South East breaking News
Supreme Court ruling: Ihedioha can still be governor, by ex-INEC Spokesman Tonnie Iredia
Extract:
But if the addition of the controversial votes creates mathematical errors as we now have, the court ought to correct such clerical error, accidental slip or omission. That is probably what any person would regard as the ordinary meaning of Order 8 Rule 16 of the Supreme Court Rules which creates an exception to the rule that a court cannot revisit its own ruling.
Thus, nothing in our view stops Emeka Ihedioha from pointing out the apparent error occasioned by the addition of the voting figures approved by the court. All he needs to do is to present an application to the court for the correction of the error in computing the votes and not to seek an appeal.
In other words, Ihedioha must not go to Court to seek a reversal of his case as Andy Uba was wrongly persuaded to do in the Anambra governorship election in 2007. Ihedioha should stop at correcting errors.
In truth, if the Supreme Court had averted her mind to the absurdity of the figures we are now seeing, she would have seen with relative ease, some wisdom in the earlier rejection by the electoral body of obviously concocted figures which Nigerian politicians are expert of.
She would have realised that allowing the figures would do incalculable damage to our electoral and democratic system. This is why we call on the Supreme Court to, on its own, without the prompting of a party correct the obvious error which would not derogate from its credibility because although the court is final, its members are not infallible; they are human.
This is our own understanding of what the late legend, Chukwudifu Oputa meant when he said many years back while referring to those of them in the Supreme Court that “we are final not because we are infallible, rather we are infallible because we are final.”
Protesters warned not to disrupt peace in Imo What would make the finality of our Apex Court to be greatly cherished is where the Court is not only fair and just but where it also adopts an approach which allows errors to be corrected.
-Tonnie Iredia, ex-DG NTA
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