Plateau lawmakers’ sack: Group urges NJC to sack Appeal Court President, others
A group, Guardians of Democracy and Development Initiative, has called on the National Judicial Council, NJC, to sack the President of the Court of Appeal and other erring justices of the Court who sacked all lawmakers from Plateau State elected on the platform of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP.
The group, which made this known at a news conference in Abuja, addressed by its leaders, said that the president of the appellate court and other justices nearly jeopardized national security by deliberately short changing clear winners in the last general elections in the country.
“We were on the brink of a monumental national crises due to a willful assault on our democracy by a set of Judges who abandoned the law, judicial precedents and sound legal reasoning to pursue interests suspected to be pecuniary.
”But all thanks to the Supreme Court who rescued the country and restored hope in our democracy by the sound judgements it delivered on Friday, January 12, 2024.
“Across the country, many elected officials lost their freely given mandates in suspect judgements in which the Election Petition Tribunal or Court of Appeals assumed jurisdictions over matters it has none,” the group said.
“They have happened as pockets of cases, grave as they were to democracy, till the monumental disaster which swept off nearly all the mandates given to the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) in Plateau. And this was in addition to the vexatious judgements in Kano and Zamfara States,” it added.
The group said that security and political tension peaked at this point, describing what the Justices of the Court of Appeal Tribunal led by Justice Elfrieda Williams-Dawodu who presided over the cases emanating from Plateau State did as horrendous.
“It remains one of the greatest assaults on democracy in Nigeria. It was indeed a brazen judicial heist. And coming from the judiciary? It is unacceptable. It must be repudiated. It has to be remedied. And this includes also those involved in the attempted judicial “banditry” in Kano and Zamfara,” they said.
“The Justices that are culpable should have no place in our judiciary. The thought that these set of Justices may one day find their ways to the Supreme Court is horrifying. It should not happen at all,” they added.
“For the records, these Justices unjustly sacked 2 Senators, 5 members House of Representatives and 16 State House of Assembly members in one State; Plateau State. There was no reason in the Nigerian laws to have done that.”
The group further alleged that it had have every reason to believe that justice was deliberately miscarried.
“Imagine the crises that would have been ravaging in Plateau now if the case of Governor Caleb Mutfwang were to be terminated at the Court of Appeal like those of the House of Assembly and National Assembly.
“This is how much crises a set of careless and perhaps, compromised Justices would have caused this country,” the group added, saying that such actions would have been the same in Kano and Zamfara States.
“The country would have gone up in flames because of the decisions of these judges or Justices both at the Tribunal level and the Court of Appeal.
“There is a total lack of confidence in the Court of Appeal as we speak, especially against the backdrop of how they were severely berated by the Supreme Court.
”This looks more like a judicial hatchet job. The judiciary should be rid of Justices like these both in the Court of Appeal and the Tribunal (as in the case of Kano State),” the group said.
“The National Judicial Council (NJC) should therefore act with dispatch and firmly as Nigerians are waiting for a firm and definite action while the world is watching,” the group added.
