By Abidemi Adebamiwa, Editorial Desk
Much of the public commentary following the Supreme Court’s decision in the Maryam Sanda case rests on a basic constitutional misunderstanding. Several reports have asserted that the Court overturned or nullified President Bola Tinubu’s pardon. That claim does not withstand scrutiny, for a simple reason: even where a valid pardon exists, the Supreme Court has no constitutional authority to set it aside.
Section 175 of the Constitution vests the power of pardon exclusively in the President. It is an executive act, not a judicial one. Courts may express discomfort with the timing or implications of a pardon, but they cannot revoke or cancel it. A full and operative pardon suspends punishment and removes enforcement from judicial reach. According to a constitutional lawyer familiar with the case, once a presidential pardon is validly granted and remains in force, no court can lawfully reinstate the punishment it extinguished.
What the Supreme Court actually did in the Sanda case was far more limited. It exercised its appellate jurisdiction over a pending appeal and affirmed the conviction and sentence imposed by the lower courts. In the course of its judgment, the Court criticised the grant of clemency while judicial proceedings were still ongoing. That criticism has been widely misread as judicial nullification. It was not.
The decisive issue is procedural. By the time the Supreme Court delivered its judgment, there was no operative pardon standing in the way of the Court’s jurisdiction. The Court did not strike down a subsisting act of executive mercy. It simply proceeded on the basis of the existing judicial decisions before it. Confusing this sequence has led many to attribute powers to the Court that the Constitution does not grant.
Precision matters in constitutional discourse. The Supreme Court affirmed a sentence because it could. It did not overturn a presidential pardon, because the Constitution gives it no such power.
—Newspot Nigeria
