For Governor Aliyu Magatakarda Wammako of Sokoto State the attainment of 60 years of age is indeed a coming of age. Though, in keeping with the spiritual ambience of the Seat of the Caliphate, of which he is temporal head, and his own respect for decorum in governance, there was no fanfare, the occasion must have provided a unique opportunity for reflections on other significant events in his political career. Now heading steadily into the second half of a second term His Excellency may have begun to get some relief after the agonizing predicament of a protracted and pernicious legal running battle waged by his political foes. He has definitely translated the dividend of peace of mind and unwavering focus on duty occasioned by the eventual and final squelching of the serial legal challenge of his popular election by the Supreme Court into greater good governance for the people of Sokoto State.
It may nevertheless be of interest in the context of remarkable milestones of Governor Wammako’s tenure to learn that the same tortuous legal trauma he went through to revalidate his twice-affirmed popular mandate has now earned him a singular pride of place in the annals of election petition trials as a robust reference point in political litigations in Nigeria henceforth. This is by virtue of the fact that the Muhammadu Maigari Dingyadi (DPP) versus Aliyu Magatakarda Wammako(PDP) election petition trial which lasted from May 11, 2007 to April 8, 2011 is the longest election trial ever.
This case engaged the attention of the political class and the general public with alarm and apprehension just as it tasked the mental faculties and professional competence of the legal teams involved while it lasted. Indeed, in a climaxing turn of events, the election trial ultimately shook the foundations of the nation’s judiciary with the threat of “drifting into judicial anarchy” and imminent pronouncement of “conflicting interpretation” of identical issues by two different courts of equal jurisdiction, as succinctly described by the legal luminary Yahaya Mahmoud ,SAN, himself a veteran of the case, in his concise compilation of the facts and issues of the saga.
Governor Wammako’s experiences capture the vicissitudes of life and the astonishing changes of circumstances that can only be divinely determined. Sai Alu’s remarkable rise from the suppressing machinations of his former political boss Bafarawa into the irrepressible hero of the people of Sokoto State transformed him into a legend in his own time. The persistence by proxy in pursuing Governor Wammako with intent to reverse his resurgence instead took a heavy toll on his political predators whose political shadows shortened dramatically.
The more profound political repercussions of the protracted legal challenge of his popular democratic mandate are of timeless significance. The legal angle precisely outlined in the Yahaya Mahmoud compilation of the trial raises several salient points to ponder. The opportunity to extend the political competition for popular mandate to tribunals and courts and to even stand a good chance of effectively capturing the mandate by legal tactics is considered an affront on the sanctity of the expressed popular will of the people through the ballot box. Wammako’s landslide election results of 392,258 in 2007 and 568,395 in 2008 above 296,419 and 126,046 respectively for Dingyadi meant little to the tribunals and courts pre-occupied with pre-election procedures of qualification and nomination.
No less perplexing is the seeming solicitousness of the election tribunals, courts of appeal, federal high courts and even the Supreme Court implicit in entertaining proceedings, making pronouncements and sundry acts of commission and omission whose outrageous outcome included the creation of loopholes for litigants to “shop” for convenient verdicts and for judges to deliver conflicting interpretations of identical issues thereby paving the way for judicial anarchy to loom ominously over the temple of justice. Even as the Supreme Court and ultimately the National Judicial Council were eventually constrained to intervene to save the judiciary from terminal implosion, the rattled ranks of laymen shuddered at the thought of the consequences of a judicial coup ousting Wammako’s tumultuously popular democratic mandate. The voice of the people proved to be the Voice of God when Governor Wammako polled 518,247 votes to secure his second term mandate on February 8, 2012, dusting his closest rival’s 131,048.
This awesome conflict of political and judicial constituencies staged across seven tribunals and courts over a period of almost 4 years during which the verdict of the people was twice affirmed will also be a memorable milestone in the political career of Aliyu Magatakarda Wammako and the history of political struggle of the good people of Sokoto State whose “patience and resilience” is saluted in the compilation by Yahaya Mahmood, SAN.
Abdulhamid Babatunde, former Editor, The Democrat, wrote from Kaduna
