Infecting the Supreme Court

Worldwide, whenever a court delivers judgment, it becomes functus officio. This is a Latin maxim which, according to Black’s Law Dictionary, means, “having fulfilled the function, discharged the office, or accomplished the purpose, and therefore of no further force or authority”. Applied to a court, it means that once a court delivers a judgment, it has no further force or authority to adjudicate on the case. In summary, it has no jurisdiction to adjudicate further on the case.

In Nigeria, according to Section 285(6)(7) of the 1999 Constitution, “an election tribunal shall deliver its judgment in writing within 180 days from the date of the filing of the petition”, while “an appeal from a decision of an election tribunal or Court of Appeal in an election matter shall be heard and disposed of within 60 days from the date of the delivery of judgment of the tribunal or Court of Appeal.”

The Supreme Court is the final court in our country and its decision is final. Section 235 of the 1999 Constitution states, “without prejudice to the powers of the president or of the governor of a state with respect to prerogative of mercy, no appeal shall lie to any other body or person from any determination of the Supreme Court.” This simply means that whenever the Supreme Court gives any judgment, it becomes functus officio and does not have any further force, authority or jurisdiction to adjudicate on the matter. Worse still, if the time to appeal has exceeded 60 days in election cases, the Supreme Court can no longer entertain the matter as it has become statute barred.

In civilized societies, the judgment of the Supreme Court is sacrosanct and everybody obeys it even if with reservations. Throughout my adult life, it was only once that the American presidential election was settled by the Supreme Court and even at that, the loser at the Supreme Court, Al Gore, former Vice President of the USA, disagreed with the judgment, but accepted it and obeyed it. He did not go back to the court to seek for a review. Al-Gore warned every foreign country who thought that his election squabbles with George W. Bush will weaken the foundation of American democracy to buzz off. He neither demonstrated against the judgment of the Supreme Court nor solicited the assistance of foreign countries to interfere in the affairs of the American government simply because the Supreme Court ruled against him. Also recently, Boris Johnson, the British Prime Minister, lost a case at the British Supreme Court concerning Brexit. He simply obeyed the judgment and sought political solution to the problems of Brexit by subjecting his decisions to the will of the British people through elections. He did not ask for the review of the judgment. Here in Nigeria, with myriad of corrupt, unpatriotic and infected politicians who only think of power and elections and not their country or the welfare of the people, whenever they win election cases at the Supreme Court, the court becomes the court of justice, but whenever they lose at the court, the Supreme Court becomes a cesspool of corruption and compromised judges. Let me be the first to admit that some of the judgments of the Supreme Court in our recent past have been disturbing, but there must be an end to litigation. Truth be told, there are periods when politics can be unfair, but politicians must learn to disagree at times, but accept the outcome of results and final decision of the Supreme Court for the common good of the country. History can be mad at times, but history must be made all the time. Even the Supreme Court itself has not claimed to be infallible. They have only claimed, and rightly too, to be final. It is their finality that bestows infallibility on them not the other way round.

A disturbing scenario has erupted with some of the decisions of the Supreme Court recently. These decisions include the Zamfara elections, Imo governorship election, and the Bayelsa governorship election. These decisions were handed out against both the APC and the PDP. Indeed, two are against APC, the ruling party and one is against the PDP. Rather than these parties respecting the finality of the Supreme Court, they have resorted to appealing their cases to the same Supreme Court to change its decision. You can imagine that the mere admitting of these cases for review by the Supreme Court has opened a floodgate of appeals to the court. The PDP has indicated that it will appeal the Supreme Court decisions of the Presidential election, Kano, Kaduna, Katsina and Osun states gubernatorial elections thereby turning the whole thing into a huge joke taken too far and thereby infecting the Supreme Court.

One thing the Supreme Court has guarded jealously till date is the finality of its judgment. On the day it loses it, it loses everything that makes it sacred. The Supreme Court has imposed harsh penalties in heavy fines against lawyers who have tried in the past to make it change its decisions. It has called a politician “a scoundrel” for daring to come before it to make it change its decision even after collecting N10 million from the respondent with a promise that he will not pursue the case further against the respondent. Please see the case of Andy Ubah versus Peter Obi. The dictionary defines a scoundrel as an unprincipled, dishonourable person; a villain. This trait of being unprincipled and dishonourable is an infectious disease which most Nigerian politicians have. The more shameless scoundrels are some of the politicians who line up foreign embassies seeking for the interference of other countries in our judicial process or line up in protest in the home of a Supreme Court judge just because she was part of a team that gave a unanimous judgment against a party. These antiquated politicians forgot that one of the countries it is inviting to interfere in their judicial process recently impeached its president for inviting a foreign government to investigate a political rival. They are quick in accusing their own government of interfering with the judiciary and yet shamelessly inviting foreign governments to interfere in their own judiciary. I heard one foreign politician threatening our Supreme Court to reverse its judgment on Imo gubernatorial election based on these protests. This is something he will never ask his own Supreme Court to do. Shame!!!

Let us even examine the laws that some of these appellants rely on to disturb the peace of the Supreme Court and ridicule our apex court worldwide. It is trite law that judicial precedents of the Supreme Court are not binding on it, they are simply persuasive. They can depart from them at will so citing any of them here will be unhelpful. There is no provision in the Constitution that allows the Supreme Court to review its decision. We are left with ORDER 8 RULE 16 OF THE SUPREME COURT RULES which states, “The Court shall not review any judgment once given and delivered by it save to correct any clerical mistake or some error arising from any accidental slip or omission, or to vary the judgment or order so as to give effect to its meaning or intention. A judgment or order shall not be varied when it correctly represents what the court decided nor shall the operative and substantive part of it be varied and a different form substituted.” A look at this rule will show that it does not give any appellant the right to appeal the judgment of the Supreme Court to the Supreme Court. It simply grants the right to an appellant to seek for the review of the decision in terms of any clerical mistake or accidental slip. For instance, if the Supreme Court wrote Kennedy instead of Kenneth as the name of the appellant or wrote London instead of Lagos as the place to perform a certain order, the appellant can apply to the Supreme Court for review in order to give effect to its meaning and intention. Any other requests from an appellant which border on the Supreme Court changing its operative and substantive part of its judgment and substituting it with a different one is no longer a review, but an appeal against the judgment of the Supreme Court and the court has no jurisdiction to entertain it. A look at all the purported application for review by all these parties reveal that they are seeking for the variation and substitution of the operative and substantive part of the Supreme Court judgment and replacing them with the ones favourable to them. With respect, the Supreme Court has no jurisdiction to do that. However, the Supreme Court must insulate itself from being infected with this disease of being unprincipled and dishonourable pervading our politicians by delivering judgments based on justice, punishing lawyers who aid these litigants to ridicule the court and avoiding every appearance of these brand of politicians.