Ladoja, swear in the chairman
THE centrality of the rule of law to the sustenance of democracy is a point that has often been emphasised, but one to which key political actors pay scant regard. On the part of the executive branch of government, the short shift to the rule of law usually takes the form of disobedience of court orders.
Thus, under the subterfuge of seeking to interprete judicial decisions that are as clear as crystal, the executive has been acting in utter contempt of the courts. This is so in Anambra State where Chief Ben Obi won election to the Senate. But through executive indifference to the various decisions by the election tribunals, the court of appeal and even the Supreme Court, Chief Obi has yet to take his seat in the Senate. This unfortunate situation is compounded by the resort to abuse of court process through the filing of vexatious applications by persons in cahoots with the Federal authorities, the indifference and disregard of court rulings by the INEC and the curious acquiescence of the Senate in this illegality and injustice. By their action, these organs of the Federal Government are not only discrediting but impairing our democracy.
A similar nauseating scenario is unfolding in Oyo State. There, a candidate of the ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) was first declared winner of the chairmanship election of Ibarapa East Local Government Council. But upon the hearing of a petition filed by the candidate of the Alliance for Democracy (AD), Mr. Joshua Adewuyi Akintaro, the Election Petition Tribunal on August 16 upturned the PDP candidate's purported victory. The PDP candidate appealed.
Two months later, the Oyo State High Court Appeal Tribunal upheld the lower tribunal's earlier ruling. Being a local council election, the parties were deemed to have exhausted all available legal avenues for redress, as stipulated in the relevant state law. In the circumstances, the state Governor, Alhaji Rashid Ladoja, was under obligation to swear in the AD candidate as chairman. That, however, has not happened.
In the further instance of abuse of court process, the PDP candidate, Moses Kolawole, filed another suit at the state high court. On November 22, the case was struck out, with harsh words from the presiding judge, who described the action as "incompetent...an abuse of court process and malicious". In spite of this, signalling that the PDP has reached the end of the road, the AD candidate is yet to be sworn in. Instead, the party has resorted to writing to Governor Ladoja, beseeching him to inaugurate the chairman.
The unfortunate impression created by the unfolding events is that the governor has declined to act because the court decision was unfavourable to his party's candidate. Such selective obedience to court rulings does havoc to the rule of law and to democracy. For more than a year, the Federal Government similarly spurned a court ruling whose import was the restoration of the police orderlies for Governor Chris Ngige of Anambra State. The reason for that disposition was simply because the ruling was unfavourable to agents of the Federal Government who are anti-Ngige.
Admittedly, Governor Ladoja's refusal to swear in the successful AD candidate was cloaked under due process. Without a certificate issued by the Oyo State Independent Electoral Commission, which conducted the council polls, there is, on the face of it, no evidence that Mr. Akintaro is the winner of the chairmanship election.
Now that the matters have been judicially disposed of, the state electoral commission has a duty to issue the certificate of victory, without further delay. Thereafter, and in fact, contemporaneously, we expect the Governor to swear in the new council chairman, who has been elected to perform functions which he is unable to carry out because the opposing party in power at the state level is disrespectful of the law.
It is a measure of the restraint being exercised by supporters of AD that they have not reacted abrasively to the continued denial of their party of its fruits of electoral labour. There are too many hot spots in the country already, that Oyo State ought to be spared the tragedy of a blow-out between the PDP-led government and the AD.
There will always be elections in the future. A loss now should never be seen as the end of the road. Governor Ladoja has an urgent task to get over with this unsavoury incident once and for all. But above all, the travesty in Oyo State bears out the warnings we had issued in the past that unless the law and the courts are respected by the Federal authorities as in the case of Chief Ben Obi, other tiers of govt may begin to copy these acts of illegality.
