BUHARI WON BY THE BALLOT, NOT THE BARREL, PLEASE!

I am an activist and a human rights lawyer. I have advocated decade long to uphold the rule of law, constitutionalism and respect for human rights and gender rights. As a direct result of my human rights work I won a scholarship award for my LL.M Int'l legal studies in Georgetown Law Center, Washington DC 2009-2010. I have never held a public office in Nigeria or elsewhere. I do not belong to a political party and was never issued a party membership card at anytime. As a practicing lawyer I recall I conducted a case in the High Court of Lagos State, one Billion Naira libel suit instituted by Mr Buhari against the Guardian newspaper, for an article entitled “for the attention of Buhari” by Abati following the post-election violence in 2011 that cost Nigerians precious lives of youth corpers adhoc INEC staff who were butchered over allegations that they had assisted in rigging Buhari out and the matter was settled out of court after I had cast a defence. I didn’t sign the terms of settlement as defence counsel.

On 31st Dec 2015 I had raised certain human rights and constitutional issues against the President of my country Nigeria, Mr Muhammadu Buhari after his first media chat on Television on 30th Dec 2015 whereat he had justified disobedience of court orders by his regime and that prompted me to write an online petition to respect court orders; here is the link to my petition signed by 2,200 signatories as at 3rd Jan 2016 11:50PM https://www.change.org/p/president-of-the-united-s...

The reactions of Mr President’s supporters not surprisingly threatened violence even after PMB won the 2015 presidential election. What if it wasn’t online would they have applied President Buhari’s Barrel?.

Won’t that be Barbaric! These being executive tactics to silence are very poor tactics for our democracy.

President Buhari is not the first President I would critic, I critiqued President Jonathan within weeks of his being sworn in and from 2011 to 2015 and nothing happened to anyone, nobody was ‘silenced’. He was tolerant of critics. If Buhari is incapable of tolerating criticism why is he holding a public office?

Respectfully submitted,

CA