The funny thing about the utter idiocy Nyesom Wike and his supporters are perpetrating in Rivers State is that a court can never even order the police not to provide security in any context, whatsoever, much less with regards to such a critical civic duty as an election.
Even if a court had ordered that the police should not participate in the election, the police is still duty-bound to secure the state against any reasonable apprehension of a breakdown of law and order.
Since holding the election was not barred by the court because a court cannot even prevent elections from holding, in the first place, the order was clearly meaningless from a law enforcement point of view because the police can never be prevented from upholding law and order.
A court cannot, for instance, bar the police from preventing a citizen from being beheaded by his neighbour – courts simply lack the capacity to impose, compel or, howsoever, order the unreasonable to be wrought.
What we take the police to task for is that it might not have upheld law and order according to law but there is simply no legal device or judicial mechanism by which the obligation of the state to uphold law and order, through the police or by some other means, can ever be, howsoever, diluted, not to talk of being abrogated.
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A policeman cannot, under any circumstances, whatsoever, for instance, rely on a court judgement to allow you to be assaulted in his presence when he is in a position to intervene or he would be liable, potentially, for a raft of offences turning on gross derilection of duty.
I have never seen a court order as absolutely ridiculous as the one Nyesom Wike and his goons are relying on to burn down Rivers State.
Indeed, a court cannot order me, as a lawyer, not to defend or otherwise represent any person, just as it cannot order a medical doctor not to treat a particular patient.
Courts are by far the most important and powerful institutions in any society because they are what society invented to uphold civilisation and prevent a descent into anarchy but there happen to be things they simply can’t do, chief of which is to be patently unreasonable or to seek to compel the impossible such as by purportedly ordering the police to effectively stop being the police, as in this case.
Indeed, given that the Rivers State Electoral body went ahead with the election the police was, thereupon, duty-bound, under the law, to provide security to all persons participating in the elections and prevent the brigandage of those opposed to it.
I heard Nyesom Wike is a lawyer and even a member of the Body of Benchers; I don’t think he is a fit and proper person to be a lawyer, in the first place, not to talk of sitting on our most prestigious professional organ.
Shame on him.
Onokpasa, a lawyer, writes from Abuja.