Why Makarfi defeated Sheriff

The Supreme Court, yesterday, declared Senator Ahmed Makarfi as the authentic Chairman of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP).

It also described his opponent, Senator Ali Modu Sheriff, as “power hungry.”

The three-man panel of justices stated that in the course of the two year dispute, Sheriff displayed an “infantile desperation to remain in power.”

In a lead judgement read by Justice Bode Rhodes Vivour, the apex court held that Makarfi’s appeal challenging the verdict of the Court of Appeal in Port Harcourt on February 17 had merit. It, therefore, dismissed Sheriff’s preliminary objection.

The justice said the national convention, being the highest organ of the party, was in order when it dissolved the National Executive Committee (NEC) and set up the caretaker committee headed by Makarfi, adding that the Port Harcourt convention of May 21, 2016, which removed Sheriff, was validly convened.

The unanimous judgement observed that Sheriff’s resort to the courts, including the Federal High Court in Lagos, which on May 20, 2016, stopped the PDP convention, was an afterthought, having submitted himself to the electoral screening committee and was screened out for failure to show three years tax clearance certificate, party membership card and voter’s card as required by law.

The apex court also noted that Sheriff filed 10 different suits in different courts within one year in his bid to remain in power, stressing that the suits will gather dust in judicial archives.

Justice Vivour admonished politicians to stop engaging in “forum shopping” and that heads of courts should always assign cases of the same nature and content to a single judge so as to avoid getting conflicting judgements.

“This court frowns at the habit of assigning cases filed by politicians with the same subject matter to different judges,” he said.

“It is on record that Sheriff in his infantile desire to perpetuate himself in office had filed 10 cases in one year, some of which he abandoned and it will remain in the shelves and dust forever.”

The Supreme Court also awarded N250, 000 costs against Sheriff’s faction of the PDP.