DEVIL HAS TAKEN OVER JUDICIARY-OPADOKUN

Convener of the Coalition of Democrats for Electoral Reforms (CODER), Mr. Ayo Opadokun has assessed President Goodluck Jonathan's 100 days in office and warned that the country would go under with the way Judiciary was being treated in recent past.

'A nation, where the last hope of the common man and the stabilizing force like the Judiciary is being subverted and pigeon -holed will go under,' Opadokun declared lamenting that 'a country with opportunistic collaborators would not be able to fight evils because they would not want to die.'

The former Secretary of the defunct famous National  Democratic Coalition (NADECO), told Daily Sun in an interview, that 'when a group of people decide to appropriate power of governance to the devil, the result is always fatal,' warning that 'if revolutionary change is not made possible, you are courting disaster as people will resort to self help that will not augur well for the country.'

While reminding Jonathan that 'the people cannot for ever sit down and watch their rights being trampled upon,' the CODER boss stated that 'whoever takes such people for granted is undermining the existence of the country.

He then warned that until something tangible was done to redeem the image of the Judiciary vis a vis the Isa Ayo Salami issue, 'danger is lurking around the corner,' just as he enthused that 'without the opportunistic collaborators with evil, Nigeria can be better.'

Opadokun also, in a release titled 'Can Nigeria survive,' reacted to President Jonathan statement that he did not need to be draconian to change Nigeria.

Opadokun wrote: 'The fact is that President Jonathan needs not be a military general to be able to perform well,…. yet, the President has acted militarily to approve the suspension of Justice Salami in an undue haste when in fact he knew that Justice Isah Ayo Salami, the jurist, was presiding over the presidential tribunal dealing with the petition of Gen. Buhari against the President. Someone ought to have advised the president that he could not be a judge in his own matter, 'nemo dat quo non habit'.'

He therefore warned that 'those who want to sustain this lopsided national structure should realize that undermining the judiciary and the operation of the rule of law as manifested by the conduct of the former Chief Justice of Nigeria as the Chairman of the NJC is injurious.'

He noted that 'Justice Katsina Alu's NJC failure to take judicial notice of the pending suit against the body is an open invitation to anarchy,' regretting that 'the unfortunate incident has eroded the confidence of the public in the judiciary as the last hope of the citizen.'

While lamenting the level of poverty in the land the CODER boss wrote that 'from available statistics, Nigeria has earned over 230 billion USD from General Obasanjo's emergence till now under Dr. Jonathan,' saying the worry was that there was no trace of how such huge resources has been utilized.

'Rather than making life better for Nigerians, as we, the campaigners for restoration of democracy to Nigeria hoped for, the level of poverty and misery in the country is now too worrisome and intolerable to ignore, he concluded.