I Annulled June 12, Not IBB - Dahiru Saleh

Justice Dahiru Saleh

Justice Dahiru Saleh is the Judge who made the judicial pronouncement annulling the June 12, 1993 presidential election, an action that plunged the country into a major political crisis. In this encounter with The Interview he attempts to explain the circumstances surrounding the infamous ruling he gave from the Bench…

What made you choose law as a profession?

When I was in secondary in the 1960s, I wanted to study engineering. But later on, after I left school, I saw an advertisement for a legal course and I applied for it. It was a time when there were virtually no lawyers in the North. I was in the third batch of northern lawyers to be trained. That was how I came to be interested in and studied the law. When I attended the course in Zaria, it was in August 1961 and it went through 1962. We had to go to London for the second part of the course. I finished my studies there. I then returned to attend the Nigerian Law School, where I eventually qualified to practice in Nigeria. I qualified as a lawyer in England on January 4, 1963 and later on, I attended the Nigerian Law School. I finished in 1965, I think. I am not quite sure of the date. Every year at that time, they used to take about 12 candidates from the northern states to qualify as lawyers. In the year I was selected, I was the only one from Bauchi. There were three candidates from Sokoto. There was someone from Argungu, who later became a justice of the Supreme Court; there was Justice Kalgo from Kalgo and Usman Mohammed from Sokoto. And then there were other candidates from other northern states. There was another one from Borno, and another from Plateau. There were 12 of us in my set; I can’t remember all the names.

Fuel Subsidy Removal: Buhari administration has broken a key electoral promise

"The Buhari administration has broken a key electoral promise, that is to revamp the refineries and wean Nigeria off this destructive reliance on fuel imports. This deregulation/fuel price increase is effectively a declaration that they've given up on restoring our refining capacity."

Now why did I pick this up specifically? I did because when many of our public affairs analysts discuss issues, they often do so inside a "pipe" and fail to consider the environment that surrounds the pipe. Conclusions or opinions as I have quoted above was ascribed to Moses Ochonu, someone I actually do respect but doubt if he made the statement above. I do not work for this government and therefore not their spokesperson but I am knowledgeable enough to know that as of March 2015, the Nigerian government was so broke it was borrowing to pay civil servant's salaries. I also know that that government left with a trail of debts owed on petro-subsidies and that there was an acute scarcity of petroleum products towards the tail end of the last administration the reason for which many accused it of criminal indifference. So soon after, we witnessed the near collapse of two-thirds of the 36 states in Nigeria who could not pay staff salaries or maintain the institutions of state. Since after that, the nation has been treated to different manifestations of sleaze and different guises of high-treason by those who held sway. Something that was obviously so shocking was the "Abuja Yam Festival". Only a few days ago, the vice-president, Yemi Osinbajo, confirmed that about $15 billion of the nations wealth was looted under the cover of security spending at the federal level alone. If one were to add what was looted under power infrastructure, third term, UBE, monetization, 2011 subsidy scam, un-remitted oil receipts, sovereign wealth fund, Niger River Bridge, NNDC, ecological fund (nonsense), banking and bank consolidations and the debt write-offs and other sources or domains, you can imagine how this nation had been raped by the elites ruling us.