'Transmitted Justice' By Adesina Ogunlana

THE LEARNED SQUIB

I am in shock. In fact I have been in shock since 26th February 2008 when the Presidential Election Petition Tribunal delivered its judgment on the Atiku Vs Yar Adua and the Buhari Vs Yar Adua cases. It is at the juncture, that I will know who of my readers, is or are prone to presumption. If you are the presumptious type, you certainly have presumed the reason for my state of shock and I can bet you, you have presumed wrongly? Why did the judgments of the PEPT fling me into a state of shock. Let the presumers tell us? Is it because Mr. Umar Yar’ Adua was declared the victor of the legal contest? No, you are wrong there. Is it because of the reasons advanced by the topmost court, the Supreme Court to justify the INEC created and packaged presidency of Mr. Yar’ Adua? No, you are wrong there again.

Is it because politicians and political groups that lost out in the legal contest, are “yabbing” the PEPT members? Of course, not. That’s only too normal. Is it because, a day or two after the judgment, the Nigerian Army was heard threatening to deal with ‘trouble-makers’ who wanted to disturb the polity because of the judgment. Although I briefly wondered to myself, whether the Army is now in charge of our internal security, and no longer the police, their strange comment did not send me into any state of depression, talk-less, shock.

What I found strange and startling about the judgment was that it was broadcast, and broadcast live.
Why ever did the PEPT do that? Why was it considered necessary or expedient to beam the judgment to the Nigerian public ‘fresh’? Was it to douse tension? Was it to show “transparency” or was it simply done in the spirit of democracy, which in the case can be termed – judgment of the people, by the people for the people? Well, wittingly or unwittingly the PEPT, peopled by elderly folk, have shown that it is an increasingly modern world we now live in. a world of greater liberty, reduced strictures and vanishing barriers. Who knows maybe the day will come when deliberations of judges in chamber conference will be televised live. In that case, there won’t be much need for judges to come to court to deliver their judgment, talk less of going on the air. Then the mystery that enshrouds the judiciary will no longer be.
But a judiciary without a mystery, nay myth, will, I fear be something less and, else. A brave new world, eh? Perhaps, but.