Democracy is a game of rules and numbers
Sir: I have been listening or if you like, monitoring a number of radio programs lately and have been riled by the amount of stark ignorance that passes for opinion
- By Percy Owaiye
Sir: I have been listening or if you like, monitoring a number of radio programs lately and have been riled by the amount of stark ignorance that passes for opinion and the ease with which anchors, many of them just as ignorant, or feeding their bias, allow them to pass.
The abuse to which the third arm of government, that is the judiciary, has been subjected to is uncalled for and if unchecked will certainly lead us all to Golgotha.
I am not a lawyer, but I am worried that the often targeted branch, the bench, by virtue of their conventions, is hardly allowed to defend itself. So, the mob, masquerading as the jury, often led by self-serving and at best, mischievous members of the bar, haul insults and all sorts at it, forgetting that in the end, we will all come back to it for redress.
Many times, they point to the judgements that do not go their way as evidence of this and conveniently forget the many others that have been entered in their favour. A recent case in point is the apex court’s delivery in the matter involving the ADC and the other parties.
Read Also: Nigeria’s economy rebounds strongly, report shows
I was alarmed to hear commentators and anchors frame it as a final test of the judiciary’s independence, when even the blind can see that it is a case of one party’s attempt at self-help and dangerous circumvention of the due process. Simply put, what David Mark and his accomplices were busy serving us the public - ignorant and compromised as we were - was what they should have taken to the court of first instance in the first place. And they know it!
Why did they not do it then? The answer, as they say, is blowing in the wind. In the end, democracy as a form of government is, ab initio complicated, in that it makes too many assumptions, and made even more complex by those who are supposed to play by it. It is a game of numbers because it is assumed “the government of the people, by the people, and for the people,” but it must first be a game of rules because all who participate in it must be guided. Anything short of this is a return to the Hobbesian state where life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”
Perhaps, there are many who will argue that we never left there.
•Percy Owaiye,
Lagos.
