‘No right thinking person can call that a clerical error,’ Nigerians react to Appeal Court explanation on Kano election judgment

Nigerians have been reacting to the comment by the Chief Registrar of the Court of Appeal, Umar Bangari, saying the contradiction in the court’s judgment on the Kano State governorship election was a mere clerical error which does not invalidate the sack of Abba Kabir Yusuf.

Recall that the ruling delivered on November 17, upheld the sack of the Kano State Governor, Abba Kabir Yusuf on two grounds. One, some 165,000 papers were not signed and stamped by INEC officials. Two, Abba Kabir Yusuf’s name was not in the membership register of the New Nigeria People’s Party (NNPP), the party on whose platform he contested the governorship election.

But in the Certified True Copy of the judgment released on Tuesday, it emerged that the Appeal Court set aside the ruling of the lower court.

The document contradicted what the justices read in the open court.

Netizens have taken to their social media handle to react to the contradiction.

@FahadKano said: “Let’s pretend NNPP made a mistake by not including Abba Kabir’s name in its membership register. Let’s also assume INEC made the mistake of not stamping some ballot papers. Court, in its wisdom, is using this “mistake” (if any) to overturn the will of Kano people. Now, the same Court made a similar mistake by declaring Abba Kabir as a winner. By the court standard of using technicalities, it is safe to say Abba won his appeal since there is no room for a mistake. SIMPLE.”

@nafeezi said: “In a sane nation both the judge and the registrar of the Appeal Court who appended their signatures on that scandalous CTC should be sacked and prosecuted No right thinking person, by any stretch, can call that scandal a clerical error But then this is Nigeria, anything goes.”

 

 

@dondekojo said: “There’s no way what happened in Kano was a clerical error. Clerical error = simple spelling mistakes or punctuation errors, not entire judgment & cost award against a party spelt out. Only logical explanation is that they wrote two judgments for negotiation then copy/paste error.”

OpeyemiDuke said: “What exactly is clerical error? How about the signature and stamp endorsing the clerical error? What we see is compromise.”