Legislators are not independent –Mark

Barrister Ibrahim Mark, a former General Secretary of the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA), was called to bar in 1990. He has been practicing law all along for the past 26 years. In this interview, he speaks about the recent Supreme Court judgment in Rivers and sundry other issues. Excerpts: You are a former NBA General […]

Barrister Ibrahim Mark, a former General Secretary of the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA), was called to bar in 1990. He has been practicing law all along for the past 26 years. In this interview, he speaks about the recent Supreme Court judgment in Rivers and sundry other issues. Excerpts:

You are a former NBA General Secretary, do you have any regret what you should have done which you didn’t do? Any regret, whatsoever?
I was a privileged person to be elected by my colleagues to be General Secretary and I had a picture in mind though in the true nature of man, you will say you would have wished you had done more than what you did achieve but the peculiar nature of life is that you cannot be the one that will solve all problems that is in our organization. You have to do your bit and leave for another person to continue. So, I won’t say I have any regret. What I will say is that I am very glad that I was privileged to be given that opportunity to serve by my colleagues.
What is your assessment, particularly about the recent  Supreme Court judgment on Rivers State?
I was reading a write-up of Professor Sagay the other day about Rivers State judgment. He just picked Rivers State and was dissecting it, quoting laws why the Supreme Court was wrong. I felt so bad. I was like crying. This is a man who was revered. He taught some of my friends; he was a good law teacher, he wrote books. But he is now trying to suffer from self-induced amnesia. He’s now pandering into partisan politics and he’s not even practicing it on merit or saying the truth. He was quoting some English law to back up some of the things when we have Nigerian laws on all these authorities. He knew the judgment he was citing are persuasive, they are not what you write in Nigeria to say it’s the state of law. If you are talking about Supreme Court or Appeal Court judgment, you can’t write an article based on English laws as a legal opinion because that was his legal opinion based on English law which all of us know that those laws are persuasive authorities.
Some people also forget the fact that what happened in Rivers State is the law in Ambode’s case; it is the law in Yari’s case who is an APC governor in Zamfara. It is the same law in other jurisdiction. Why are you now singling out Rivers State? The Supreme Court did not revert themselves. They have held in so many cases that once you say there is no election or you say there are infractions you must prove it unit by unit. Because that is where the elections were conducted. You cannot come now and say there was violence in this ward – NO – there can be no violence in a ward, violence occurs only in units because that is where the election was conducted. Those units are the starting points; you can’t have ward results without the units, you add the units’ results and all the units’ results are collated at the ward level, then at LGA level, then at State or Senatorial or Federal constituencies. That was what happened. But where the votes are cast is the units; that’s where you must get it right.
Rivers State was now being dissected as if different laws were used. If the matters of all the House of Assemblies that went to Court of Appeal had gone to the Supreme Court, they would win. Rivers State is like a guinea pig that is as if somebody wants to deal with them. That is the perception of the people. Now they have gone back and they have still won the re-run elections again. Don’t you now see something is wrong because even this winning shows that the Supreme Court was right?
Now we have governors in the National Assembly collecting salaries and they have approved laws for themselves to be collecting jumbo gratuity and pension. How do you react to that?
I don’t think we can blame governors for approving, because it is the legislators that approved the laws for that. The legislators passed the law and the governors merely signed it. Even if it is an executive bill, you have a say to look at it. But, you see, because the problem we have is that the legislators are not independent in Nigeria. If they are truly independent they won’t do what they are doing. They approved houses for them in the states and in the FCT. What type of pension is that? And look at  the civil servants who have retired who worked for 32 years their common pension cannot sustain them and you are approving house in the state capital and another house in the FCT for former governors.
What is your take on the herdsman and farmers clashes across the nation?
In the whole thing it’s the government you blame no matter what anybody is telling me, you can’t tell me that those people perpetrating these violent acts are stronger than government. Look at the way people were being macheted as if we are in the 18th Century, look at the gory pictures we are seeing. And you cannot tell me that the intelligence we have in the country does not or cannot even know that those things are going to happen.
My advice is that government should do the needful. They should step up on their information gathering and they should also step up on their preventive efforts and even when it has happened, they should apprehend the people. So that people will know there is no room for criminality and even those that have lost their persons will be able to say at least justice has been done for my person. Although the dead won’t come back.