He handed down the charge yesterday at an interactive section with journalists in Lagos, noted that the nation's politics should be placed above ethnic or religion bigotry,and urged President Goodluck Jonathan to disregard the octogenarian leader's call and faces through security course to tackle the insecurity challenges the country is being faced with.
Falana (SAN) described the called as a diversionary distraction that has no legal backing to substantiate the allegation and charged him to be more focused to see to the end on the Boko Haram incessant attacks on the vulnerable Nigerians.
He Said “There is nothing like partial declaration of a state of emergency in the 1999 Constitution; what Section 305 (c) of the Constitution contemplates is the recourse to ‘extraordinary measures to restore peace’ and security, where there is a breakdown of public order and public safety. This, in effect, means that all democratic institutions should be suspended to permit the military exercise full control until peace and order return.”
He cited Section 305 of the Constitution, which empowers the President to declare a state of emergency in any part of the country, does not make any provision – expressly or implicitly – for the removal of elected democratic structures.
“In other words, the power of the President to take ‘extraordinary measures to restore peace and security’ under a state of emergency does not include the removal of elected public officers or the dissolution of democratic structures,” he said.
Falana (SAN) therefore challenged the Ijaw leader to refrain from the habit of advising the president wrongly but follow dew process of the law to establish facts of calling for the sack of any elected executive governor of a state which according to him would plunged the country back to the former administration which he described as the worst of executive recklessness of democratic governance under Chief Olusegun Obasanjo.
