MAURICE IWU IS VINDICATED IF THE TRIBUNAL SUSTAINS THE PRESIDENTIAL POLL

TRANSCRIPTS OF INTERVIEW GRANTED BY ATTORNEY ALOY EJIMAKOR TO MEMBERS OF THE NIGERIA MEDIA ON THE 2007 ELECTIONS AT ABUJA ON FEBRUARY 10, 2008

Q: After so many years in America, you are just back into country. May we know you?

A: My name is Aloy Ejimakor. I reside in the United States where I have worked as an Attorney since 1995. I am the Convener of the Organization of Nigerian Lawyers in Diaspora. We monitored the 2007 elections and with regard to the many difficulties encountered with the elections, my attitude and that of most prominent Nigerian Diaspora is that Professor Maurice Iwu and his team at INEC did a marvelous job of transiting Nigeria from one civilian regime to the other. And this view is shared by many top American policymakers and opinion leaders with whom I am familiar – a shared viewed helped mostly by a team of Nigerian and American Lawyers I co-led to Senator Russ Feingold’s office on July 27, 2007 to make a case for a constructive engagement of Nigeria’s electoral issues instead of the opposite view canvassed by the opposition, which surely would have isolated and hurt Nigeria. I believe that the shortcomings noticed during the elections are insufficient to warrant isolation of Nigeria or nullification of the election. Therefore, in deciding the ongoing election petitions, the tribunals are expected to be averse to some notion of strict liability for every violation of the statute, unless there is robust evidence that the violation substantially affected the outcome of the election. With particular regard to the presidential election, it is my considered view that the Tribunal should let it stand. And if this should happen, it will represent a complete vindication of Maurice Iwu because the presidential election is the only one over which it can be argued that he had complete legal control as the chief returning officer as opposed to the governorships which were statutorily under the exclusive control of the Resident Electoral Commissioners for the states.

Q: How would you compare anticipation of justice between America and your native Nigeria?

A: In terms of core legislations and black letter law, there are several similarities. And of course, our Constitution is a version of the US Constitution, as amended and interpreted over the centuries. But where the difference is marked and clear is in terms of the many nuances brought by America’s pure federalism as opposed to Nigeria’s, which still lacks some of the core elements of a truly federal system. And then there is the irony. Before the 2007 elections, the then AGF Bayo Ojo issued advisory opinion to INEC to follow through on the indictments issuing out of EFCC, the Commissions of Inquiry, and the White Papers, all as grounds of disqualification to run for office. This is besides the string of Appeal Court rulings sustaining INEC’s power to disqualify or exclude for cause. Professor Maurice Iwu did the right thing by adhering to the legal advice of Nigeria’s chief law officer, having been emboldened by the Courts of Appeal. In the US, the election umpires would have also done the same thing. This comports with modern notions of constitutionalism. The difference is that in Nigeria, everyone now seems to have ignored this and taken to criticizing Maurice Iwu as if he acted arbitrarily; whereas, in the US, if the disqualifications or exclusions turned out to be wrong, it is the AGF or the judiciary that should become the fair target for criticisms, if at all.

Q: Does the United State have an electoral body, and what about qualification to run for public office
A: Yes, it does, but with nuances, of which some, if not most, will definitely work for Nigeria. For instance, the Boards of elections for the counties have some oversight of the party primaries or caucuses for nomination of candidates. This helps to ensure that political parties conform to their own rules of engagement. My research tells me that Professor Iwu is poised to introduce this concept in the by-elections that will come soon, beginning with the Kogi governorship re-run; and hopefully, with him in charge of the 2011 elections, I am sure Nigerians will as soon see lots of innovations, assuming that politicians get beyond petty ambitions to trust Iwu and give him the free hand to do his job. Don’t forget that Maurice Iwu lived in America before all these, and that was what prepared him for the Electronic Voting system and other innovations he proposed but which the National Assembly rejected for some reasons that are beyond me. But most importantly, the election bodies in the US are permanent and uninterrupted institutions that are permitted to self-reform without having to be re-constituted all the time with new Chairmen and whatnot that will again begin to learn the ropes anew. When it comes to qualification to run for public office, America, just like any other morally upstanding modern society has some strict rules, mostly bordering on moral turpitudes. For instance, a felony conviction, not only disqualifies you from holding public office for the most part, but also bars you from voting; and you don’t need the courts to tell you that.

Q: What are your views on the nullification in Kogi and the others that might come?

A: Anybody gleefully rooting for a rash of nullifications should also contemplate the spectre of no-election or the grave nullification of Abiola’s election in 1993. Therefore, as the Tribunals weigh the various requests for nullification, the learned justices will do well to consider the uniqueness of the Nigerian federation, and consider whether the framers of the Electoral Act really wanted otherwise good elections to fall for every infraction. One might say with some justification that some isolated cases of exclusions or other irregularity merely constitute technical violations or omissions of ordinary course that can hardly justify the extraordinary remedy represented by nullification. In the United States, the learned justices there call such technical violations ‘excusable neglect’, and as the phrase implies, they are excusable, and if standing alone, can never be seen to strictly require quashing the outcome of an election. With regard to the Kogi case, there is some merit to the opposite argument that the exclusion was in order because it was valid under law when it occurred. If you read the analysis of the learned justices in that case, they stated clearly that INEC just complied with the extant law at the time it disqualified the candidate at issue but that the tribunal felt compelled to nullify solely on the strength of a contrary ex post facto Supreme Court ruling - meaning that the Supreme Court ruling is being applied retroactively. This is the kernel of the ruling which the media needs to stress to the Nigerian people for a better understanding and debate of the legalities of the 2007 elections. Blaming Maurice Iwu or INEC for merely acting within authority of extant law won’t cut it.

Q: Are you are saying that the Tribunals might be applying laws retroactively?

A: This is one important area the Electoral Reform Committee needs to look at so that Tribunals are not forced by passage of time into rendering judgments that tend to confuse our strict constitutional system by raising the spectre of retroactivity of laws – be it legislation or a judge-made law. A democracy should be very conscious of rejecting any notion of retroactive application of her laws. Better practice seems to support the postulate that if your rights were breached by some law that is no longer good law, then you try your hand next time around and you could prevail on the tenor of the new law that now favors you. The right to hold political office can never be said to be so vested and absolute to the point that Nigeria must pedal back all the time to accommodate every infringement, otherwise we may come to the point where a Shehu Shagari and others who lost their constitutional tenure and mandate due to illegal and violent sack of their government may begin to file legal actions to be restored to office. The dangerous judicial remedy of mass cancellation of elections in a young and fragile democracy like Nigeria requires more circumspection and judicial conservatism than the need for the judiciary to be seen to be independent. Ours laws must be interpreted in ways that must not threaten our survival as nation.

Q: It seems the Tribunal rulings have put INEC in very bad light before many Nigerians

A: Yes, because of the general tendency to spin, parse and distort. And the media has not fully explained the true meanings of these rulings to the average lay Nigerian. But those who have devoted some intellectual downtime to studying the rulings are likely to posit that INEC and Maurice Iwu should never be blamed for what happened. Election flaws or exclusions have been discussed enough, and again, in a way that seems to ignore the duplicity of the political class – all in an attempt to single out one man for scapegoating. And the secondary point to consider is that we may have come to the point that endangers our democracy and stability should we continue to so carelessly continue this voyeuristic harassment of INEC and the government of the day. Whilst some people might recoil at my directness, candor and neo-legalisms, I will be mindful to put matters into proper legal context and hope for a better and richer understanding hereafter. Nigeria should not be belittled for the historic leap it made with the 2007 elections.

Q: What is your advice to politicians, the political parties, PDP, AD, political class generally?

A: For most of the West, especially the European Union, there is this rampant tendency to rush to conclusions that elections held in countries that the West fears, loathes or does not understand are never free and fair. The West does not understand Nigeria. If you don’t know by now that the West considers candidate Abubakar Atiku pro-West and President Yar’Adua, a closet anti-West or too Islamist (and frugal, meaning - a radical socialist that may prefer China), then you have not been reading everything out there. And more to the point, Yar’Adua’s fiscal conservatism in Katsina when he was Governor was mis-characterized as neo-socialist by a naïve West that looked forward to an Atiku they believed through his PR spin in the US to be anti-socialist and thus more representative of any Western desire for a President likely to draw down Nigeria’s hard currency reserves to finance high technology acquisitions from the West. Therefore, our politicians need to do some serious contemplation of their patriotic duty and remain vigilant to protecting Nigeria from the sort of misguided interference in our electoral process that led to the debacle in Kenya. In other words, we should learn to accept our democracy as it is while working patiently towards attaining the idealisms and stable order that took a helluva of political hard work and give-and-take to achieve in other climes that started before us. All victories or good things don’t have to come in our lifetime.

Q: What is your take on the petitions challenging Yar’Adua’s victory?

A: Let me put it this way. That Dr Orji Kalu and other odd 50 presidential candidates did not file petitions against Yar’Adua is relevant and probative evidence that the presidential election must have passed statutory and political muster and impeaches the merits of any claim to the contrary. Concession of defeat is the first starting point to determining the legitimacy of an election, and concession by some fifty candidates is some concession indeed and cannot be ignored when deciding whether the election should stand or not. In the United States, Al Gore’s initial concession of victory to Bush based on initial results collated from statute-mandated machine count of the ballots as opposed to a manual recount was part of the material evidence that emboldened a politically-conscious US Supreme Court to stop the recount and affirm the initial declaration of Bush as winner. As regards our own, AC and ANPP’s poll agents accepted and signed off on the REC-collated final results of the presidential poll before Maurice Iwu went to press with it. So, how can anyone now claim that there was no election in more than 29 states when their agents had contemporaneously signed off on the results of elections conducted in those states? What happened to the basic law of agency that binds a principal to the actions of his agent? And if you look at the spread of the party’s performance in the state/national assembly and governorship elections, you will notice that the parties maintained just about the same number of votes they garnered in the presidential election. If aspects of the election were rigged, I would say they are too minuscule to constitute grounds for disturbing the final outcome. This does not mean that the Tribunals or the Supreme Court should go wholescale political but it will be naïve and suicidal for our political order if these petitions are lent completely to the absolutism of strict legal solutions without regard to the unique political history of Nigeria. Mistakes are bound to be made along the way, but as good and conscientious citizens, we will all do well not to overplay them.

Ejimakor can be reached at alloylaw@ahoo.com

MAURICE IWU AND THE 2007 ELECTIONS: MY CASE AGAINST NULLIFICATIONS

MAURICE IWU AND THE 2007 ELECTIONS: MY CASE AGAINST NULLIFICATIONS

By: Prince Femi Omoyole

After Maurice Iwu’s telling and credible responses to the interrogatories propounded by Atiku, I wonder why anybody would still be calling for nullification of the 2007 polls. All those still complaining, including the complainer-in-chief, Atiku should pause for once to recall the events in the period before the elections, and they would as soon agree that their defeat at the polls had absolutely nothing to do with Maurice Iwu or any rigging. Atiku’s problems and eventual fall stemmed from his bitter split with OBJ which set off a chain of adversities that included his grave indictment for corruption by the EFCC, his expulsion from the PDP, the censure from the National Assembly for corruption, his unwise protracted battles in court over some spats he should have just ignored, and his take-no-prisoners tactics to boot. The INEC and Iwu he continues to blame acted within extant legal authority to disqualify him pursuant to the written advise of the then AGF Bayo Ojo, which was confirmed by the Court of Appeal. Everyone, except Atiku, knew very well that he lost the election before it began because he no longer possessed what it took to have won it against Yar’Adua/PDP, and the little he had (including his pet GDM) was wrenched from him, not by Iwu, but by a combination of system forces arising from the political and legal war he and the system levied against each other. The PDP even went to court with a near successful claim that he was no longer vice-president and even some elements in his own AC sought to frustrate him because they saw him as a desperate interloper. And Nigerians knew that AC was just a party of protest held together by disgruntlement and possessing of only sentimental appeal in Atiku’s Adamawa and Lagos (because of Tinubu). And where is AC today? Many are with Yar’Adua – meaning, the man is still winning while Atiku is still losing.

On his part, Buhari had his many issues with his own party, including the nasty challenge by Ahmed Yerima, the strongman and main financier of ANPP. Ditto for many other ANPP governors and apparatchiks, most of whom decamped to PDP. Further, Buhari did not have the kind of money and ANPP lacked the national spread that must be present before anyone could think of winning a presidential election. Its popularity and structure lay in only four or five states in the far core north, and there was no evidence that Buhari or the ANPP had sufficient numbers anywhere in the south to even win a councillorship election. So, how could he have won the presidency? And where is ANPP today? Majority are in Yar’Adua’s government. That means Yar’Adua is still winning.

Orji Kalu was very clever to acknowledge early in time that his party did not yet have the structures to win the presidency not because he is not popular (the man is well-liked amongst Ibos and Northerners) but because PPA was just a new party founded in protest over the lack of internal democracy in the PDP and OBJ’s bitter battles with Orji. So, Orji demonstrated better political smarts than Atiku and Buhari when he chose not to contest the presidential poll results in court. That Orji and the other odd 50 presidential candidates did not file petitions against Yar’Adua is relevant and probative evidence that the presidential election passed statutory muster and impeaches the merits of any claim to the contrary. In the United States, Al Gore’s initial concession of victory to Bush was part of the material evidence that emboldened the US Supreme Court to stop the recount and affirm the initial declaration of Bush as winner. As regards our own, AC and ANPP’s poll agents accepted and signed off on the REC-collated final results of the presidential poll before Maurice Iwu went to press with it. So, how can Atiku or Buhari now claim that there was no election in more than 29 states when their agents had contemporaneously signed off on the results of elections conducted in those states? And as if this was not enough, Atiku is now claiming that he was excluded from the ballot when all Nigerians knew that Maurice Iwu had to go to extra expenditure and hard work to include him in the ballot pursuant to the Supreme Court ruling in his favor. I personally saw his name on the ballot. And if you look at the spread of the party’s performance in the state/national assembly and governorship elections, you will notice that the parties maintained just about the same number of votes they garnered in the presidential election. These and Iwu’s credible responses to Atiku’s interrogatories have bolstered the proposition that the election was actually in substantial compliance with statutory mandates and therefore should stand for the most part. The governorship tribunal in Nasarawa has led the way and even went further to award costs as a deterrent to frivolous judicial challenge of election results.

If aspects of the election were rigged, I would say they are too minuscule to constitute grounds for disturbing the outcome. Notice that each of the parties won in the states and electoral precincts where they had larger followership and better structures. AC strong-armed PDP in Lagos not because of Atiku but due to Tinubu’s famous winning abilities. Or did he and Atiku rig that one too? In Adamawa, AC was strong but the Court of Appeals’ affirmance of the disqualification of their governorship candidate and the presence of warhorses like Jibril Aminu and Marwa overwhelmed a wounded Atiku. So, it was a no contest for PDP. PPA carried the day in Abia because Orji proved too wily for a clumsy Onyema Ugochukwu who expected OBJ to do every winning for him. And in Imo, the entire PDP National and State leaders, including Governor Udenwa leveraged on their control of the political space and state power to deliver an unknown Ikedi Ohakim of a fledgling PPA, trouncing a lonely and party-less Ararume and a rejected Agbaso whose structure lapsed into disarray when PDP double-crossed him at the ninth hour. It is laughable that these folks are also blaming Maurice Iwu for troubles that totally had nothing to do with the man. Thus, in the rest of the country, the PDP prevailed for the same reasons ANPP, AC, and PPA prevailed in the select areas where they did. Anybody who recalls how and why Osakwe prevailed over Ahmadu Ali’s wife in Delta can easily discern what was really going on in the country and would agree that it was not Maurice Iwu or INEC that also went over to Delta and picked Osakwe over Ali’s wife. It was OBJ (who then was nursing a huge animus against Ahmadu Ali), El-Rufai who was busy demolishing Ali’s house in Abuja, and a foxy Ibori, who wanted to please OBJ in the hope that Ribadu would remember the favor and forget about following through with the threat to arrest him once he leaves office.

In both emerging and advanced democracies, elections are not won on the pages of newspapers or by court battles like Atiku loves to do but with lots and lots of money, organization, and quantum of party spread in electoral wards. Nigeria is a special case - the monumental level of poverty and deprivation in the country affects or even controls voting behavior, as majority of Nigerians are likely to vote for the highest bidder. A few are just cowed and no Iwu can change that. Another factor that affects voter behavior is our well known system of communal harmony where communities get together and decide to give most of their votes to only one party, except in few ultra-metropolitan areas with little ethnic homogeneities. This is true of both the North and South. If you doubt it, go and ask the Emirs, Ezes, Obas and all the other layers of community leadership common to many locales in Nigeria and they will give you details of how they preside over meetings where decisions like this are reached. Certainly, Maurice Iwu did not invent this culture. So, all the blame-mongers are either ignorant of the uniqueness of the Nigerian voter or trapped in terminal hostility to a man who just declared a result handed to him by Resident Electoral Commissioners (RECs) he cannot even overrule or fire. As fellow Nigerians, the learned justices of the Presidential Election Tribunal cannot ignore all these and return a verdict of nullification because whoever wins in any re-run would have won for the same reasons that Yar’Adua won, and the reasons are nothing more than the ones listed above. And none of these reasons had anything do with Maurice Iwu (as the umpire-in-chief) or with any other new umpire that might replace him when his tenure expires in about three years. The same set of serial complainers will still rise against any new umpire and harangue him until he buckles under and declares them winner or eats crow like the Kenyan umpire did with disastrous consequences. And they are certain to use their second passports and prodigious wealth to escape to the safety of their foreign mansions once Nigeria begins to boil, leaving the innocent common man to hold the short end of the stick. It is so obvious and so sad.

It is now clear that Atiku and the others who pressured Iwu not to hold the election and even went to court to stop it are abusing the opportunity of a petition to achieve the same dubious aim. Whether the election was then postponed or cancelled by Iwu could have brought the following scenarios into play: Some mischief makers would have instigated violence against Ibos by claming that Iwu, an Iboman cancelled an election won by a Northerner as part of an Ibo plot (again?) to frustrate power shift to the North. OBJ could have gleefully declared a state of emergency and thus achieve his third term ambitions by default and thanks to Atiku who was opposing third term and pressuring Iwu not to hold the elections all at once. The much worrisome ‘failed state’ predicted for Nigeria by America would have come to pass before time. And the army could have struck, and justifiably so. Nigerians would have been likened to the gladiators of ancient Rome who sang ‘Mori Turi Te Salutamus’ (we, who are about to die salute you, our king) as they marched past their Emperor into the arena to fight lions made raving mad through starvation. In this case, the King would have been OBJ and the lead gladiator would have been Atiku. The same could be true in the event of judicial nullification.

A popular adage in management goes thus ‘if you think that training is not important, you should try ignorance’. As applied to the 2007 elections, if you think an election that ushered a crucial transition should be nullified, then try no-election or the famous nullification of Abiola’s election in 1993. Therefore, as the Tribunals weigh the various requests for nullifications, the learned justices will do well to consider the uniqueness of the Nigerian federation as part of the material evidence that should detract from what many legal experts have come to see as mere technical violations of the Electoral Act in which INEC was helpless due to the many skirmishes instigated or abetted by those who are rooting for nullification. In the United States, the learned justices there call such technical violations ‘excusable neglect’, and as the phrase implies, they are hardly grounds upon which an extreme and extraordinary remedy like nullifying the result of a major election can be sustained. A good example is a situation where a party known to exist only on the pages of newspapers or inside the briefcases of one man seeks nullification merely because it was excluded from the ballot. In such a case, the Tribunal will be well within the universal rules of evidence and fairness to require such party to show strict proof that it had the numbers, the structure, the preparedness, and the spread to win the very election from which it has been excluded or was itself in compliance with the strict statutory mandates on national spread. So, absent the high probability that an excluded party had provable or judicially-noticed chances of winning, it will comport with real-world principles of political justice to conclude that such a party or its candidate only existed to play a spoiler role in a volatile polity like Nigeria that does need such distractions.

Prince Femi Omoyole fomoyole@yahoo.com

BARRISTER ITSEY SAGAY, I HEREBY HOLD YOU IN CONTEMPT

IF I WERE ATIKU, I WILL FIRE ITSE SAGAY AS MY LAWYER

By: Ibrahim Danlami, College Park USA

Lately, Nigerians have been treated to a series of interviews and sometimes nasty opinion pieces credited to Barrister Itse Sagay, who is on the legal team representing Atiku in his ongoing petition against President Yar’Adua’s victory. What makes Sagay an interesting character is not the jurisprudential quality of the many things he has to say but the lack thereof. The other is his carriage and demeanor which all together demonstrates a brazen contempt for the learned justices of the Presidential Election Tribunal. Without doubt, Sagay’s true intention is to intimidate and pre-empt the tribunal by recklessly opinionating on why Atiku should win the case. What is more? Mr. Itse Sagay is an attorney of record to boot, retained by Atiku in the same case in which he has abandoned the privileged corridors of the tribunal for the allure of romancing the media with his wild and hollow postulations that don’t mean much for rehabilitating a petition that Atiku is losing by the day. Atiku is losing partly because of Sagay’s tactless pastimes which, in the opinion of many trial lawyers, clearly constitute ineffective assistance of counsel and flagrant violation of ethical rules of conduct in many ramifications.

While Mr. Sagay occupies his attorney billable hours with pillorying Maurice Iwu/INEC in the press and taunting the tribunal and President Yar’Adua, his client’s case continues to suffer several setbacks that a little bit of legal research by Sagay could have foreseen and averted. The tribunal hearing the petition against Yar’Adua, as constituted, has the powers of a superior court, which includes the broad powers to punish in contempt and to prevent pre-emption and unnecessary distraction by an officer of the court and counsel of record who should know better than engage in conduct deemed prejudicial to the proper administration of justice. What makes it more troubling is that the NBA has chosen the path of silence while Mr. Sagay continues to conduct himself in manners that are clearly violative of established norms of professional behavior for an attorney of record and of his standing at the bar. Every bar association in all democracies – both emerging and advanced have clear rules barring counsels of record from engaging in unguarded public utterances that might either hurt their client’s interest or appear to be interfering with a decorous handling of the proceedings still pending before a court. And the prestige and integrity of all bar associations is largely judged by their ability and readiness to bring discipline to bear on any erring member, otherwise overall professional discipline may suffer in the long run.

As a common law jurisdiction, Nigerian courts – tribunals and regular courts alike should abide or be seen to abide by the universal rules underpinning professional conduct of lawyers retained to represent clients in matters already pending before a court of law. In the past, we have seen the superior courts of this country proceed aggressively against professionally irresponsible behavior similar to Mr. Sagay’s by either issuing a gag order or invoking its inherent contempt powers to punish as a means of curbing such misconduct. Therefore, Mr. Sagay must be prepared for the consequences of his conduct once the tribunal gets beyond its busy docket to notice the damage he has been doing to the legal profession, the integrity of the court process, and even the interest of his client - Atiku. Atiku is not a lawyer and thus may not have realized the monumental damage Sagay is doing to him and his case, but with the likes of Professor Nwabueze on his legal team, I don’t see how Sagay’s clumsy and bizarre public remarks can go unchecked in the interim.

When a lawyer puts his legal maneuvers in the public glare as Sagay does, he unwittingly undermines and hurts his client’s interest in so many different ways. One way he can hurt his client is by giving away his strategies confidences to the party opponent. For instance, through Sagay’s numerous interviews and careless publicized remarks, it is now well known to INEC/Yar'Adua’s side that Atiku lacks specific proof of his case-in-chief (irregularities). Perhaps part of the reason Iwu/Yar’Adua’s lawyers appear to be a step ahead of Atiku’s legal team is because Sagay’s numerous public remarks have provided a window and a peek into the mental impressions and strategies of Atiku’s team. This is the stuff many a lawyer will pay humongous sums to a private investigator for, but thanks to Sagay, Iwu/Yar’Adua’s lawyers are getting the whole stuff for freebies and using it so successfully to build a solid defense for their clients. And if you think about it, you will notice that Iwu/Yar’Adua’s lawyers are not in the habit of disparaging Atiku or even Buhari in the press because they know better than do that; and from the quiet way they carry on by limiting themselves to answering on the record, they exude the requisite confidence and professionalism common to a case of such national significance. The parties in the case are free to unleash their spinmeisters on the public without a Sagay who is duty-bound to limit his comments to the record.

Sagay’s conduct hurts Atiku and makes him out to be a desperate litigant, if not casting his petition as lacking in any real legal merit. And the public which Sagay appears to be courting by what he is doing is likely to also come to the same conclusion that the only reason for such misbehavior and pedestrian tactics is because Atiku is devoid of any compelling evidence that can pass evidentiary muster, thus prompting Sagay’s panicked resort to appealing to public sentiments. Further, Sagay seems less credible when he goes to the press with his theory of the case instead of the tribunal which is where whatever he has to say matters. Additionally, if anything he is saying is true or admissible, all he needs to do is to convert it into material evidence and file it before the tribunal for consideration as part of the record.

And when a lawyer such as Sagay continues to behave as he does, he hurts the administration of justice by hampering the efforts of the tribunal at putting his client’s case into proper context. The learned justices of the tribunal read newspapers and when they read Sagay’s comments, certain questions must arise in their minds. What do they go by? Is it by any legal briefs filed before them by Sagay or is it by his many public comments? Judging by the recent turn of events, Sagay’s mission to intimidate the tribunal or harass Maurice Iwu or Yar’Adua is not working because it is now clear that both Iwu and Yar’Adua have adopted a scorched-earth policy towards this case and have hankered down to answering Atiku with equal aggressiveness. To the credit of his case and stability of the country, Yar’Adua is no longer telling anybody that he will go back to Katsina were he to lose the case at the tribunal. It is now the opposite as the President has been emboldened to a gutsier defense of his mandate by irresponsible and disrespectful statements being purveyed by Sagay and his likes.

What is more troubling is Sagay’s evident evasiveness in not disclosing to the public that he is fact a counsel of record for Atiku in the ongoing petition. He pretends to be rendering an objective and disinterested professional opinion in a manner that is misleading about his true role in the case. This is unacceptable both under the cannons of professional conduct, common decency, and rules of the court. The legal profession is an honorable one, and if Sagay takes this seriously, then he needs to just stop from going from one newspaper to the other to plead Atiku’s case. Instead he needs to go back to the drawing boards or his law library and find out why Atiku’s case seems to be floundering especially since after Maurice Iwu answered the 27 odd irrelevant interrogatories Sagay and his colleagues saw fit to tactlessly propound. And as if that was not enough, Sagay and his team leaked the interrogatories and the answers to the press in the vain hope that some sympathy will be drawn to their side. But it seems to have backfired as many legal analysts are at a loss over how helpful it is to Atiku’s evidence-in-chief to go off-mark to issue interrogatories on whether the presidential ballots contract was awarded or re-awarded to a South African firm or how much it cost to print them.

And hear this: Is it relevant to making a case for electoral irregularities by querying Iwu on whether the ballots underwent customs destination inspection or not? This is the sort of interrogatory Sagay is promoting in the media as part of his case-in-chief, hoping to make some connection that no one as yet understands. If he cares to poll some of his peers, he will be shocked to learn that this whole strategy of rushing to the press to say one nasty thing or the other about Iwu or Yar’Adua every other day is not working for him or his client - Atiku, but is fast making him and what he represents a laughing stock and butt of jokes amongst all lawyers that know better than embarrass themselves the way Sagay does.

Therefore, if Barrister Itse Sagay does not summon the good sense and professional judgment to walk a straight path and behave responsibly, it might get to the intolerable point that Atiku and his other lawyers will lose their cool and cut him loose, if the tribunal does not beat them to it by censuring him for contempt.

Ibrahim Danlami is a research scholar in Legal Ethics and he wrote in from College Park USA. ibrahimdanlami@yahoo.com