Festus Ogun, a lawyer, has condemned a piece of President Bola Tinubu’s Democracy Day speech from Monday.
“It has become imperative to state here that the unnecessary illegal orders used to truncate or abridge democracy will no longer be tolerated,” Tinubu stated in a countrywide address.
In response, the human rights activist said that Nigeria’s president “threatened” the court, saying that intimidation of judges would not be permitted.
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Ogun feels the president’s “reckless threat to the judiciary” is “intentionally directed at the eminent justices of the Presidential Election Tribunal.”
“To be clear, any Tribunal order declaring Tinubu’s return as invalid cannot “truncate democracy”, it would rather strengthen it,” the lawyer argued.
Tinubu’s statement was “an affront in a democracy which amounts to a subtle attack on the tenets of separation of powers as enshrined under Sections 4, 5 and 6 of the 1999 Constitution”, he said.
The Principal Partner of Festus Ogun Legal stressed that court orders are meant to be obeyed and not regarded as “illegal”.
Such an assertion, according to him, is “an abuse and a calculated attempt by Tinubu to subvert Nigeria’s tottering democracy”.
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“This signifies a government that will not respect court orders, particularly unfavorable ones they consider illegal,” Ogun added.
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