The Law Is the Last Hope of a Scam

by Uzor Maxim Uzoatu

What a laugh when it is claimed on high that the law is the last hope of the common man!

Law and the common man are very strange bedfellows. Law belongs with the highest bidder.  

Justice and lawyers are parallel lines that can never meet. How can there be justice when there are lawyers?

Law and lawyers ought not to appear in the same sentence.

The rule of law can only work once lawyers are left out of the matter. As Shakespeare penned in Henry VI, “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.”

If Shakespeare said it, who am I to say the opposite?

Look at what has just happened in Owerri, Imo State. The law in its most unfathomable wisdom has declared the man who came dead last in an election as the winner!

When one wonders what occult powers led to this magic, a ready answer emanates thusly: After all, Father Mbaka had prophesied it!

And the Supreme Court has issued the final and irreversible imprimatur!

Abracadabra does not come any greater than seeing the Supreme Court actually inflating the number of INEC’s accredited voters of 823,743 by awarding a staggering 925,825 ghost votes to its preferred winner, some 102,082 votes above the INEC accredited votes!

The PDP chair Uche Secondus has dropped the bombshell that “even if all the excess accredited votes of 127,209 manufactured by the Supreme Court were added to Uzodinma/APC it will be 223,657 votes, still less than Ihedioha’s votes of 276,494 by 42,747 votes.”

Obviously, the legal profession and good old arithmetic are not the best of friends.

I can’t remember the wag who said that “a good lawyer knows the law but the great lawyer knows the judge!”

There is the extant law that for any vote to count according to the Electoral Act, that vote must be accredited!

I have to admit that I am not a learned man, and cannot therefore decode the convoluted scams of the legal world.

Lawyers are simply insuperable, which makes Mario Puzo to write in The Godfather: “A lawyer with his briefcase can steal more than a hundred men with guns.”

There is the rickety bus plying the wonky road from Orlu to Owerri in Imo State which bears the legend: “God’s case, no appeal.”

I have just been informed that after the Uzodinma-versus-Ihedioha verdict the lettering on the bus has been changed to: “Supreme Court Case, No Appeal.”

The only mere mortals that used to rival Supreme Court justices in the finality of their judgment used to be football referees.

But now, with the advent of VAR, the football referees are no longer in the same class as the Supreme Court lords.

The handmaiden of the Supreme Court is the special brand of lawyer known as the Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN).

I have it on good authority that it is the SAN’s hocus-pocus that almost always informs the Supreme Court’s higgledy-piggledy.

Mbaka’s mumbo-jumbo snookers the hoity-toity of the hoi polloi.

Beyond the big words, the concoctions of the SANs, the Supreme Court, Mbaka and federal executive power do not agree with my constitution at all.

It smacks of a scam of the 419 mode complete with Ghana-Must-Go bags containing the mysterious votes of wonder that swung the Owerri verdict.

Even after the judicial heist, Hope Uzodinma did not score the needed 25 percent of the votes cast in two-third of the local governments required by the constitution yet the powers-that-be would want the world to keep quiet.

Nigeria has since become a butt of jokes across the globe. After the cabal-mandated and Mbaka-facilitated – but arithmetic-challenged – show of utter shame in Imo State, the Supreme Court must on the pain of death not allow the sacred zenith of justice to sink deeper into gutter shamelessness! Something ought to still be sacred in this benighted country!    

During the days of military dictatorship, we were used to scams being staged in the Central Bank and even in the State House. We could understand because in military rule anything goes.  

It is simply out of this world that in a democracy a scam is arranged in the temple of justice known as the Supreme Court.

The pity is that the Supreme Court became used, and abused, because its judgment is irreversible.

The law has in the last resort become the last hope of scammers.   

You may also like

Leave a Comment