By Evans Ufeli Esq
A recent judgment by the Supreme Court that appears to bless the president’s power to declare a state of emergency and suspend a democratically elected government feels less like sober jurisprudence and more like a lamentable surrender to temptation. It is as if the high bench, the custodian of constitutional fidelity, has loosened the sacred moorings that keep a republic afloat, permitting the ship of state to drift onto the shoals of executive aggrandizement. Such a turn is not merely technical; it speaks to the health of our civic imagination and the resilience of institutions that must, in times of trial, perform as bulwarks rather than as backdrops to power.
There is a certain poetry to constitutional restraint: it is the quiet art of saying “thus far and no further” when the alluring force of convenience beckons. The emergency power is, by design, an instrument bound by drasticality and brevity; an exception that recognizes its own exceptionality. But when a court whispers approval for a broad and unfettered reach, the exception risks becoming the norm, and the polity is left to reckon with the slow slide from rule by law to rule by whim. To tolerate an elastic notion of emergency is to invite the slow venality of governance, where democratic mandates are hollowed out by the very hand sworn to preserve them.
This judgment is troubling not merely for what it enables, but for what it disfigures. It corrodes the separation of powers, that elegant latticework through which a free society breathes. Emergency powers, if ever used, must be channeled through rigorous checks: clear factual findings, transparent processes, strict temporal bounds, and meaningful legislative and judicial oversight. Absent these guardrails, the executive stands transformed from servant to solitary arbiter, dispensing and retracting democratic legitimacy with the caprice of a monarch. The consequence is not only a legal aberration but a civic malaise; citizens who see their ballots nullified by decree will, in time, lose faith in institutions that once promised accountability.
Worse still is the precedent’s effect on the judiciary’s own moral authority. Courts are not mere referees of power; they are memory keepers of the constitutional compact. When they acquiesce to expansive readings of executive prerogative without insistence on evidentiary particularity and proportionality, they forfeit their claim to impartial guardianship. The judiciary’s silence is then interpreted as consent, and consent is the most corrosive lubricant for the machinery of autocracy. A court that permits the suspension of elected officials without insisting upon crystalline standards and periodic review risks being remembered not as a citadel of rights but as an accomplice to their eclipse.
We must also attend to the human cost. Emergency powers, historically, have been accompanied by the shadow of curtailed liberties; restrictions on assembly, speech, and movement; detentions without the balm of due process. To permit these powers to be turned against the very actors who embody popular will is to institutionalize a perverse form of political warfare: governance by attrition, where opposition is not defeated in the marketplace of ideas but silenced under the gravely solemn guise of necessity. The fabric of pluralism frays when dissent is rendered precarious and when politics becomes a matter of survival rather than conviction.
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What is required, then, is not merely rueful lamentation but vigorous repair. Parliament must step forward to legislate precise standards for emergency declarations: defined triggers, obligatory fact-finding, mandatory parliamentary ratification within a short window, and unambiguous sunset clauses. The judiciary must reclaim the mantle of rigorous review, demanding evidence, specificity, and proportionality whenever extraordinary powers are invoked. Civil society should insist upon transparent public accounting; every proclamation accompanied by a verifiable record and subject to independent audit. And if necessary, the Constitution itself should be amended to make the suspension of democratic offices either impermissible or subject to supermajority approval and immediate adjudication.
In the final accounting, democracy is not measured by eloquent pronouncements in calm times but by the sturdiness of its restraints when storms gather. To cede those restraints for the comfort of expediency is to desert the very republic we profess to cherish. The judgment cannot be challenged, but it will stand as a cautionary tale: that liberty, once loosened by the authorities entrusted to protect it, is not easily reknit. We must act, with both passion and prudence, to restore the meshes that hold our democratic polity tight before the gentle weave unravels entirely.
