THE story I’m telling today began developing days after the June 21, 2014, outlier Ekiti gubernatorial election that stunned bookmakers and stung then-incumbent Kayode Fayemi of the All Progressives Congress (APC), which was then in its infancy.
A political outcast, Ayo Fayose, then of a much more harmonious Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), returned from the wilderness to rout the incumbent, romping to a landslide victory.
In winning his non-consecutive second and final term in office, Fayose shellacked the sitting governor in all 16 local governments of the state, also taking the popular vote by a margin of 82,647 votes between him and the second-placed candidate.
Today’s Senate Leader, now of the ruling APC, Opeyemi Bamidele, but then of the Labour Party, trailed at a distant third with 18,135 votes.
It’s very likely that Nigerians, particularly the Ekiti electorate, may have forgotten that he once sojourned out of the party he calls home today for the proverbial greener pasture elsewhere. But he found out in a very humiliating way that the grass wasn’t that green on the other side he coveted, quickly did the prodigal son’s U-turn, and bolted back into the warmth of those who owned him. Today, he’s a front-row member of the ruling class, and his straying is hardly remembered in his résumé as a politician.
But I digress.
As the political class was chewing and trying to digest the Fayose phenom as incumbent-demolisher (he also dethroned Niyi Adebayo of the now-defunct Alliance for Democracy as the sitting governor to secure his first term, which OBJ scuttled), my ears caught a scoop while news-hunting around my judicial sources.
I was told of a thickening judicial plot to stop the governor-elect’s swearing-in, which was to take place on 16 October of the year.
Constitutionally, the state CJ (Chief Judge) is to administer the oath, and the one then in office had positioned himself as a sworn enemy of the incoming governor!
A stalemate?
Yes.
But someone rose to the occasion. Her name was/is Maryam Aloma Mukhtar, the sitting Chief Justice of the time and the first female in history.
I did what was editorially necessary with the information, and events, political and judicial, began to cascade in Abuja and Ado Ekiti.
The state was already on edge, and a lot was going to go south.
The National Judicial Council (NJC), the apex body for the country’s judiciary, was invited into the burgeoning crisis in the state, especially when the supporters of the governor-elect caught glimpses of perceived confirmation of the plot to stop the fellow they overwhelmingly elected from ascending to the governorship.
From that point, only the firm intervention of the country’s judicial leadership would save the state and, by implication, the 2015 election from descending into total chaos. Already, courts were being invaded by alleged supporters of the governor-elect, and judges were being allegedly assaulted, in fact, slapped.
The Ekiti Chief Judge of the time also publicly descended into the arena and, in an unprecedented manner, shut down the entire state judiciary!
Nothing like that had happened before, but Aloma took the bull by the horns and summoned an extraordinary emergency Council meeting in Abuja, compelling the presence of the CJ and other stakeholders.
The situation was so bad the CJ even wrote a petition against the man who was going to provide political leadership in the state for the next four years and whom he was expected to work with!
In choosing to become the face of resistance to the incoming governor, the CJ must have either thought the plan to stop the swearing-in was foolproof and Fayose would never be governor, or he was just ready to damn all the damnable.
Well, as later events proved, Fayose became governor, and, contrary to what the reading of his combustible personality might suggest, he worked with the same CJ for the four years he spent in office, ending in 2018.
The CJ would peacefully leave office on May 28, 2021, capping off 21 years of service as a judge.
There are inherent lessons to learn in the saga and even the denouement.
In the course of resolving the matter, I got entangled in a way.
After Aloma had given the CJ marching orders to reopen the state judiciary as Fayose’s swearing-in day drew near, everybody was expected to play by her rules for everything to be as it should be.
But she wasn’t one to allow a matter as incendiary as that, with grave national implications, to run on subordinates’ whims.
She decided to monitor the implementation of the decisions reached by the Council by herself!
When I broke the story, as an exclusive report, of her cancelling her scheduled foreign trip, which would have seen her outside of the country on 16 October, the day Fayose was to be sworn in, she was livid about the leak.
Because her trips, both local and international, were always tightly controlled out of public view, she correctly singled out my source, who almost lost his job but for providence.
My source gave the information out because he thought it positive, portraying her as a hands-on CJN. But the one we called Mama wasn’t really a sucker for PR. She felt what should be secret should be secret, not to give an advantage to those who wanted to subvert the system.
We later sorted things out, though I had to stay away from the apex court for days.
But Team Fayose profited hugely from that Tribune exclusive cover story, establishing their confidence that Abuja was behind them. Team CJ, believed to be working with then-outgoing Fayemi, eventually succumbed. Fayose was sworn in, and what would have been a major political crisis was averted.
I must confess those publications drew the Ekiti strongman and me closer for a while, with his long-time personal lawyer and later AG constantly oiling the interaction.
Both are estranged now.
As I was penning this, I checked with the judicial leadership if Justice Peter Lifu, who threw the political space into another spin last Thursday with his ruling on leading opposition figure and former vice-president, Atiku Abubakar, has a clean slate with them.
It turned out there is a certain ‘meritorious’ petition pending against him over a ruling in another political matter involving another opposition political party! You say, ahah.
The petition, according to a top source, looks ‘very bad for him’.
Lifu sacked the ADC exco and scrubbed its presidential candidate, Atiku, from the 2027 ballot. If he has jurisprudence on his side, it is a pronouncement he can make, since something can’t stand on nothing. And somehow, no matter how cantankerous some of the judicial leaders may view him now, consequential orders are within his right if he came to the right conclusion about the foundation of the process that produced the ADC candidate.
Yes, I know about Akeredolu (God rest his soul) v Jegede, with the apex court holding that the internal affairs of political parties are their private business and not open to judicial scrutiny, but hey, judicial precedents, though supposed to be sacrosanct, have been remodelled in the past even by the apex court itself!
It would also seem that the mischief interpretation is always the choice pick in political seasons!
Atiku participating or not in the 2027 process now rests on the judiciary, especially the apex court, but the management of the process, to ensure that the impacts of the final decision do not blow up in the face of the country, is that of Chief Justice Kudirat Kekere-Ekun.
And that is why I brought back the Fayose memories.
A senior judicial operative was shocked that any judge would do what Lifu did (considering the subsisting judgement of a court of coordinate jurisdiction which his is now at variance with), with the sledgehammer Mama (Kekere-Ekun) had taken to misconduct since her arrival on the big stage.
The official wondered if the judge isn’t being backed by the big masquerades in the political arena who could frighten the CJN herself!
For instance, the day before Lifu rendered his controversial judgement, the CJN was busy using the NJC platform to knock jurists who misconducted themselves.
Three: Justices Hannatu Kabir and Sobere Biambo, and Grand Kadi Mohammed Sani, were suspended and barred from promotion. Several others received final warning letters.
Years back, Lifu was also in the NJC dock but returned to his docket unscathed. The Council cleared him of any wrongdoing in the political cases he adjudicated, which birthed multiple petitions against him. That must have buoyed his confidence that nothing go happen (in Tuface’s voice).
But Lifu is just a judge among hundreds in the system. The symbol of the judiciary is the CJN, who chairs practically all 11 agencies of the system. In every system, there must be a Lifu for those who think him problematic. The judge has a direct boss who is also grappling with a perception problem. Something almost gave last time, but someone pulled some things back at the last minute, and someone’s head was saved.
There was a time the Court of Appeal was the proverbial problem child of the judiciary. It would seem its current leadership has sanitised the crooked corners. At a time, it was the National Industrial Court.
If the approaching election has shifted the perception burden onto the Federal High Court again, I see it as an opportunity for the CJN to further cement her legacy beyond just being the second female in history.
Lest I forget, Wike too was almost not sworn in after being declared the winner of the 2015 Rivers governorship poll because Rotimi Amaechi and Aloma were locked in a bitter constitutional battle over the state CJ, though it would appear the then-outgoing governor was scheming a stalemate to deny his estranged partner the seat.
A Chief Judge had to be literally procured for Wike to become a lawful governor.
Then-Bayelsa Chief Judge, the now-late Kate Abiri, had to be ‘poached’ by the outgoing Goodluck Jonathan administration to rescue Wike.
I remember putting a call through to the CJ, who confirmed her willingness to swear Wike in.
It baffles me that we easily forget these recent events.
For INEC, which is rushing to announce a replacement for the ADC ticket despite appellate windows, I say, remember recent history too.