The Yahaya Bello Administration in Kogi State is not surprised to see the Faleke/(Mohammed)Audu camp once more take to the Press spewing rumours aimed at unsettling the polity and shaping impending judicial events in their favour. It is even worse when the only justification for this current misconduct is again undisguised ‘rumour’, devoid of any vestige of substance. The Administration expresses nothing but utter contempt for such vile tactics. It takes career opportunists who have never developed any other means of sustenance but politics to be in such panic-stricken desperation as this, careering from one extreme maneuver to another in hopeless bid to secure their privileged access to public resources.
We are appalled, as usual, by this instant attempt. It seems this madness has finally walked naked into the marketplace. For a litigant, himself the Petitioner/Appellant to issue a media statement through known proxies directly admonishing the Supreme Court of Nigeria on his estimation of public conduct if the Apex Court judgment goes his way is beyond desperate, beyond overreach even. One would say it is atrociously prejudicial to the entire proceedings. We refrain just short of that conclusion, but only from our total submission to the Will of the Almighty and belief in the inviolability of the judicial conduct at those apex levels.
Any follower of the case knows the progression. Faleke and all other challengers to Governor Yahaya Bello’s mandate have lost at The Tribunal and the Court of Appeal. Both courts have been congruent in outlining the facts and law as applicable to the case put before them by the Petitioners including Faleke. Said litigant has remained fixated on self-help however, making multiple attempts to deploy the considerable war-chest and media arsenal at his disposal to brow-beat, or panel-beat, respected individuals and sacred institutions into abominable shapes after the image of his own gods.
While the maxim ‘…there is no smoke without fire’ is popular in the English language, its import remains inapplicable in the circumstances of its usage in that media release by the bumbling Duro Meseko on behalf of the Faleke/(Mohammed)Audu Camp. With reference to their serial losses in the courts, nothing has happened to show undue influence over the Judiciary by our side. Even when the usual suspects secured the Tribunal’s relocation to the nation’s capital, we were content to meet, and trounce, them there.
The fact is that those outcomes the Faleke/(Mohammed)Audu camp fear are inevitable when people file baseless cases in court and enter into default appellate mode. You cannot put something on nothing and expect it to stand is a long-standing legal nugget which has restrained reasonable people from frivolous litigation. If litigants choose to ignore its wisdom however, the Judiciary can only offer them fair hearing at each stage while patiently reiterating the established jurisprudence on the matter.
We must note that since the Faleke/(Mohammed)Audu camp is so desperate for smoke to screen their evil deeds and fires to burn innocent constituencies and institutions to the ground when final outcomes in this matter fail to favour them, we urge them to consider this immortal wisdom of Africa: ‘it is those who try to start a fire with wet firewood who will suffocate themselves with peppery smoke’. Governor Yahaya Bello and the New Direction Agenda in Kogi State therefore admonishes the Faleke/(Mohammed)Audu gang of carpetbaggers to look inwards for the source of their present unease. On our part, we are content to let Truth have its way.
We have said this before and we repeat it again for emphasis: the Kogi State Government will not stand by and watch any person, including the scion of any family, no matter how highly regarded his forebear might be with the Administration, institutionalise mayhem in Kogi State on the asinine misconception that political succession answers to biological patrimony.
This Administration has combated all sorts of violent criminality to a standstill and will not relent till every Kogite and all travellers through our lands can go about their business in total security and peace. We believe in the rule of law and we respect it too much to elevate anyone above it. Aggrieved persons must follow due process and wait for the process to exhaust itself. No one is permitted to take the laws into their own hands or resort to violent self-help, even in so-called ‘family matters’.
Perhaps it is time the judicial authorities consider laying a gag order on all parties involved in the various Petitions pending before the Supreme Court to avoid further inflammatory or prejudicial comment or conduct. The Faleke/(Mohammed)Audu camp are urged to decorate themselves with some decorum and wait for their attrition against Governor Bello, the Governing All Progressives Congress
Mohammed Awwal
Hon Commissioner for,
Information, Culture and Tourism
