Rats and roaches in the temple of justice
Late last week, the Chief Justice of Nigeria, Mr Justice Tanko Muhammad, summoned the chief judges of Rivers, Kebbi, Cross River, Anambra, Jigawa and Imo states to a meeting with him in Abuja on September 6. He wanted them to tell him why there was a sudden flurry of conflicting judgments and reckless exparte orders granted by some judges in their states.
The meeting has since been held and three of the judges have either appeared or will appear before the National Judicial Council, NJC, to tell the council why they should not be disciplined. Muhammad’s unprecedented action is a clear indication that the temple of justice is still not safe from rats and cockroaches; men and women who choose to be untrue to their sacred public offices and are too weak to rise to the high demands of the impartial discharge of their public duty. The temple of justice should be the last refuge of professional scoundrels and unsavoury characters. Sadly, it is not. Greed is incurable; it has a strong pull on individual conscience.
The last time we had a flurry of contradictory judgments, orders and exparte injunctions granted and nullified by courts of coordinate jurisdictions was during the June 12, 1993, debacle. Courts of co-ordnate jurisdictions in Abuja, Lagos, Benin and Port Harcourt fell over themselves to impose exparte and counter-exparte injunctions ordering the electoral commission to release or not to release the results of the presidential election. It was a huge shame and a huge mess.
An exparte motion is filed by one party to a litigation. It is heard by a judge before whom the matter pends without giving the other party a chance to contest it. It is a twist in litigations and a subterfuge employed by litigants and their lawyers to delay the cause of justice. It serves satanic purposes. Politicians love it. They employ it in the unholy pursuit of their unholy interests without qualms.
The Supreme Court has always frowned on them. My recollection is that the National Judicial Council under Justice Aloma Mukhtar, the first female chief justice of Nigeria, ordered judges not to entertain exparte motions in order not to injure the interest of the party against whom the exparte injunction is sought. Somehow, this order now lies in the courts like a tattered piece of arrested justice. Muhammad’s summon raises the hope that the resort to blatant exparte motions and injunctions would once more be arrested and thus restore public trust and confidence in the impartiality of judges in dispensing justice, not to the highest bidder but to the party that is right in the eyes of the law.
It would not be Uhuru for the judiciary, however. Its problems are, to sound a bit intellectual, multifarious. It faces serious internal and external challenges to its independence and its capacity to provide a refuge from the storms of power, money and influence. As the third arm of government, the judiciary may be passive but it is actually the most powerful of the three arms. It has the power to mess things up quite a bit for the executive and the legislative branches of government, as in annulling elections and giving victory to the man cheated by the system.
This is the primary source of its challenge from external sources. Th executive branch has an unsavoury history of encroaching on the independence of the judiciary by bending it to its will and keeping it on a short leash. It treats its orders and judgments with contempt. It underfunds the judiciary and intimidates it. Both are calculated steps to make the judiciary subservient to the unholy will of those who have problems with appreciating the finer points of the beauty in the separation of powers among the three branches of government. The executive branch favours a quiescent judiciary. Wahala.
At a special session of the Supreme Court at the formal commencement of the 2019/1020 legal year on September 23, 2019, Muhammad said he had to beg for funds to run the judiciary. He said: “The gross underfunding and neglect of the judiciary over the years have impacted negatively on the infrastructure and personnel within the system. It is to a large extent, affecting productivity, increasing frustration and deflating moral.”
Sometime in 2018, the SSS staged a midnight raid, gestapo-style, on the residences of some judges and justices of the court of appeal and the Supreme Court, including that of the Chief Justice of Nigeria, Justice Walter Onnoghen, ostensibly as part of government effort to rid the judiciary of corrupt judges. It had a more sinister motive. Onnoghen, who appeared to be the primary target of the raids, was removed from office in shabby circumstances. The raid was also intended to serve notice on the men and women on the bench that the eyes of big brother, the executive branch, were and would be on them. A judge quaking in his underwear cannot be trusted to have the courage to minister to his own conscience.
It would be naïve, foolish even, for anyone to deny that the judiciary is riddled with corruption. This has been a huge problem for justice and the rule of law. Some judgments are tributes to the degree of corruption in the system. Two systems of justice now exist in the country – one for the rich and the influential and the other for the poor. The rich buy justice because justice by any means is still justice. The poor, cynically denied justice, is left to wallow in self-pity and rue the unfair decision by the Naira to be absent from his pocket.
Two disasters have crept up on the judiciary over the years. Firstly, it is proving increasingly difficult to be what it was meant to be – the defender and the protector of the weak and the poor. The sight of Naira in Ghana-must-go backs is as much unsettling for judges as it is for the rest of the people. The weak who run to the judiciary seeking protection from the strong, is no longer assured of that protection; the poor who run to it seeking justice from the tyranny of the rich, see a system that favours the rich at the expense of justice. When judges foul the temple of justice with the disagreeable perfume of their professional perfidy, they bend the arc of justice to the vulgar abuse for which they gain but the people lose.
The second problem, equally as serious as the first, is that the politicians have hijacked the judiciary and justice is hawked and sold to the highest bidder. Court dockets are filled with political cases with an exponent rise in such cases before, during and after every election season. The cases for which the chief judges are being made to answer for the professional venal sins of their judges are all political cases. The contradictory decisions are all evidence of unscrupulous men buying the co-operation of unscrupulous judges to bend the law and the rule of law to oil their political ambitions. If takes money, so be it.