Buhari certificate: Presidency threatens lawsuit against Abuja-based lawyer

Senior Special Assistant to President Buhari on media and publicity, Shehu

Garba, has hinted that the presidency may be filing a lawsuit against Abuja
based lawyer, Nnamdi Nwokocha-Ahaaiwe over what it described as the
lawyer's prejudiced view of President Buhari in a recent interview where he
spoke on President Buhari's alleged lack of school certificate and declared him
guilty on the pages of newspapers.
Nwokocha-Ahaaiwe had dragged President Buhari before the court, arguing that
he did not meet the educational requirement to contest for President of Nigeria.
Nwokocha-Ahaaiwe alleged that President Buhari did not sit for the Cambridge
West African School Certificate WASC) in 1961 as he claimed.
According to Vanguard, Garba Shehu, while reacting to Nwokocha’s recent
press interviews, explained that “it is unfair for a lawyer who is a litigant to a
case in court to go out of his way to hijack the power of a Judge by declaring
the President guilty of what he is accused of. Newspaper pages are not
alternative courts where a lawyer can declare anybody guilty of anything when
the court has not formally given a definitive judgment on an issue before it. The
two-pages interview splashed on pages 56-57 of ThisDay edition of Saturday
June 11th breaches a lawyer’s ethical code and we hope that the court and the
Bar Association will take notice of this.
Any lawyer that sincerely believes in judicial process and the rights of other
parties to a case would not have engaged in the inappropriate and
unprofessional practice of trial by media, especially a situation where Nwokocha
openly declared the President guilty when the court didn’t make that
declaration. Shehu noted that “gag orders emerged in the United States on
account of lawyers’ inappropriate conduct on trying and convicting people on
the pages of newspapers or the court of public opinion. He added that "free
speech is not synonymous with recklessness and wanton abuse of the rights
other parties to a case in court.” He also said that
“The litigant’s unabashed claim that he was a card-carrying member of the
opposition PDP which lost power in the last election clearly indicates a scheme
that seeks power by circumventing the democratic process of elections.” Malam
Garba Shehu said “if Nwokocha has not stopped his unfair and professionally
inappropriate abuse of free speech, the President’s competent team of lawyers
will seek the instrumentality of the law in dealing with his unethical actions. You
cannot be a litigant and be a Judge at the same time.”