BRIEF REMARKS BY ASIWAJU BOLA TINUBU AT JUSTICE AYO SALAMI’S BOOK LAUNCH IN ABUJA ON WEDNESDAY OCTOBER 30TH, 2013. BOOK TITLE IS -“AYO SALAMI- THROUGH LIFE AND JUSTICE”
We gather today to give live honor to a living man of integrity, intellectual courage, wisdom and discipline. A man who reaffirmed and kept faith with the true meaning of justice even when the powerful and mighty tried to redefine it as something it was not. He stood alone and singlehandedly tried to give the Nigerian judiciary a rebirth.
This man is no mythic fable or figment of our desperate search for heroes. This is a real man who we all know. Whenever the history of the Nigerian judiciary is told or written the name of Justice Ayo Salami, former President of the Appeal Court, will occupy a place of supreme honor and respect. Many have said he is the finest jurist of this generation. They may well be right.
We live in an era where justice has been placed on the auction block. Too often the temple of justice has decayed into a chamber deceit. One man fought to bring justice back into the temple through singular acts of courage. He stared injustice and the misconduct of craven power in the face and did not flinch. He stood his ground
because it was a firm and honest position, established on the unbiased rule of law.
Justice Salami represented the judiciary a true democracy needs. We are yet to achieve this judiciary simply because those in power do not want it. They do not want judges who are objective arbiters of the law. They want jurists who cheer for them not jurist who cherish the law. They want judges who believe power and might
are the law not judges who believe in the power and might of the law. For being forthright and objective, Salami was taken from his deserved position on the bench by the ruling party.An innocent man was made to suffer. pilloried for the sin of being good and forthright. Those who forced him into retirement saw him as an obstacle because he did not play favorites. when it came to the law, he did not play at all. He held the law in great esteem and protected it as one should protect the cornerstone of a just society.
The story of Justice Salami is instructive. Despite being exonerated by numerous panels of men of integrity, the government refused to re-instate him. Though kept at home. He was a constant thorn in their side because he would not abide their script. His compass was not the demands of those in power . His compass was the dictates of
the law. In another setting, he would have been proclaimed a great and noble man. In Nigeria, he was punished.
Salami’s account is the story of Nigeria. Nigeria stands in the cross winds of history. Unless we find more men with the gravity and sobriety of Justice Salami in the judiciary we shall be swept in the wrong direction by the terrible gales of unbridled ambition and mean power.
In an era of electoral thievery, Nigerians had their votes stolen and elections manipulated. The ruling PDP had perfected the art of losing at the ballot box but winning at the arbitrary stroke of a pen held by some compromised INEC agent. The 2007 elections wrongly applauded by the international observers as credible was a most brazenly rigged exercise. It was an open carnival of malpractice.
PDP candidates who were clear losers were awarded the trophy as governors in Ekiti, Edo, Osun and Ondo states. The opposition is fairly tolerant but this amount of thievery no one can stomach. The aggrieved went to court. They asked the judiciary to fulfill its duty by applying justice where justice had gotten cheated. In a long and tough battle, justice prevailed rafter nearly three years of litigation and battle.
When the cases arrived at the Court of Appeal, one man was waiting. This was one man who made the difference. He was Justice Ayo Salami, the President of the Appeal Court. Soon the stolen victories in Osun, Ekiti, Edo and Ondo where overturned and the people’s mandates were restored to the proper winners.
That should have been the end of it where law and history merged in to a just and happy ending. But wait. It did not happen that nice way..
The PDP government refused to see justice for what it is. Exposed for what they had done, they ambushed the man who had the singular courage to protect justice. Ayo Salami became a target of an obtuse and intricate plot to discredit him. Colleagues in the judiciary were recruited and pressured to rubbish him. First, he was to promoted into a nice-sounding but irrelevant position. He wisely rejected that trap. His foes then upped the ante. If he would not be coaxed out of position, they would simply pull him from it.
Their objective was to ensure that he would never be in a position to deliver judgments that might go against the PDP if the law and facts were against the PDP. They became obsessed with seeing the back of him as the presidential election case moved to the Appeal Court.
Justice Salami was the President of the Appeal court on the eve of the judgement in the presidential elections involving Jonathan. At this point, the current government used its mercenaries in the judiciary to suspend Justice Salami without cause or reason. Despite being cleared of any wrongdoing, Jonathan blatantly refused to
re-instate the man. He bolted the door shut against an innocent, upright man until he was due for retirement. This is the how the current government defines justice. This is why they can do little right and do mostly wrong. whatever they do right is by accident and when they do wrong it mostly backfires against them. This government
is its own worst enemy. But worst, it is a burden on the people and the collective search for just governance.
In 2011 our elections were again more crass than credible. Our judiciary through the election tribunals did little to dispense justice in most cases. What happened to justice Salami had frightened the few other judges who might have had the courage to stand against the whims of power.
Nigerians had their votes stolen and manipulated once more. The electoral pilferage had reached crisis proportion. We need to return to basic decency. If not, the next general election will be so substandard that no one can
predict its aftermath.
In 2007, the incoming PDP government knew its lack of legitimacy would impair its already suspect capacity to govern. To salvage its image, government inaugurated the Electoral Reform Committee. Chaired by former Chief Justice of Nigeria, Muhammadu Lawal Uwais, the committee produced a comprehensive report enumerating 83 procedural
and substantive recommendations. Key recommendations dealt with the independence of the electoral commission and creating an electoral process secure from manipulation. If implemented, the report would have moved Nigeria closer to genuine democracy. In effect, the PDP did not bargain on the Uwais Committee taking its mission seriously.
In constituting the Committee, the government got what it did not want: a true road map for reform. But it was the type of reform that would end the party’s undemocratic grip on power..
If we are serious and if this government is serious, it would return to the important bit of unfinished business. Government would have the courage to implement the Uwais report. If there is but one law passed before the next general elections, let it be a law implementing the report and adding the important innovation of bio-metric voting. Then we shall have a level playing ground. Let the people and the chips fall where they may. The APC is willing to go this route and stake its fortune on the will of the electorate. THe PDP cannot make the same claim. it is still
seeking ways to engineer the people out of the elections that are supposed to manifest their sovereign will in selecting the government and leaders of their choice.
In conclusion, the judiciary was intended to be the guardian of fair play. Without such a protector, democracy lies exposed to the ravages of power. This is the case in Nigeria today. Instead of learning democratic lessons from the judicial overturning of its electoral violations, the ruling party has vowed t overturn the impartiality of the judiciary. Instead of desisting from practices deemed improper, the PDP now employs those same practices to wreck the operation of justice.
Thus government wrongfully ended the career of one of our illustrious jurists, Court of Appeal President, Justice Isa Salami. What was his crime? He refused to put his sense of justice on sale. Because of this, they slandered and libeled him. They rumoured he was in the pockets of the ACN. This was a terrible lie against a good man. Our party has no hold on him. His verdicts were not for the ACN. They were for justice. However, those in power could not tolerate his impartiality. So partisan and power-mad, they cannot see that this man operates from principles different and more exalted than the crude politics they play. IN everything, they see a power game. the notions of justice and fairness are as far from them as the sun is from the moon. They sacrificed this fine jurist to send a clear and blunt message to other jurists: GO AGAINST OUR WISHES AND LOSE YOUR ROBES. If such a thing can fall
upon so senior a jurist, what hope for the others. What hope for the common man? The answer is none, unless the public cries out against the PDP turning the rule of law from an inalienable right into a tradable item that it owns
and controls.
Our courts have become Islands of confusion as judges are now forced to balance their conscience against their careers. As a consequence, we face the troubling development of having the scant progress in INEC performance being completely overtaken by this subjugation of the judiciary. We are thus confronted with a process that is timed for backward rather than forward movement. Justice Salami will remain the thorn in the flesh and the hammer in the minds of those who seek to clip justice to gain undue political power and advantage. Yet, nothing they do can eclipse his courageous contribution to democracy and to the restoration of hope in our judiciary. Some day, Nigeria shall erect a monument in his name. But the best monument to give this man is a living one. Let us, continue
to demand electoral reform. Let us demand judicial independence so other jurists can act in the the spirit of this man we today honor. If we do this, Nigeria would have executed the proper turn to its better future. And whenever the story of the judiciary of this nation is told, the name Ayo Salami will find powerful and true mention. (Nigerian News)
