (10) did not do so to promote injustice, and that no court of law may approach its interpretation by giving it a twisted meaning. One major gain of the entire process may well be the need to call for an amendment of Section 188 (10), since in any case the application of the entire section, by unicameral Houses of Assembly, seems to be in the mould of mischief and injustice. Above all, it would be tragic to drag the judiciary into the arena of politics as is being attempted in the Ibadan crisis. The impartiality of the law is what sustains society and promotes stability. When that link is broken, anarchy is given a free rein.
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