By Jibrin Okutepa, SAN
In Nigerian political lexicon, 2nd term is automatic and always given for those in the executive branch of government. Nigerian constitution prescribed a maximum of two terms of four years for the president and the state governors. Once the occupants of these offices got into office, their first agenda is the 2nd term in office.
This agenda, in most cases, is not rooted in performances. It is an automatic assumption of right. The other day, I read the senate president speaking about when the current Nigerian president finished his 2nd term. I just hope he was wrongly quoted because the current president has not finished his term of four years yet.
But be that as it may when you hear politicians speak, they give no respect to the rights of the people to make choices of who govern them. Yes, politicians don’t because no matter how Nigerians expressed their rights at the polls, Nigerian politicians are the ultimate deciders of who to be announced.
Today, whoever is announced is almost always sure of retaining power because the systems put in place to give remedies to unlawful victims of electoral frauds seem to be compromised by the same people who perpetuated electoral evils.
That is the origin and genesis of go to court. The courts have almost been castrated by what the legal profession has done to itself or what it allowed itself to be used to do to itself to the prejudices of its noble role as the hope of the hopeless.
Until members of the legal profession stop using their legal knowledge in law to shield and instal those who rigged their ways into power, the peace and stability of Nigeria will continue to be undermined. Most of the resources wasted in electoral litigations can be channelled to viable ventures to give employment to the people if the legal profession decides to do what is just and right by punishing those who subvert of electoral processes. Everything wrong seems to enjoy the stamps of legality in our society.
Today’s sufferings of the masses of Nigerians are a function of commercialisation of legal practice that failed to take into account the interest of the people and practices that are not rooted in social engineering, which ought to be the core mandate of the legal profession.
The audacity of arrogance of rigging by political actors parading in the corridors of powers since democratic experiment in Nigeria in 1999 is traceable to conspiratorial abatement of the legal profession. Let no one tell me that lawyers are doing their work. Lawyers are and ought to be ministers in the temple of justice and are not trained to aid and abet evils in governance and installing wrongdoers as kings.That is not our core mandate.
The core mandate of the legal profession is justice and social justice for the people. That is why in advanced civilised societies, lawyers are the leading light, and where there is light, there can not be darkness of corruption and evils permeating in the corridors of governance.
