Today, I was at the CCT trial of Dr. Bukola Saraki and I witnessed something that I had never seen before:
As a law student, I asked my sister who is a journalist for one of the national dailies to take me with her as this was her beat.
I did my initial research, and I was expecting to see that based on the Tribunal’s non-adherence to Section 3, Paragraph D of the Act that establishes the Code of Conduct Tribunal (CCT), the charges against the Senate President, Dr. Bukola Saraki would be dismissed – like Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s charges were. After all, the procedural errors in the case seemed similar, if not the same.
However, what surprised me the most is that as soon as Justice Umar started reading out his judgement, he began to stammer, stutter, and stumble through many words in his own ruling. Who makes multiple mistakes on something that he wrote with his own hands? Who cannot pronounce words that he put in his own judgement?
Honestly, it was only when some people beside me began to ask if he had in fact written the judgement by himself that I myself began to wonder – after he messed up on a few more words – whether he knew what he was saying.
Something else that equally surprised me is that a section of Justice Umar’s ruling sounded oddly similar to the Nation Newspapers and Sahara Reporters report on the dissimilarities between Saraki and Tinubu’s cases at the CCT.
In a nutshell, Dan Ladi Umar said that “The tribunal has since realised that the decision it made on the case between FRN vs Tinubu was in error and has clearly departed from it.” Isn’t this self-indictment? How can a judge on such a sensitive bench rule one way today, and decide to rule another way tomorrow?
I might be wrong, but anyone else who was in court today should tell me: did you also notice all these things? What’s your take?
-From Nkami Egbuna