IN THE EYE OF THE STORM
The Supreme Court rulings in some governorship election petitions are bewildering, reckons
Addressing the Nigerian community in Ethiopia in Addis Ababa recently, President Muhammadu Buhari inter alia lamented that Nigeria’s judiciary is a major cog in the wheel of his administration’s anti-corruption fight. There is no doubt the president’s angst and displeasure derive from the numerous reported cases of the involvement of officials of the judicial branch of government in seedy and sleazy conducts. Thus, a number of magistrates and judges and justices have, at one time or the other, come under suspicion of corruptive miscarriage of justice. In fact, there have been some proven cases of the complicity of members of the bar and the bench in an unholy alliance and the peddling of undue influence leading to perversion and twisting of the law to achieve predetermined outcomes.
Actually, this is really nothing new. Sadly, for a long time in the beleaguered history of Nigeria’s judiciary there have been cases of corruption of varied hues ranging from malfeasance through misfeasance to nonfeasance, all occasioning the miscarriage of justice. One easily remembers the celebrated case of Justice Okoro-Udogu, who presided in the matter of the State versus Fela Anikulapo-Kuti on the charge of illegal exportation of foreign exchange in 1984, in which the Justice was said to have sought out the later in Maidugiri, Borno State to apologise for his wrongful imprisonment. A more recent instance would be the saga between the former President of the Court of Appeal, Justice Ayo Salami and the former Chief Justice of Nigeria (CJN), Justice Aloysius Katsina-Alu, in which allegations and counter-allegations of improper conducts and attempts to influence and manipulate the cause of justice in the 2011 Sokoto State Governorship Election were cross labelled by each against the other by the nation’s then highest ranking judicial officers.
If many had lived in the delusion that corruption in the judiciary was something that was more to be associated with the lower rungs of the nation’s criminal – justice administration ladder than its highest echelons, the foregoing celebrated cases and other recent developments have totally debunked such a supposition.
The public spat between Salami and KatsinaAlu in particular along with the admissions of past Chief Justices of Nigeria in connection with that altercation went a long way in exposing the sordidness of abuses and sham in the inner recesses of judicial edifice and dragging the judiciary to its lowest possible ebb. The stench from that incident continues to ooze and pollute the judicial atmosphere unto this day.
For instance, in January 27, 2012 letter to former President Goodluck Jonathan, Justice Dahiru Musdapher, a former CJN, admitted that the judiciary was “already integrity-deficient” and “bereft of public confidence” based on the perception of corruption and impunity and called for an urgent effort towards the “redemption of the image and credibility of the judiciary”.
Another former CJN, Muhammadu Uwais, is also on record to have publicly spoken of the need to rejig the structure and processes of the judiciary as an institution that like Caesar’s wife should be above suspicion “…in order to maintain the integrity of the judiciary and to assuage public feeling and restore confidence in both the bar and bench”.
The respected Nobel Laureate, Wole Soyinka, has also weighed in by cautioning on the dangers of denying the people justice, stating that “the country is being affected by the burden of untreated justice, and that social injustice could only thrive for a while; further admonishing that “where justice appears to be lost, a higher order of restitution takes over”. This is in line with the observation by John F. Kennedy that “Those who make peaceful change impossible make violent change inevitable.”
Perhaps at no time in the history of the nation’s judiciary has the stock of the once revered institution come to the lowest nadir of disrepute as since the slew of decisions concerning the Governorship Election Petitions, especially since it made its bewildering pronouncements on the 2015 governorship elections in Rivers, Akwa Ibom and Abia States. In each of these elections, independent local and international election observers reported large scale electoral fraud. The respective legal teams provided overwhelming evidences of the electoral fraud, and marshalled compelling arguments and grounds. In each of the cases, the Court of Appeal upheld the petitions. But, hey presto! The apex court, the Supreme Court became the supreme kill joy of Nigerians, hiding behind a transparent fig leaf of legal technicalities to the detriment of dispensing justice to the people.
The Supreme Court became the instrument for the thwarting of the people’s will as expressed through their votes. The Supreme Court became the tool used by election fraudsters to cleanse themselves and get clean bills of electoral health, even though every Dick, Tom and Harry saw and knows the truth. Should our top court be only concerned with delivering judgments without giving justice?
By its counter-intuitive decisions in each of these cases, the nation’s apex court, which had a good opportunity to restore its tattered reputation and uphold a veneer of integrity as the ultimate refuge and last hope of the common man, has turned itself into a macabre monster that dashes the collective yearnings of the people in the affected states to effect peaceful change in their respective polities. It would be foolhardy for this court to think that it would sleep easy when the majority of the people feel cheated and believe that its judgments deny them of justice. For, no nation can thrive in peace and progress where there is no justice.
By its putative injustice, the Supreme Court appears to be encouraging election riggers by putting out the message that you should “do everything you can to get INEC to return you as elected and go home to sleep as we will always affirm you as winner if you know your onions”. To fit this straight jacket, the Supreme Court through its serial insensitive pronouncements that defy any shred of logic or rationality, is sowing the seed of ferment and the potential recourse of the people to seek change by other means.
In the context of these recent happenings, the call during the 10th Gani Fahewimi Lecture in Lagos sometime ago by Justice Ayo Salami, former President of the Court Appeal, for the scrapping of our present criminal-justice architecture in which the Chief Justice of Nigeria is also the Chairman of the Nigerian Judicial Council (NJC), the body responsible for the appointment and discipline of judges begins to assume new importance and poignancy.
Nigeria needs not delay further in hearkening to the 2012 Uyo call by Justice Dahiru Musdapher, during a roundtable organised by the Socio-economic Rights and Accountability Project (SERAP) in conjunction with Royal Netherlands Embassy in, Akwa Ibom State for drawing up of a new judicial code of ethics to reflect current realities and challenges to tackle judicial corruption in the country, so as to ensure that “judges and the judicial system remain politically neutral and rise up to safeguard our fledgling democracy, and to minimise the entire judicial system against all identified iniquities.”
Nwagbara wrote from Umuahia, Abia State