Aso Rock Cabal’s Judicial Cabal on Election Petitions

[Farooq A. Kperogi]

Saturday, August 29, 2020

Aso Rock Cabal’s Judicial Cabal on Election Petitions

By Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.

Twitter: @farooqkperogi

I’ve always had a sneaky suspicion that judgments on election petitions in Nigeria are influenced by political pressures from the presidency, but a conscientious judge who is familiar with the issues and who is deeply concerned about the brazenness of the politicization of election tribunal judgements confirmed my suspicions last week.

One of the thrills and burdens of public commentary is that it connects you with every strand of the society— and with all sorts of information. When I received communication from someone who initially just identified themselves [the use of the singular plural pronoun is deliberate] as a “senior member of the judiciary” who wanted to confide in me, I was a little hesitant.

But being IT savvy— and security conscious—I was able to uncover their identity without letting them know. In time, they sensed that I knew whom they were, so they came clean. They called because they read my columns and have read my opinions on election tribunal judgements.

In September 2019, for instance, I wrote on Twitter that members of the Presidential Election Petition Tribunal who delivered a predictably questionable judgement in favor of Buhari would be rewarded.

“Let me give you guys a little homework. From now till 2023, observe what happens to the judges that delivered the laughably tendentious & predetermined #PEPTJudgement,” I wrote on Twitter on September 11, 2019.

 “Buhari will reward them and/or their children. He already rewarded INEC's Mrs. Amina Zakari by appointing her biological son as his SA on Infrastructure. Recall that Buhari has openly admitted that he appointed 84-year-old retired Justice Sylvanus Nsofor as Nigeria's ambassador to the US because he wrote a dissenting judgment at the Court of Appeal in his favor. He rewarded many others.

“The PEPT judges are salivating right now in anticipation of their rewards. The already universally reviled and corrupt INEC boss and his minions are waiting for their rewards. Some have already been rewarded. Supreme Court justices are waiting in the wings….”

As if to prove me right, just one month after their judgement in favor of Buhari, Justices Mohammed Garba and Abdul Aboki were recommended for promotion to the Supreme Court. It took the protest of opposition political parties and of senior judicial officers for the National Judicial Council to withdraw their promotion to the Supreme Court.

But on Friday, August 14, Buhari elevated the same people yet again to the Supreme Court. Justice Mohammed Garba, in case you didn’t know, headed the patently prejudiced Presidential Election Petition Tribunal in 2019 that gave legal imprimatur to Buhari’s electoral heist. Justice Abdul Aboki was also a member of the Presidential Election Petition Tribunal.

Well, the judge who reached out to me last week told me “there is a judicial cabal at the Court of Appeals of Nigeria that writes judgments for election petition tribunals.” They said it was the cabal that wrote “the recent ludicrous judgment of the Bayelsa State Governorship Election Petition Tribunal, which the legal community and commentators have unanimously condemned for daring to overrule the Supreme Court.”

I am unable to share the details they shared with me about the Bayelsa tribunal judgement because doing so will ruin many lives. As a demonstration of the confidence in the authenticity of their information, the judge gave me the contact details of other judges who were in the know of the wiles and pressures that preceded the Bayelsa judgment.   

The judge said, “Indeed, the judicial cabal in the Court of Appeal was created by the late Chief of Staff to President Buhari, the late Abba Kyari” with the help of a senior judicial officer whose name I have chosen to omit for legal reasons.

I learned that judges who resent the overt politicization of election petition judgements were ecstatic when Justice Monica Dongbam-Mensem was appointed President of the Court of Appeal through external pressures, particularly the open letter Colonel Dangiwa Umar wrote on her behalf when it became apparent that she was going to be passed over by the Buhari regime.

Justice Dongbam-Mensem was thought to be independent-minded, scrupulous, opposed to politically motivated judicial activism, and capable of dismantling the judicial cabal.  “However, there are indications that she lacks the courage to do so and may have compromised her integrity,” the judge said.

Apparently, this issue is well-known to most lawyers. Most of them know of this cabal that works in cahoots with the Aso Rock cabal to subvert justice. “The actual writing of the judgments is usually done by a consortium of justices and legal practitioners,” I was told. This subversion of justice by a conclave is a low-risk-high-reward undertaking.  Members of the judicial cabal are routinely compensated with promotion and financial reward.

I know that most people won’t be shocked by this revelation. I wasn’t. But I am sharing it nonetheless for just two reasons. The first reason is archival or, as my late friend Pius Adesanmi put it, “archaeological.” I want it to be noted somewhere in the records that a civilian junta that initially came to power through a popular election later thoroughly subverted the judiciary and made election tribunal judgements predictable charades.

The second reason for publicizing this is that it just might spur decent and ethical people in the judiciary to resist the cabal and their sponsors— and possibly inspire a reform.

It’s entirely possible that previous civilian administrations had their own judicial cabals. I have no evidence to make this case. I hope that the conversations that this will provoke would address that.

But no one disputes the fact that no civilian administration in Nigeria’s history has ever arbitrarily removed the Chief Justice of Nigeria because it fears he won’t give a judicial stamp of approval of its electoral malfeasance.

How Many Nigerias Does Tinubu Believe In?

A screenshot of an April 13, 1997 interview Bola Tinubu granted ThisDay with the headline “I Don’t Believe in One Nigeria '' trended on social media this week.

In my social media commentary on the headline, I pointed out that, “Nigerian politicians are shamelessly situational ‘patriots.’ They're irredentists when they're outside the orbit of power and exaggerated ‘patriots’ when they have access to the public till. A man who didn't believe in Nigeria when he didn't have his way now wants to lead it. Ha!”

Tinubu’s defenders said his repudiation of Nigeria was informed by Sani Abacha’s brutal dictatorship, which disillusioned even the most optimistic patriots at the time. Well, Abacha wasn’t Nigeria. You could—and people actually did—condemn Abacha’s villainy without losing faith in Nigeria. To conflate Abacha and Nigeria was shortsighted.

Olusegun Obasanjo was jailed by Abacha, but I don’t recall him ever saying he no longer believed in Nigeria because of Abacha’s ill-treatment of him. In fact, it was precisely his unbending faith in Nigeria in spite of what he suffered under Abacha that inspired northern leaders at the time to support his presidential bid in 1999.

Of course, as I’ve always said, there’s nothing inviolable about Nigeria, and one should be ostracized for questioning the desirability of its existence.  But it is legitimate to wonder if Tinubu, who wants to be president in 2023, now believes in Nigeria and what has caused him to change his opinion.

The government he is a part of now is, in many ways, worse than Abacha’s. Abacha’s fascistic excesses are being replicated many folds. Only that he is not at the receiving end this time. Is he an opportunistic, fair-weather patriot?

Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.

School of Communication & Media

Social Science Building 

Room 5092 MD 2207

402 Bartow Avenue
Kennesaw State University

Kennesaw, Georgia, USA 30144
Cell: (+1) 404-573-9697
Personal website: www.farooqkperogi.com

Twitter: @farooqkperogi

Author of Glocal English: The Changing Face and Forms of Nigerian English in a Global World

Nigeria's Digital Diaspora: Citizen Media, Democracy, and Participation

"The nice thing about pessimism is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised." G. F. Will

[DR SIKIRU ENIOLA]

With the information available on the Internet and in the public domain, the INEC boss and his " minions are not universally reviled nor cast in any similar shroud. In recent times, Election petition tribunals have delivered land mark judgements and in many cases in which the ruling APC lost, public opinions swell on the magnanimity of the ruling party to accept the judgements. 

 The Bayelsa gubernatorial election tribunal put itself in a serious problem ab initio. Any scholar who read the judgement could not but marvel at the legal summersaults. This was why the chieftains of the Bar,  Chiefs Afe Babalola and Wole Olanipekun sent to the supreme court to get the warped judgement reviewed. Although the court rejected their pleas, recent dvelopments in Bayelsa showed clearly that the Judiciary came to realize its blunder and eventually ordered a general rerun in the State. 

All the theories about the Presidency' s foray into the supreme court functions are just the spurious imaginations of a pathological adversary of the presidency.

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[OLAYINKA AGBETUYI]

This is a very interesting and illuminating piece by Farooq on the workings of democracies in presidential politics.  

This is why Americans fret when there are vacancies in the Supreme Court as to which party is in power at the centre, Democrats or Republicans.  It affects the tenor of judgements on varied rationalisation.

We must also remember this was at the heart of the Tallahassee imbroglio regarding Governor Bush when his brother George W. held sway at the centre as the president of the United States.

This was again why the political hegemony in the South West Nigeria during the Second Republic reviled the illustrious lawyer  late Richard Akinjide till he died.  He was seen as influential in supplying the Obasanjo ' judicial cabal' the leeway in interpreting the 12 2/3 election quandary which cheated their hero (Awo) another protracted shot at the presidency but gave it instead to Obasanjo's preferred candidate, Shagari.

The misplaced trust in Shagari's abilities appears to be the main reason why Obasanjo determined that he would not allow himself the same mistake twice to allow his deputy Atiku Abubakar succeed him because of what he discovered in close proximity about him (which might have led to his reckless gamble with a third term) and eventually led to fresh primaries for a successor and his hand picked  choice of Umaru YarAdua.

Now Tinubu.  He has to declare his interest in the presidency first, which I dont believe he will.

At the time he was quoted as saying he did not believe in One Nigeria millions of Nigerians and a conservative estimate half of the Nigerian communities in the diaspora did not at the time and those I personally came in contact with in the diaspora  both in the UK and the US expressed the same opinion. Again we owe ' the Shuttle in the Global Crypt' (WS)  the boundless gratitude of keeping HOPE alive in the other half of the diaspora community while the physical symbol of HOPE was buried in an open grave which was promptly turned into an actual grave the moment the Gods decided the time was up for his principal captor.

It was actually a surprise anyone ( including Obasanjo) believed in project Nigeria ( yours truly's position-truth be told- was at best ambivalent) during this uncharted period.  

If you had a free and fair elections and the winner could not rule mainly because of the part of the country he comes from  is it not logical to NOT believe in One Nigeria?  Based on simple logic was it not those who wanted to defy logic who preferred to believe in One Nigeria? The columnist glossed over the statement that Abacha was not Nigeria; but for the palace coup that got rid of him was he not about to attempt the ultimate uncharted territory of project Nigeria:  transformation from military dictatorship to civilian dictatorship which would have cemented the death of One Nigeria?

Was it not because the executioners of the coup feared that would widen the basis of rulership exclusion from mainly the South to include the North West and the Middle Belt that the il-logic of the annulment dawned on them?  The creation of an Abacha ruling dynasty!  Are we still going to refer to that dynasty as One Nigeria,  if- but for the terminal coup-he had succeeded?

We cannot compare Obasanjo to Tinubu.  Obasanjo had once been head of state based on his vision for Nigeria and based on single minded honest pursuit of that vision it worked; it is not the single minded pursuit of a goal by the head of state alone that makes things work in a democratic polity.  As I once expressed the situation geometrically, in a military dictatorship leadership is strictly pyramidal while in a civilian polity it is a plateau. Obasanjo discovered that to his chagrin in his second coming.  People doing evil in his own party could tell him to mind his own business and he could not frog march them!

OAA

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.

-------- Original message --------

From: "Farooq A. Kperogi" <farooq...@gmail.com>

Date: 29/08/2020 23:30 (GMT+00:00)

To: USAAfrica Dialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>

Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Aso Rock Cabal’s Judicial Cabal on Election Petitions

This message is eligible for Automatic Cleanup! (farooq...@gmail.com) Add cleanup rule | More info

[Salimonu Kadiri]

​As the Yoruba aphorism put it, ENU ÒKÙRO KI N'SÈJÈ. It is roughly translated to; liar's mouth never bleeds. Farooq Kperogi seems to be Nigeria's modern days Joseph Paul Goebbels who believes that repeating a lie consistently will eventually make it acceptable as the truth by the general public. Hear him : In September 2019, for instance, I wrote on twitter that members of the Presidential Election Petition Tribunal who delivered a predictably questionable judgement in favour of Buhari would be rewarded. "Let me give you guys a little homework. From now till 2023, observe what happens to the judges that delivered the laughably tendentious & predetermined #PEPT Judgement," I wrote on Twitter on September 11, 2019. Dishonestly playing on the intelligence of the public, he deliberately avoided telling his readers why the Presidential Election Petition Tribunal judgment was predictably questionable and why the PEPT's judgment was laughably tendentious & predetermined. The fact is that Presidential Election Petition Tribunal is not the final arbiter in a presidential election petition in Nigeria and as such its decision is subject to alteration or total rejection at the Court of Appeal or Supreme Court. Why then should Prophet Farooq preoccupy himself with predicting PEPT's judgment?

While hearings of the petition were ongoing, Farooq Kperogi wrote on Saturday, 20 April 2019 thus, "Now that Atiku has enlisted the expert intervention of Microsoft and IBM to authenticate his claim that the electronic record of the presidential election stored on INEC's server is inconsistent with the results the compromised and morally putrid chairman of INEC announced, there is panic in the Presidential Villa, and Buhari's ignorant lawyers are engaging in comical, illiterate rhetorical antics for the sole purpose of diversion." Well, it is on record that the Court hearings of Atiku's petition on 20 July 2019 focused on INEC's Server which Prophet Farooq claimed Atiku had enlisted expert from Microsoft and IBM to authenticate his election victory as stored in the Server. Atiku claimed that the results stored in INEC's Server gave him 18,356,732 votes against 16,741,430 for Buhari thereby winning the election with 1,615,302 votes over Buhari. INEC official result had given Buhari 15,191,847 votes against 11,262,978 for Atiku. The first witness called by Atiku on purported INEC's stored Server's results was former Aviation Minister under President Jonathan and PDP representative at Abuja collation centre, Osita Chidoka. He told the Tribunal that he was a witness to the manual collation of the Presidential election result at the International Conference Centre in Abuja after the 23 February 2019 election. He confirmed that the results were collated nationwide manually but added that he learnt the results of the elections were transmitted by INEC electronically to the INEC Server. Under cross-examination, he said that he was not present when the alleged electronic transmission was done. He has never seen the server and he did not know its location, but added that INEC Chairman talked about its existence before election and collation. When asked to provide the Server's address, Chidoka referred to the anonymous whistle-blower's given address. Prophet Farooq's Microsoft and IBM expert who was to authenticate the electronic record of the presidential election stored in INEC Server in favour of Atiku turned out to be a Kenyan by name, David Ayu Nyango Njoga, who claimed to be an Information Technology Expert. Mr. Njoga told the Tribunal that he was engaged by the petitioners (Atiku and PDP) to analyse results of the election obtained from INEC Server and stored in a website, https://www.factsdontlieng.com When asked if INEC owned the website, he replied no, but claimed the data it contains are from INEC Server. Who owned the website, Njoga was asked? Njoga answered that it was owned by an INEC official, who provided the election result figures. When asked the name of the official, Njoga said, "The INEC official is anonymous and I do not know him." Under cross-examination by the leader of Buhari's legal team, Wole Olanipekun (SAN), Njoga said the website was created on March 12, 2019. When Njoga was reminded by the learned SAN that the Presidential election was held on February 23, 2019 and the results were released before 12 March 2019, Mr. Njoga was blank and speechless. 

Atiku's election petition was based on his claim that card readers were used to send election results electronically to the INEC Server from where he obtained the figures, 18,356,732 votes for himself and 16,741,430 for Buhari. Atiku's figures showed that the total votes for Buhari and Atiku (35,098,162) added up exactly to the total number of accredited voters!! Accepting Atiku's figures would imply that there were zero cancelled votes or invalid votes in the election and the rest 71 presidential candidates that participated in the election scored zero votes in all the polling booths all over Nigeria!! Only intellectual cabals would accept fraudulent figures in Atiku's self-declared Presidential election victory. 

Despite what came out at the tribunal, illiterates in law and intellectual cabals still valued the information supplied by Osita Chidoka and Mr. David Ayu Nyango Njoga as those from Microsoft and IBM experts. Farooq Kperogi knows quite well that Buhari, as the president, appoints Judges only on the recommendations of National Judicial Council (NJC), a body containing only professional lawyers, and as such there is no way Buhari can use his appointing power to favour a particular person. Simplified, the NJC chooses Judges without any input from the President who only appoints according to the list forwarded to him by the NJC. Apart from the fact that Atiku's election petition and claim to victory was based on fake INEC's Server, it is a lie to assert that the judgment of the Tribunal on 2019 presidential election was delivered in favour of Buhari in exchange for future reward. The prediction of Farooq about the outcome of the election tribunal is, instead, laughable when viewed with the evidence of his so-touted Microsoft and IBM experts. 

Well the judge who reached out to me, last week told me "there is a judicial cabal at the Court of Appeals of Nigeria that writes judgments for election petition tribunals." They said it was the cabal that wrote "the recent ludicrous judgment of the Bayelsa State Governorship Election Petition Tribunal which the legal community and commentators have unanimously condemned for daring to overrule the Supreme Court,"- Farooq Kperogi

To begin with it is unthinkable that any Judge would ever wake up in the middle of the night in Nigeria to make a telephone call to Farooq in faraway US just to gossip about fellow Judges on the bench. Besides, such gossiping Judge would be risking his career in Nigeria by engaging in malicious gossips with Farooq whose telephone traffics to Nigeria might probably be under security watch. Either out of ignorance or out of underrating the intelligence of Nigeria's security agents, Farooq believed that the identity of the Judge he claimed had phoned him is secrete as long as he did not mention his/her name. The number of Judges in Nigeria at the level Farooq is referring to are very few and it should not be a problem for the security agents to run a check on telephone call logs of all incoming and outgoing calls to Judges in Nigeria to identify which Judge telephoned Farooq in the US. He knows truly that no Judge in Nigeria called him, Farooq, in the US as claimed by him but Farooq, a self-declared V.I.P., is accustomed to presenting himself to his readers as a well-connected person, in this wise a Judge, to impress them. However, no intelligent person should be impressed when he claimed that a Judge in Nigeria called him on the telephone to say "there is a judicial cabal at the Court of Appeals of Nigeria that writes judgments for election petition tribunals, only in the next moment for the same one Judge to become they said it was the cabal that wrote "the recent ludicrous judgment of the Bayelsa State Governorship Election Petition Tribunal which the legal community and commentators have unanimously condemned for daring to overrule the Supreme Court." That was a fiction and a blatant lie churned out by Farooq. The conclusion that Farooq Kperogi drew on Bayelsa State Governorship Election Petition Tribunal is totally at variance to what actually happened. Before Bayelsa's gubernatorial election, on 16 November 2019, PPD had filed a High Court suit against the APC's deputy Governor contestant, Senator Biobarakuma Degi-Eremienyo. PDP alleged that Degi-Eremienyo's name was written as Degi Biobaragha in his primary School certificate, his secondary school education bore Adegi Biobarakumo as his name and his University education had Degi Biobarakuma as his name. The result from his MBA certificate had Degi Biobarakuma Wangagha as his name. The names contained in the certificates submitted to INEC did not correspond to the name Biobarakuma Degi-Eremienyo which the APC deputy governor aspirant was using to contest the election. In view of variety of names, PDP asked the Court to disqualify him from contesting the election, which the Court did. Before the election was held, on 16 November 2019, the Appeal Court had cleared Biobarakuma Degi-Eremienyo to contest the election after presenting affidavits for change of names and the PDP appealed the judgment to the Supreme Court which was unable to hear the case before the election took place. The Governorship election in Bayelsa on 16 November 2019 was won by APC candidates, David Lyon and his deputy elect Senator Biobarakuma Degi-Eremienyo. Two days before their inauguration, on Thursday, 13 February 2020, the Supreme Court nullified the election of Lyon and Degi-Eremienyo. Justice Mary Odili's led Supreme Court panel held that the nomination form Degi-Eremienyo submitted to INEC for the purpose of November 16, 2019, governorship election in the State contained false information. The Supreme Court ordered that the certificate of return be withdrawn immediately from David Lyon and his deputy elect, Biobarakuma Degi-Eremienyo and instead be issued to the candidate with the second highest votes in the November 16, 2019, governorship election in Bayelsa State. Consequent to that decision, Douye Diri (PDP) and Lawrence Ewhrudjakpo (PDP) became Governor and deputy Governor of Bayelsa State respectively on Saturday, 15 February 2020.

The Supreme Court Judgment was anti-democratic, a travesty of justice and common sense because it denied David Lyon his gubernatorial victory on the ground of what the Court considered infraction of his deputy elected. The decision of the Supreme Court disqualifying Degi-Eremienyo to participate in the 16 November 2019 election as a deputy governor ought to have taken place before the election and not after the election and so late as 13 February 2020. If Degi-Eremienyo had died immediately after the election, procedurally, David Lyon would have been sworn-in whereafter he would have chosen a new deputy. In Nigeria, change of names are permitted as long as they are supported with affidavits from the courts of law. And if the Supreme Court had reason to believe that the names contained in the certificates submitted to INEC by Degi-Eremienyo constituted false information, the Court could not just only nullify his election but should recommend him for prosecution. Instead, a 7-member Supreme Court decided to disenfranchise almost a million people of Bayelsa that voted for APC joint ticket and thereby handed over power to a minority votes' winner of the election. That was how Douye Diri and Lawrence Ewhrudjakpo became Governor and deputy governor of Bayelsa respectively on 15 February 2020. However, the Advance National Democratic Party (ANDP) had all along filed a petition against INEC at the Bayelsa Governorship Election Tribunal for exclusion from the November 19, 2019 governorship election. ANDP, therefore, asked the Tribunal to nullify Bayelsa's gubernatorial election of 19 November 2019 and to order a fresh election in which ANDP will be able to participate. After hearings, mainly from ANDP and INEC, Bayelsa Governorship Election Petition Tribunal, nullified the 16 November 2019 Governorship election for unlawfully excluding ANDP from participating in the election and on Monday, 17 August 2020, ordered INEC to arrange a new election to include ANDP.

Since the Supreme Court of Nigeria has never at any time, hitherto, heard or taken any decision on whether ANDP was lawfully excluded from participating in the 16 November 2019 governorship election or not, it tantamount to extreme malicious lie to equate the judgment of Bayelsa Governorship Election Tribunal of 17 August 2020 to overruling the decision of the Supreme Court of 13 February 2020. The case of ANDP is yet to reach Supreme Court and only pathological and mischievous liars will assert the contrary.

S. Kadiri     

---

From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of DR SIKIRU ENIOLA <drsikir...@gmail.com>
Sent: 30 August 2020 07:47
To: USAAfrica Dialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Aso Rock Cabal’s Judicial Cabal on Election Petitions

 

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/CAHqryX3BL6D978_nR1_mg%2BYRew4L4OHrrYG52gRzD7k8DjAs7w%40mail.gmail.com.

[Ashafa Abdullahi]

This lucid anyslysis as truly as convincing as it is means accepting anything to the contrary is buffoonery 

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/BN7PR06MB406866E767402099F09093F9AE500%40BN7PR06MB4068.namprd06.prod.outlook.com.

[Femi Segun]

' Either out of ignorance or out of underrating the intelligence of Nigeria's security agents, Farooq believed that the identity of the Judge he claimed had phoned him is secret as long as he did not mention his/her name. The number of Judges in Nigeria at the level Farooq is referring to are very few and it should not be a problem for the security agents to run a check on telephone call logs of all incoming and outgoing calls to Judges in Nigeria to identify which Judge telephoned Farooq in the US. He knows truly that no Judge in Nigeria called him.'Alagba Salimonu Kadiri'. Is it not executive recklessness for state security officials to be monitoring the phone calls of judges? As a Nigerian citizen, is Farooq not entitled to air his views on issues of public concerns? By insinuating that DSS have the right to monitor the phone calls of judges, are you not promoting fascism by default? It is either we are ready for democracy or we settle for the brutality of Buhari military junta of 1984-85. You will please recall that his arbitrariness created fertile grounds for the evil genius, who in turn gave way for the monster called Abacha. While we may support a regime as much as we want,  we must be wary of inadvertently promoting dictatorship. As much as I was not a fan of Jonathan and his crassly ineptitude administration, one cannot but applaud his democratic credentials relative to the high-handedness of the Buhari regime. Lai Mohammed said all manner of nonsense against that administration, but he is today trying as much as possible to muzzle every voice of dissent. People forget so easily that power is transient but memory is permanent. Let's be careful.

Femi

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/BN7PR06MB406866E767402099F09093F9AE500%40BN7PR06MB4068.namprd06.prod.outlook.com.

[OLAYINKA AGBETUYI]

Are Farooq's editors reading these responses of a deliberate attempt by their columnist to mislead the Public?

Are they comfortable in their seats at the selling of falsehood to Nigerian readers as value for money?

OAA

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.

-------- Original message --------

From: Salimonu Kadiri <ogunl...@hotmail.com>

Date: 01/09/2020 15:16 (GMT+00:00)

To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com

Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Aso Rock Cabal’s Judicial Cabal on Election Petitions

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​As the Yoruba aphorism put it, ENU ÒKÙRO KI N'SÈJÈ. It is roughly translated to; liar's mouth never bleeds. Farooq Kperogi seems to be Nigeria's modern days Joseph Paul Goebbels who believes that repeating a lie consistently will eventually make it acceptable as the truth by the general public. Hear him : In September 2019, for instance, I wrote on twitter that members of the Presidential Election Petition Tribunal who delivered a predictably questionable judgement in favour of Buhari would be rewarded. "Let me give you guys a little homework. From now till 2023, observe what happens to the judges that delivered the laughably tendentious & predetermined #PEPT Judgement," I wrote on Twitter on September 11, 2019. Dishonestly playing on the intelligence of the public, he deliberately avoided telling his readers why the Presidential Election Petition Tribunal judgment was predictably questionable and why the PEPT's judgment was laughably tendentious & predetermined. The fact is that Presidential Election Petition Tribunal is not the final arbiter in a presidential election petition in Nigeria and as such its decision is subject to alteration or total rejection at the Court of Appeal or Supreme Court. Why then should Prophet Farooq preoccupy himself with predicting PEPT's judgment?

While hearings of the petition were ongoing, Farooq Kperogi wrote on Saturday, 20 April 2019 thus, "Now that Atiku has enlisted the expert intervention of Microsoft and IBM to authenticate his claim that the electronic record of the presidential election stored on INEC's server is inconsistent with the results the compromised and morally putrid chairman of INEC announced, there is panic in the Presidential Villa, and Buhari's ignorant lawyers are engaging in comical, illiterate rhetorical antics for the sole purpose of diversion." Well, it is on record that the Court hearings of Atiku's petition on 20 July 2019 focused on INEC's Server which Prophet Farooq claimed Atiku had enlisted expert from Microsoft and IBM to authenticate his election victory as stored in the Server. Atiku claimed that the results stored in INEC's Server gave him 18,356,732 votes against 16,741,430 for Buhari thereby winning the election with 1,615,302 votes over Buhari. INEC official result had given Buhari 15,191,847 votes against 11,262,978 for Atiku. The first witness called by Atiku on purported INEC's stored Server's results was former Aviation Minister under President Jonathan and PDP representative at Abuja collation centre, Osita Chidoka. He told the Tribunal that he was a witness to the manual collation of the Presidential election result at the International Conference Centre in Abuja after the 23 February 2019 election. He confirmed that the results were collated nationwide manually but added that he learnt the results of the elections were transmitted by INEC electronically to the INEC Server. Under cross-examination, he said that he was not present when the alleged electronic transmission was done. He has never seen the server and he did not know its location, but added that INEC Chairman talked about its existence before election and collation. When asked to provide the Server's address, Chidoka referred to the anonymous whistle-blower's given address. Prophet Farooq's Microsoft and IBM expert who was to authenticate the electronic record of the presidential election stored in INEC Server in favour of Atiku turned out to be a Kenyan by name, David Ayu Nyango Njoga, who claimed to be an Information Technology Expert. Mr. Njoga told the Tribunal that he was engaged by the petitioners (Atiku and PDP) to analyse results of the election obtained from INEC Server and stored in a website, https://www.factsdontlieng.com When asked if INEC owned the website, he replied no, but claimed the data it contains are from INEC Server. Who owned the website, Njoga was asked? Njoga answered that it was owned by an INEC official, who provided the election result figures. When asked the name of the official, Njoga said, "The INEC official is anonymous and I do not know him." Under cross-examination by the leader of Buhari's legal team, Wole Olanipekun (SAN), Njoga said the website was created on March 12, 2019. When Njoga was reminded by the learned SAN that the Presidential election was held on February 23, 2019 and the results were released before 12 March 2019, Mr. Njoga was blank and speechless. 

Atiku's election petition was based on his claim that card readers were used to send election results electronically to the INEC Server from where he obtained the figures, 18,356,732 votes for himself and 16,741,430 for Buhari. Atiku's figures showed that the total votes for Buhari and Atiku (35,098,162) added up exactly to the total number of accredited voters!! Accepting Atiku's figures would imply that there were zero cancelled votes or invalid votes in the election and the rest 71 presidential candidates that participated in the election scored zero votes in all the polling booths all over Nigeria!! Only intellectual cabals would accept fraudulent figures in Atiku's self-declared Presidential election victory. 

Despite what came out at the tribunal, illiterates in law and intellectual cabals still valued the information supplied by Osita Chidoka and Mr. David Ayu Nyango Njoga as those from Microsoft and IBM experts. Farooq Kperogi knows quite well that Buhari, as the president, appoints Judges only on the recommendations of National Judicial Council (NJC), a body containing only professional lawyers, and as such there is no way Buhari can use his appointing power to favour a particular person. Simplified, the NJC chooses Judges without any input from the President who only appoints according to the list forwarded to him by the NJC. Apart from the fact that Atiku's election petition and claim to victory was based on fake INEC's Server, it is a lie to assert that the judgment of the Tribunal on 2019 presidential election was delivered in favour of Buhari in exchange for future reward. The prediction of Farooq about the outcome of the election tribunal is, instead, laughable when viewed with the evidence of his so-touted Microsoft and IBM experts. 

Well the judge who reached out to me, last week told me "there is a judicial cabal at the Court of Appeals of Nigeria that writes judgments for election petition tribunals." They said it was the cabal that wrote "the recent ludicrous judgment of the Bayelsa State Governorship Election Petition Tribunal which the legal community and commentators have unanimously condemned for daring to overrule the Supreme Court,"- Farooq Kperogi

To begin with it is unthinkable that any Judge would ever wake up in the middle of the night in Nigeria to make a telephone call to Farooq in faraway US just to gossip about fellow Judges on the bench. Besides, such gossiping Judge would be risking his career in Nigeria by engaging in malicious gossips with Farooq whose telephone traffics to Nigeria might probably be under security watch. Either out of ignorance or out of underrating the intelligence of Nigeria's security agents, Farooq believed that the identity of the Judge he claimed had phoned him is secrete as long as he did not mention his/her name. The number of Judges in Nigeria at the level Farooq is referring to are very few and it should not be a problem for the security agents to run a check on telephone call logs of all incoming and outgoing calls to Judges in Nigeria to identify which Judge telephoned Farooq in the US. He knows truly that no Judge in Nigeria called him, Farooq, in the US as claimed by him but Farooq, a self-declared V.I.P., is accustomed to presenting himself to his readers as a well-connected person, in this wise a Judge, to impress them. However, no intelligent person should be impressed when he claimed that a Judge in Nigeria called him on the telephone to say "there is a judicial cabal at the Court of Appeals of Nigeria that writes judgments for election petition tribunals, only in the next moment for the same one Judge to become they said it was the cabal that wrote "the recent ludicrous judgment of the Bayelsa State Governorship Election Petition Tribunal which the legal community and commentators have unanimously condemned for daring to overrule the Supreme Court." That was a fiction and a blatant lie churned out by Farooq. The conclusion that Farooq Kperogi drew on Bayelsa State Governorship Election Petition Tribunal is totally at variance to what actually happened. Before Bayelsa's gubernatorial election, on 16 November 2019, PPD had filed a High Court suit against the APC's deputy Governor contestant, Senator Biobarakuma Degi-Eremienyo. PDP alleged that Degi-Eremienyo's name was written as Degi Biobaragha in his primary School certificate, his secondary school education bore Adegi Biobarakumo as his name and his University education had Degi Biobarakuma as his name. The result from his MBA certificate had Degi Biobarakuma Wangagha as his name. The names contained in the certificates submitted to INEC did not correspond to the name Biobarakuma Degi-Eremienyo which the APC deputy governor aspirant was using to contest the election. In view of variety of names, PDP asked the Court to disqualify him from contesting the election, which the Court did. Before the election was held, on 16 November 2019, the Appeal Court had cleared Biobarakuma Degi-Eremienyo to contest the election after presenting affidavits for change of names and the PDP appealed the judgment to the Supreme Court which was unable to hear the case before the election took place. The Governorship election in Bayelsa on 16 November 2019 was won by APC candidates, David Lyon and his deputy elect Senator Biobarakuma Degi-Eremienyo. Two days before their inauguration, on Thursday, 13 February 2020, the Supreme Court nullified the election of Lyon and Degi-Eremienyo. Justice Mary Odili's led Supreme Court panel held that the nomination form Degi-Eremienyo submitted to INEC for the purpose of November 16, 2019, governorship election in the State contained false information. The Supreme Court ordered that the certificate of return be withdrawn immediately from David Lyon and his deputy elect, Biobarakuma Degi-Eremienyo and instead be issued to the candidate with the second highest votes in the November 16, 2019, governorship election in Bayelsa State. Consequent to that decision, Douye Diri (PDP) and Lawrence Ewhrudjakpo (PDP) became Governor and deputy Governor of Bayelsa State respectively on Saturday, 15 February 2020.

The Supreme Court Judgment was anti-democratic, a travesty of justice and common sense because it denied David Lyon his gubernatorial victory on the ground of what the Court considered infraction of his deputy elected. The decision of the Supreme Court disqualifying Degi-Eremienyo to participate in the 16 November 2019 election as a deputy governor ought to have taken place before the election and not after the election and so late as 13 February 2020. If Degi-Eremienyo had died immediately after the election, procedurally, David Lyon would have been sworn-in whereafter he would have chosen a new deputy. In Nigeria, change of names are permitted as long as they are supported with affidavits from the courts of law. And if the Supreme Court had reason to believe that the names contained in the certificates submitted to INEC by Degi-Eremienyo constituted false information, the Court could not just only nullify his election but should recommend him for prosecution. Instead, a 7-member Supreme Court decided to disenfranchise almost a million people of Bayelsa that voted for APC joint ticket and thereby handed over power to a minority votes' winner of the election. That was how Douye Diri and Lawrence Ewhrudjakpo became Governor and deputy governor of Bayelsa respectively on 15 February 2020. However, the Advance National Democratic Party (ANDP) had all along filed a petition against INEC at the Bayelsa Governorship Election Tribunal for exclusion from the November 19, 2019 governorship election. ANDP, therefore, asked the Tribunal to nullify Bayelsa's gubernatorial election of 19 November 2019 and to order a fresh election in which ANDP will be able to participate. After hearings, mainly from ANDP and INEC, Bayelsa Governorship Election Petition Tribunal, nullified the 16 November 2019 Governorship election for unlawfully excluding ANDP from participating in the election and on Monday, 17 August 2020, ordered INEC to arrange a new election to include ANDP.

Since the Supreme Court of Nigeria has never at any time, hitherto, heard or taken any decision on whether ANDP was lawfully excluded from participating in the 16 November 2019 governorship election or not, it tantamount to extreme malicious lie to equate the judgment of Bayelsa Governorship Election Tribunal of 17 August 2020 to overruling the decision of the Supreme Court of 13 February 2020. The case of ANDP is yet to reach Supreme Court and only pathological and mischievous liars will assert the contrary.

S. Kadiri     

From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of DR SIKIRU ENIOLA <drsikir...@gmail.com>
Sent: 30 August 2020 07:47
To: USAAfrica Dialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>

Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Aso Rock Cabal’s Judicial Cabal on Election Petitions

 

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[OLAYINKA AGBETUYI]

It is legitimate for security officials to monitor the phone calls of public officials if there is need to.

OAA

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.

-------- Original message --------

From: Femi Segun <solor...@gmail.com>

Date: 01/09/2020 23:23 (GMT+00:00)

To: 'Chika Onyeani' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>

Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Aso Rock Cabal’s Judicial Cabal on Election Petitions

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' Either out of ignorance or out of underrating the intelligence of Nigeria's security agents, Farooq believed that the identity of the Judge he claimed had phoned him is secret as long as he did not mention his/her name. The number of Judges in Nigeria at the level Farooq is referring to are very few and it should not be a problem for the security agents to run a check on telephone call logs of all incoming and outgoing calls to Judges in Nigeria to identify which Judge telephoned Farooq in the US. He knows truly that no Judge in Nigeria called him.'Alagba Salimonu Kadiri'. Is it not executive recklessness for state security officials to be monitoring the phone calls of judges? As a Nigerian citizen, is Farooq not entitled to air his views on issues of public concerns? By insinuating that DSS have the right to monitor the phone calls of judges, are you not promoting fascism by default? It is either we are ready for democracy or we settle for the brutality of Buhari military junta of 1984-85. You will please recall that his arbitrariness created fertile grounds for the evil genius, who in turn gave way for the monster called Abacha. While we may support a regime as much as we want,  we must be wary of inadvertently promoting dictatorship. As much as I was not a fan of Jonathan and his crassly ineptitude administration, one cannot but applaud his democratic credentials relative to the high-handedness of the Buhari regime. Lai Mohammed said all manner of nonsense against that administration, but he is today trying as much as possible to muzzle every voice of dissent. People forget so easily that power is transient but memory is permanent. Let's be careful.

Femi

On Tue, Sep 1, 2020 at 10:15 AM Salimonu Kadiri <ogunl...@hotmail.com> wrote:

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[Salimonu Kadiri]

​Dear Femi Segun,

It will be irresponsible of any security outfit in the world not to engage in security surveillances, including wire tapings of suspected individual's conversations. While I agree with you that Farooq has the right to air his views on any matter concerning Nigeria, we must also demand from him to refrain from telling lie(s). My observation is that Farooq is a notoriously foul-mouthed intellectual brawler and opportunist, always craving attention and fawning adulation. Consequently, he embellishes his opinions very often with his invented or rather fake connections with powerful people in Nigeria, in order to sound credible to his readers. My point is that Farooq has no right to tell us that a Judge or some Judges in Nigeria called him to disparage fellow Judges at the Appeal Courts of Nigeria cum Election Tribunal Judges without telling us the names of the Judges that reached out to him in whatever form. By asserting that Judges in Nigeria reached out to him in the manner given in his article, responsible and patriotic security outfits in Nigeria must be attracted into checking the call logs of the categories of Judges concerned. If they don't find any call to Farooq from any Nigerian Judge, it is understandable that the security agents would not go out public to announce that Farooq was only bluffing with his claim of Nigerian Judges reaching out to him to disparage fellow Judges.

I have branded Farooq Kperogi a liar because he claimed that a Nigerian Judge called him to say, "there is a judicial cabal at the Court of Appeals of Nigeria that write judgments for election petition tribunals" since, even non-judges in Nigeria know that the judgment of Election Petition Tribunal is never the final end of the petition as it could be appealed against to the Court of Appeal and finally to the Supreme Court. As if to say many Judges called Farooq Kperogi, he wrote : They (judges) said it was the cabal that wrote "the recent ludicrous judgment of the Bayelsa State Governorship Election Petition Tribunal which the legal community and commentators have unanimously condemned for daring to overrule the Supreme Court." But all Judges in Nigeria are aware that the August 17, 2020, judgment of the Bayelsa State Governorship Election Petition Tribunal did not overrule the Supreme Court's judgment of 13 February 2020 because the two cases were unrelated. Once again, Farooq invented a lie and attributed it to (they) the judges, constituted himself and his minions to the legal community and commentators who unanimously condemned the invented lie of supposedly overruling the Supreme Court. Femi, your right, my right and all Nigerians' right not to be lied to must also be protected!!!!

S Kadiri  

---

From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Femi Segun <solor...@gmail.com>
Sent: 01 September 2020 19:24
To: 'Chika Onyeani' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/CAN_y-4rT9GeD0deh73VB1NeVeXwfJgU-PmaXvxe2g1FTnPoK%3Dg%40mail.gmail.com.