Nigeria’s Senate Minority Leader, Senator Enyinaya Abaribe, knocked the Nigerian Bar Association on Tuesday for “failing to speak up” when President Muhammadu Buhari suspended former Chief Justice of Nigeria, Justice Walter Onnoghen.
Abaribe stated that the Senate waited in vain for the NBA and the judiciary to act in order to save the situation, because the law did not allow the President to unilaterally remove the CJN without recourse to the Senate.
The lawmaker said it was regrettable that the judiciary “deliberately sat on the judgment” on the propriety of Onnoghen’s trial at the CCT and waited till he left office before pronouncing that the trial was wrong in the first place.
Abaribe said this at the Rule of Law Symposium at the ongoing NBA Annual General Conference in Lagos.
He spoke on the topic “Independence of the judiciary beyond letters of the law.”
He said, “The question we ask is, with apologies to Wole Soyinka, if the Bar association is a tiger, where is your ‘tigritude’?
“And the reason we ask this question is simple: we find the Bar association blowing muted trumpet when the judiciary is under pressure.
“In the matter of Onnoghen, we waited for the Bar association, nothing happened; we waited for his fellow judges, nothing happened and everybody was looking at us.
“And what were we waiting for? The law is very clear that you can’t remove the Chief Justice without coming to the Senate. Yet, it happened and nothing was done.”
Asked why the Senate did not rise to the occasion when the NBA and the judiciary failed, Abaribe said, “The law does not give the Senate any right to go beyond the Constitution and the Constitution is very specific.