Dino Melaye is really scared of getting recalled
The Dino Melaye recall is back on track after the Court of Appeal ruled that the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) should continue with the process after it was stalled in October of 2017.
Moves
to recall Melaye commenced in June of 2017. The people of Kogi West said
they wanted Melaye back home because he’s become a source of
embarrassment for them.
Melaye was accused by his people of “continuous
flow of irresponsible utterances which embarrass the
constituency…violence, thuggery and other electoral offences against our
people during elections….he routinely insults other leaders, elders and
personalities….he is indecent and deliberately corrupts public
morals….he has no respect for party democracy", and so on and so forth.
Melaye’s first reaction was to laugh off moves to recall him. “I am not scared”, he had said, before launching a full scale war on Kogi Governor Yahaya Bello who he believes is the seen and unseen hand behind the recall moves.
But
don't take his word for it--Dino Melaye is really scared right now. And
he has every right to be. Everything he says and does right now is
just bluster.
Scared witless
The dramatic senator has set out his stall to frustrate the recall process by throwing legal spanners in the works.
And you have to agree that he’s been very successful with that. The
fact that it’s been nine months of trying to recall him without any
headway, tells you that the senator’s lawyers have earned every legal
fee.
He's hired some of the best lawyers to stave off the recall moves. Only scared people do that.
In
the interim, Melaye and Gov Bello have become sworn enemies, the
senator has been avoiding INEC like a plague, he’s cooked up
assassination stories and he’s gotten his colleagues in the upper
legislative chamber behind him.
He's pulling the kitchen sink into this whole thing.
All
of which tells you that he is really scared of getting recalled. Forget
the bluster and tough guy façade—Dino Melaye is scared at the moment.
That fear is why he’s exploited all the loopholes in our country’s
legal system to frustrate the recall.
Institutions
When news broke that the court of appeal has ordered a resumption of the recall process, Melaye said; “The
judgement by the appeal court today is nothing to be bothered about. I
urge my supporters to be relaxed as though I walk through the valley of
the shadow of death yet I fear no evil. Every lie has an expiry date. We
are appealing the judgement immediately”.
Of course he’s ready to take this to the Supreme Court and just as well. In a democracy, the courts have the final say.
The
challenge before the people of Kogi and INEC will be whether they can
stay the course and see this through. It’s still a long way from
recalling Melaye, though. Even if the final court decisions go in INEC’s
favour, the constitution still makes it doubly difficult to recall anyone from the national assembly.
What
should be important is that at the end of the day, we would have
allowed our institutions to get fully tested thanks to the Melaye case.
And that won't be a bad by-product for our nascent democracy.
Dino Melaye is really scared of getting recalled
Reviewed by opeyemi
on
9:18:00 am
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