With regards to the judiciary - our lowest points.

by Eze Eluchie

The level of stability, development and advancement of any society, can often times be ascertained with some measure of precision from the level of independence, transparency and predictability, based on the rule of law, of its judiciary. The less independent, more opaque and unpredictable the judiciary is, the more likely a society is retrogressive, lawless and subject to the whims and caprices of whomsoever has temporary custody of the instrument of force or purse strings of the particular enclave - in other words, the more likely a society can be termed a 'banana republic'.

Under the Nigeria Constitution, the Judiciary is eloquently and lavishly described and portrayed as an independent third arm of government - this pretence is very far from the reality. The judiciary in Nigeria in practice acts like and could rightly be termed an appendage of the Executive branch of government. The cup-in-hand approach of the judicial branch to the Executive arm for virtually all needs of the judiciary sector, ranging from salaries for Judges and other personnel, to requests for operational vehicles and office stationery and other overhead and infrastructural expenses, makes the concept of an independent judiciary in Nigeria clearly a figment of the imagination. This hallucination, it must be pointed out is more prevalent at the State level of Nigeria's purportedly federal system, where State Governors get away with blue murder in their treatment and control of the judicial arm.

The near impossibility of aggrieved litigants to secure judgments holding State Governments accountable for civil transgressions in State High Courts and ability of officials of State governments to use the instrumentality of courts controlled by such States to ensure the prolonged detention of their adversaries or those who happen to ‘cross their path’  is clearly indicative of the allegiance of the judiciary (at the State level) to the Executive branch of government as opposed to the Constitution, law or justice. At the federal level, the pendulum of justice swings more with the personal idiosyncrasies of a presiding judicial officer and at times the preference of those who control the seat of power as opposed to any known concepts in our domestic statutes or justice generally.

The uncanny practice of shopping-for-'justice', whereby litigants strive to institute matters or accused persons insist on being tried before judicial officers who will grant them a particular desired judgment evolved. Some litigants took the practice to extreme lengths by crossing State and regional boundaries in desperate efforts to procure favorable judgment. In a particularly gross instance, a judicial division of the Federal Courts was surreptitiously created in the home State of an ex-Governor who was standing trial for monumental fraud for the purpose of ensuring acquittal. The ex-Governor (James Onanefe Ibori of Delta State) was acquitted, but as providence would have it, this ex-con had cause to travel outside Nigeria where he was finally arrested and is presently serving term in a British jailhouse for some of the same crimes for which ‘his’ Nigerian court had acquitted him.

The situation in the Nigerian judiciary is clearly inseparable from the general decay in the Nigerian society. Though the entire situation is murky and near hopeless, three instances of judicial pronouncements in the course of our experimentation with civil rule could very rightly be described as when we attained our lowest points - these are:

1.    The Justice Ayo Salami Scandal: The felony (interference in the judicial process) allegations leveled against the then Chief Justice of the Federation (Justice Aloysius Kastina-Alu), by the President of the Federal Court of Appeal (Justice Ayo Salami). In belatedly making the allegations against the Chief Justice, Justice Salami, who had been suspended from office based on allegations that he had been involved in unethical communication with litigants before his Court, had unwittingly admitted to the commission of yet another crime, concealment of a felony.

The putrid stench emanating from the ugly public altercation between the two highest judicial authorities in Nigeria was further prolonged by desperate efforts by Justice Salami to cling unto his office via court processes. 

-the shameless public acrimony displayed by the President of the Court of Appeals caused and continues to cause lasting injury to the perception of the judiciary as being above board.

2.    The Trial of Mr. Bola Ahmed Tinubu for Operating Foreign Accounts: The badgering of a duly constituted court of law (the Code of Conduct Tribunal under the Chairmanship of Justice Danladi Umar), by an armada of legal practitioners, into acquiescing to not having an accused person stand in the dock when appearing before the Court – and eventual discharge of the said accused person on technicalities without venturing into the merits of the charges. In all sane judicial environments, there are properly designated places in a court room where persons whose matters are being heard by a court will be located during the duration of a particular court session.

The inability of the judges who constitute the Code of Conduct Tribunal which was then trying the corruption cases and illicit maintenance of foreign accounts by a public officer (then Governor Bola Tinubu) to overcome the mob action of the horde of lawyers who besieged the Tribunal irrevocably tainted the efficacy of not just the Tribunal but the entirety of the anti-corruption efforts it represented.

- the war against corruption had buckled under intimidation and attacks against the Court by lawyers for the accused amongst whom had been sitting State Governors.

3.    Enthronement of a non-contestant as Governor by the Supreme Court: The third and perhaps most insidious judicial pronouncement of our current era is the 2007 decision of the Nigerian Supreme Court which enthroned as Governor of a State, a man whose name was neither on the ballot nor contested nor campaigned for the gubernatorial elections. This benefactor of the Supreme Courts benevolence never also nominated any person as a ‘running mate’, prior to the gubernatorial elections as expressly required by the Nigerian constitution.

In arriving at their odd decision enthroning Mr. Chibuike Amaechi as Governor of Rivers State, the Supreme Court Justices appeared to have been ventilating anger with former Head of State Obasanjo regarding an earlier disregard of the Courts pronouncement on a totally unrelated matter involving a totally different State. The vain efforts by the Supreme Court Justices to, in their judgement in the instant case, clothe their 'get-back-at-him' efforts in legalese, was not only a most pitiable failure but also left the people of Rivers State and believers in the rule of law in Nigeria greatly short-changed. . 

- total rubbishing of express constitutional provisions by the highest court in the land on account of personal feelings of the Justices had brought the issue of relevance and efficacy of the constitution to question

Our three lowest points as identified above  in no way represents the worst to which our judicial system seems set to degrade to - there are already indications, as evidenced by conflicting pronouncements on same subject matter by courts of concurrent jurisdictions in the ongoing Anambra State gubernatorial contest, that as we progress towards the general elections scheduled for May 2015, there will be judicial pronouncements that will make the examples cited above appear divine Socratic judgments.

Considering how entrenched corruption has permeated through our system, it is obviously wishful thinking to delude oneself in the hope that, per chance, the judiciary would be immune from its vile allure. Corruption, like every other cancer, could have been removed by precise surgical procedures at its inception. We have alas, allowed ours to metastasize and with its entry into and overwhelming of our judicial sector, we are now without doubt at a terminal stage of our societal cancer.

Unlike an individual cancer patient, however, restructuring and renegotiation of the contraption, will give us a fresh lease and opportunity at life. 

Let us restructure and renegotiate the contraption whilst there is still some life in it.

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Picture: Mr. Bola Tinubu contemptuously sits in the dock during his trial before the Code of Conduct Tribunal session prior to the assault on the Tribunal.