I don’t know how many people see through the present effort by the PDP to finish off what is left of the judiciary after the scandalous manipulation that saw to the suspension of Justice Ayo Salami, in a desperate effort to stave off an impending inquest into the more-you-look-the-less you see electoral heist of April 2011. I believe many Nigerians are aware of the crystallizing conspiracy by the PDP to ensure that rouge electoral conducts are not remedied by any court. That was the crime Salami committed for which PDP is orchestrating his persecution employing the crudest and foulest tactics ever and it is within that scandalous mission that we locate the efforts of Segun Oni and those that are prodding him on to now bury the judiciary in the shallow grave PDP has dug for it en route their perpetual rule dream.
I don’t know how many people see the bizarre plot where Segun Oni, the disgraced election rigger and usurper of the Ekiti governorship mandate is being used as a hatchet dog to ensure the judiciary is finally buried under PDP’s expansive plot to annex that vital arm of government to its vote looting expedition which is getting more audacious, more entrenched and more sophisticated by the day. Those who have taken interests in the activities of the diminutive hatchet man since he was rusticated from power in October 2010 would see a quintessential soulless marionette, a robot and a mechanical odd man at play. The voice is that of Segun Oni, a man who should be serving time in jail for electoral fraud were we to have a sane country and the voice is that of the ruthless and increasingly daring PDP, a rouge cabal that has vowed to remain in power till eternity, whether Nigerians like it or not.
For those who have not known, the latest plot to ridicule the judiciary is being built around Oni. He was said to have raised a petition to the Acting President of the Court of Appeal, seeking for a panel to retry the election case in Ekiti which saw to his ouster after the unearthing of monumental electoral fraud that brought him to power. The acting PCA obliged him by raising a panel to try a case that was so comprehensively trashed out for three years during which the usurper sat on a throne he was never elected to sit on. It was not as if the latest action is predicated upon the discovery of newer compelling evidence that will warrant such but on the fancy trivialities and farcical forgeries Oni and his handmaidens have manufactured to back up their watery case. By acquiescing to this fancy judicial window shopping, the PCA has opened a floodgate that will soon overflow with torrents of requests for review of settled cases and no one is sure where this will leave the bruised, battered and badly messed image of Nigeria’s judiciary. And herein lies the PDP orchestrated self immolation of the judiciary that reached the bestial peaks with the tardy collusion of the ex Chief Judge and his National Judicial Council in the illegal removal of Justice Salami.
As some one who has watched Ekiti politics for a long time. For someone who watched the midday swing that swerved a certain Fayemi victory in April 2007 to Oni and his PDP, for someone who watched the long, enervating and sapping legal battle where nothing was saved to prove PDP’s electoral banditry, for someone who watched the way and manner the Appeal Court ruled that a bye election be held in some councils in Osun and not declare the clear winner, for someone who witnessed the daylight and internationally acclaimed electoral gerrymandering that now go with the name Ido Osi, for someone who followed the ensuing legal battle that culminated in the eventual restoration of Dr. Kayode Fayemi’s purloined victory, one would dare ask, what actually is Oni seeking in his present desperate effort to be used for another round of disgrace for the country’s soiled judiciary? One would be constrained to ask which judge lends his name to this brazen folly by a party that has almost completely overturned our nation’s code book of honor and etiquette to serve the bestial and ultra selfish interests of the party. I wonder what the Acting President of the Court of Appeal wants to achieve by playing this PDP vile roulette that is aimed at subduing whatever is left of the judiciary after the crass subjugation that has forced us to live with the results of forged and sham elections and even hailing them as the best instances of electoral probity humanity has had.
Let no one be fooled. Oni, PDP and the Acting Chief Judge of the Appeal Court know the truths and the facts about the Ekiti election. They know the exhaustive legal brickbats that brought us to where we are today. They know that somehow, there is an end to litigation. But they may not quit from attempting to resurrect a settled and rested case because of the country we are in. We are in a country where everything is deployed to protect a criminal and punish the victim. We are in a country where electoral crimes are not punished and even where pretensions are made to punishing them, only fringe culprits are given a mere slap in the wrist while the beneficiaries and the main culprits are screened from any harm’s way. We are in a country where someone that committed such a hefty crime as electoral fraud, which is a passport to unearned mandate and possible financial crimes, is given every protection the system could muster while his victims are subjected to state organized persecution. We are in a country where election riggers walk with such great swagger and grow with unseemly audacity by each day. So what we are witnessing in Ekiti today is the audacity of the rigger who has become a societal fixer when he should have been a societal outlaw. His fancies are given full ventilation by the macabre system that has been sustained by sheer audacity of co riggers and their fellow ramparts and they will not stop until the entire system is made malleable to their awful imprimatur and control.
The characters that are scripting the legal charade in Ekiti State presently know what they are doing. They are leveraging on a system that has been permanently subservient to electoral fraudsters and which, by the day, criminalizes any questioning of the scruples of an election rigger. They are merely doing all they can to ensure that no judge ever questions the audacity of the electoral rouge who transmogrifies to the law giver and enforcer with each stolen mandate. The slothful way and manner electoral cases that attended the 2011 general election are being handled by the courts, where every rigger is allowed to keep his heist, is a result of the deft effort by the PDP and its hirelings to ensure that electoral rouges go home with their loot and the people continue wallowing in the piths of irredeemable leaders that wangled their ways to power through foul means and who display audacious contempt for the welfare and interests of the people.
So the judiciary has enough room to arrest the self-driven drift it is engaging in with the Oni case. The Chief Judge of Nigeria should save what is left of the judiciary by disallowing such fanciful judicial charades that are developing with the absurd Ekiti case. There should be an end to litigation and if the judiciary allows rooms for such tricks, political chicaneries, games and wild permutations that are driving the present Ekiti judicial charade, then it should be ready for the final lid on the coffin of the nation’s judiciary, which purrs lifelessly on the permutation table of PDP mandarins and their audacious riggers.
