Bayelsa loss: Leave Justice Odili out of your politics, lawyers tell APC

Some legal practitioners under the umbrella of Lawyers in Defence of Democracy (LDD) have asked supporters of the All Progressives Congress (APC) to stop blaming Mary Odili, a supreme court judge, for the party’s loss in Bayelsa state.

An apex court panel led by Odili had sacked David Lyon, candidate of the APC in the November election, as governor-elect, on the grounds that his running mate presented forged certificates.

In a statement jointly signed by Ohazuruike Tochukwu,  its national coordinator, and Ishaq Bello, publicity secretary, the group asked APC supporters to direct their grievances at the leadership of their party which purportedly screened and cleared the deputy governorship candidate.

The group said it observed that the APC and its supporters have deliberately singled out Odili and attempted to malign her reputation, following the ruling on the Bayelsa governorship election at the supreme court.

The legal practitioners said justice Odili “neither wrote nor read the lead judgment”, adding that the supreme court per Odili had read the lead judgments in the Katsina, Kaduna, Lagos and Nasarawa governorship appeals all won by the APC.

“It is obvious that the leadership of the Party in order to divert attention from its failures and impunity yet again as it did in Zamfara and Rivers States that have instigated these supporters ,social media blackmailers and other uninformed Nigerians to begin to defame an eminent jurist of the Supreme Court,” the statement read.

“How these APC members and their leadership quickly forgot that the same Justice Mary Odili was still married to a PDP stalwart when she read the lead judgment in the Katsina, Kaduna, Lagos and Nasarawa Governorship appeals all won by the APC. If Justice Odili is as compromised as they would now want Nigerians to believe, how then did the APC win all the appeals where she wrote and read the lead judgment?”

The group said while anyone is at liberty to respectfully disagree with the judgment of any court, it however argued that there are legal ways of doing that and it does not include maligning justices of the supreme court, making speculative allegations against the justice or putting the marital status of the justice in issue just because a case did not go the way of a particular interest.