It appears now that the Presidency has resorted to Jankara tactics as it tries to intimidate the lawyer championing the request for President Muhammadu Buhari to publicly show his School Certificate, as required by law.
The Presidency, instead of doing the needful and the simple (which is to show) said today that it is considering a legal action against Barrister Nnamdi Nwokocha who it said has by his press interview prejudiced public opinion against the President Mohammadu for alleged lack of school certificate and declared him guilty on the pages of newspapers.
Buhari’s Media Aide, Malam Garba Shehu, while reacting to Nwokocha’s press interviews, in a statement said that “it is unfair for a lawyer who is a litigant to a case in court to go out of his way to hijack the power of a Judge by declaring the President guilty of what he is accused of.” According to Malam Shehu, “newspaper pages are not alternative courts where a lawyer can declare anybody guilty of anything when the court has not formally given a definitive judgment on an issue before it.”
He argued that “the two-pages interview splashed on pages 56-57 of ThisDay edition of Saturday June 11th breaches a lawyer’s ethical code and we hope that the court and the Bar Association will take notice of this.” The Presidential Media Aide said “any lawyer that sincerely believes in judicial process and the rights of other parties to a case would not have engaged in the inappropriate and unprofessional practice of trial by media, especially a situation where Nwokocha openly declared the President guilty when the court didn’t make that declaration.”
Shehu reminded that “gag orders emerged in the United States on account of lawyers’ inappropriate conduct on trying and convicting people on the pages of newspapers or the court of public opinion.”
He continued, “free speech is not synonymous with recklessness and wanton abuse of the rights other parties to a case in court.
“The litigant’s unabashed claim that he was a card-carrying member of the opposition PDP which lost power in the last election clearly indicates a scheme that seeks power by circumventing the democratic process of elections.
“If Nwokocha has not stopped his unfair and professionally inappropriate abuse of free speech, the President’s competent team of lawyers will seek the instrumentality of the law in dealing with his unethical actions.”
Shehu concluded: “you cannot be a litigant and be a Judge at the same time.”
This blog sees this as unnecessarily crowding the issue. What Nigerians expect from a president accused of not having the necessary qualification, is to simple show them that he has it. Not more, not less. Rhetoric or threat of legal action is embarrassingly out of point.
cpcnews.org 