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“If everything is for sale, including the courts and the police, trust evaporates, credit vanishes and business withers” – Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, p 257 (2016)
It is no longer news that Nigeria’s courts have normalised corruption and abuse of power. They have also put the corruption of courts and judges beyond the realm of accountability. Having developed into a country incapable of generating indignation for these perversions of high judicial office, Nigerians nevertheless wonder why the country has descended into an orgy of violent self-help. What follows is a recent timeline of how.
In 2007, former Nigerian president, Olusegun Obasanjo and his hand-picked electoral umpire, Maurice Iwu, presided over the most venal elections in Nigeria’s history. 86.35% of the offices contested and called in that election ended up before the judges who ultimately decided the winners and losers. Unsurprisingly, the judges were under considerable pressure of different kinds.
One of the contests that ended up in court concerned the governorship of Osun State in South West Nigeria. Presiding over the tribunal in that contest in 2007 was a judge of the Plateau State High Court, Thomas Naron. In this capacity, Justice Naron got into intimate telephone exchanges over the case with Kunle Kalejaiye, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN), representing the then Governor of Osun State, Olagunsoye Oyinlola, in whose favour the tribunal eventually decided. These allegations eventually ended up before the National Judicial Council (NJC) in a petition against Justice Naron. In February 2013, the NJC found that Justice Naron had violated his judicial oath in his dalliance with Kunle Kalejaiye and terminated his judicial career.
Separately, the Legal Practitioners Disciplinary Committee (LPDC) took up a complaint against Kunle Kalejaiye for violation of the Rules of Professional Conduct (RPC) in the legal profession. On 21 May, 2015, the LPDC found Kalejaiye guilty of multiple violations of the RPC and disbarred him. Mr. Kalejaiye appealed against his disbarment ultimately to the Supreme Court. On 15 March, 2019, the Supreme Court decided that his right to fair hearing had been violated because a member of the LPDC who had failed to sit in the proceedings of the Committee had nevertheless participated in its final decision. So, the Supreme Court voided the decision of the LPDC and gave Mr. Kalejaiye a clean bill of health without clearing him of the allegation of corrupting judges. The NJC fired the judge whom Mr. Kalejaiye corrupted but the Supreme Court saw nothing wrong with corrupting him.
This decision was a curious departure from over four decades of Supreme Court decisions. In September 1971, the Public Service Commission of Rivers State determined that Athanasius Hart, then Permanent Secretary in the state Ministry of Works, Land and Transport, was guilty of serious charges of abuse of office and official corruption. Instead of taking action against Mr. Hart, the Commission transmitted its recommendations to the then Military Governor, Alfred Diette-Spiff, who ordered that Mr. Hart be summarily retired. Mr. Hart challenged the governor’s decision. He lost in the High Court and appealed to the Supreme Court, which found that the power to discipline the Permanent Secretary belonged not to the Governor but to the Public Service Commission.
As a result, the Supreme Court set aside the Governor’s decision but, rather than reinstate Mr. Hart, it ordered on 19 November, 1976, that the case be remitted to the Public Service Commission “so that the Commission can exercise its powers….as it may deem fit.”
When it decided the case of Kunle Kalejaiye, the Supreme Court did not appear to remember the case of Athanasius Hart from 43 years before. Two years after, on 16 June 2021, the Supreme Court equally forgot what it did in Mr. Kalejaiye’s case. The case this time involved three lawyers, Mamman Waziri, Olayori Muideen and Osaretin George Izegbuwa, disbarred by the LPDC for serious professional misconduct. As with Mr. Kalejaiye, the Supreme Court found that there had been a violation of fair hearing because a member who had not participated in the proceedings voted on the final decision of the LPDC. However, unlike in the case of Mr. Kalejaiye, rather than give these more junior lawyers a clean bill of health, the court ordered the retrial of the lawyers by a new panel of the LPDC. The court made no effort to justify why it decided these cases differently.
This tendency to invent law on a whim has characterized decisions of the highest courts in Nigeria on matters of judicial integrity. On 23 June, 2017, the High Court of Lagos State delivered a ruling asserting competence to try Hyeladzira Nganjiwa, a judge of the Federal High Court, for unlawful enrichment (another name for judicial graft). Nganjiwa appealed to the Court of Appeal claiming that he could not be prosecuted for such a crime without first having been disciplined by the NJC. Five months later, on 11 December, 2017, the Court of Appeal agreed with him that he could not be prosecuted except after the NJC had decided on a petition against the judge. Interestingly, when the NJC earlier this month disciplined three judges for issuing “black market” ex parte orders, it did not await nor did it receive any petitions.
Nganjiwa is back judging. Justifying itself, the Court of Appeal observed: “if a judicial officer commits theft, fraud, murder or manslaughter, arson and the likes, which are crimes committed outside the scope of the performance of his official functions, he may be arrested, interrogated and prosecuted accordingly by the State directly without recourse to the NJC.” With these words, Nigeria’s Court of Appeal says collecting bribes is within the scope of a judge’s official functions? By the way, if the Court of Appeal had bothered to read Nigeria’s Code of Conduct for Judicial Officers, it would have found that Rule 1(1) of the Code requires all judicial officers to “respect and comply with the laws of the land….” In effect, the distinction that the court seeks to draw between judicial corruption on the one hand and other crimes on the other, such as murder, manslaughter or arson, does not exist because the crimes in the latter category also violate of the Judicial Code of Conduct. On this kind of jurisprudence, Justice Donald Ikomi would not have been exonerated after trial on a charge of killing of his Police Orderly because the judicial fraternity would have invented some technicality to peclude that from happening and condemned him to a lifetime of living with indelible reputational blot as a killer.
Following the decision of the Court of Appeal in Justice Nganjiwa’s case, in January 2021, the High Court of Lagos discharged Mohammed Yinusa, another judge of the Federal High Court, on charges of having received unlawful payments from senior lawyers who were conducting cases before him. He was not acquitted. Thereafter, the NJC reinstated him as a judge. How lawyers can appear before him and call him “My Lord” knowing that he is forever tarnished is another matter. Similarly, on 21 November, 2021, the Federal High Court in Lagos discharged Rita Ofili-Ajumogobia, another judge of the Federal High Court, from charges of money laundering again on a technicality.
In an icing on this bazaar of judicial whim, the Supreme Court on 20 December, 2021 reversed the conviction of Joseph Nwobike, another SAN, on charges of perverting of the course of justice. Mr. Nwobike reportedly specialized in “inducing court registrars to ensure that his cases were assigned to his preferred judges so he could obtain favourable judgments.” Nwobike, the charges read, also offered bribes to Mohammed Yinusa and Hyeladzira Nganjiwa, both judges of the Federal High Court. In a startling perversion, if ever there was one, the Supreme Court claimed that it was not “safe to regard the offence of attempt to pervert the course of justice which [Nwobike] was convicted for, where it has not been shown that it was committed with the objective of earning wealth…. as an economic and financial crime.” With clear evidence that Nwobike went about buying up judges and court registrars, the Supreme Court still wanted proof that his name was not OXFAM?
The decision of the Supreme Court purporting to clear Joseph Nwobike and reinstating him as a senior lawyer seals its reputation as the venue where accountability meets the judicial Guillotine. Tragically, in this one decision, the court inflicts eternal injustice on Nwobike, who, like Kunle Kalejaiye, will never be able to clear his name of the stain of buying judges and suborning courts. Simultaneously, it afflicts the Nigerian legal profession with indelible reputational damage.
No one wants to invest in a country in which judges lack the capacity for indignation over credible charges of judicial corruption. This is why Nigeria bleeds investments and even those who end up investing in Nigeria don’t choose it as the place for resolving their investment disputes. They think Nigerian judges are bought and sold on the open market and the Supreme Court is unwilling to face this down. Rather, it emits high tolerance for corrupting jurisprudence and a jurisprudence of corruption which is as unfair to honest judges as it is damaging to hardworking lawyers. So, Nigeria and its professionals lose jobs and earnings to professionals from more dependable jurisdictions and even those seen as doing well are mere bag carriers for their peers or inferiors from those places. As far as judicial cuts go, it is difficult to find any more unkind or less supreme.
•A lawyer & teacher, Odinkalu can be reached at chidi.odinkalu@tufts.edu
RIGHT OF REPLY
Amuta Goofed on the Jonathans
By Louis Achi
Democracy would lose its defining egalitarianism if it foreclosed the free expression of viewpoints by its adherents – including often unreasoned perspectives by forces that seek to diminish and divide. Against this backdrop, public communicators who through discipline and intellectual honesty have achieved that delicate, firm balance between viewpoints that enlighten and lift society and contrived commentary that distorts, diminishes and stunts, should be appreciated.
Last week, in his respected weekly column ENGAGEMENTS, in THISDAY, Dr. Chidi Amuta turned his focus on former President Goodluck Jonathan and ex-First Lady, Mrs. Patience Jonathan in an essay titled – “The Staying Power of Mrs. Jonathan.” Deploying his customary power of language and inimitable Tennyson-like imageries, Dr. Amuta, with unusual subliminal ruthlessness, put the former president and his spouse to the sword. If there was some afterthought of taking prisoners in this particular decapitating literary excursion, Amuta betrayed none.
A master of speech writing himself, Amuta wrote off Jonathan’s speeches while in office: “His speeches read more like apprentice campus seminar papers than lofty presidential pronouncements,” suggesting, “The consensus is that he had neither an agenda of power nor a mission in office.”
More like rhapsodizing over what he felt were the former president’s limitations, Amuta saw Jonathan as “A man who hardly found shoes to wear till rather suddenly found himself struggling to fit into the oversized shoes of Africa’s most powerful presidency.” Further according to the well-known academic and public communications guru, “Very few Nigerians remember any quotable utterances by former President Goodluck Jonathan.” Haba! Even Amuta’s existential situation could not have been the same under Jonathan the target – and currently.
Perhaps saving the unkindest cut for the former First Lady, Amuta dismissed her as unschooled in elegance and lacking cultural sophistication. Hear him: “But to the elite, she (Mrs. Jonathan) was a demeaning departure from the common run of schooled elegance and cultural sophistication.”
In what Amuta may have felt was a humorous ‘Nollywoodisation’ of the former First Lady’s tenancy of Aso Rock, he shredded her carriage, off-the-cuff speeches, street appeal, “unvarnished and unwashed witticism,” needlessly contrasting her style with the “delectable glamour of a Mrs. Aisha Buhari.”
Like a good sniper schooled in the deadly art of delivering sudden death, Amuta struck the former First Spouses with high-calibre literary-political bullets meant to end a perceived new journey. Unlike a skulking sniper who shoots from hiding, Amuta shot from the open space and a top-draw platform. But at a fundamental level, this puzzling hockery-pokery project is not suited to vintage Amuta, an idealistic academic of the Marxist bent fired by altruism – who has considerably positively impacted his milieu.
For many who may not know, Dr. Amuta is a foremost Nigerian journalist, author, internationally acclaimed intellectual and public communicator and former senior lecturer in literature and communications at the Obafemi Awolowo University and University of Port Harcourt. He was also visiting Fellow, Fletcher School of Law & Diplomacy, Boston USA. A founding Editorial Board member, The Guardian, Group Editorial Adviser and Chairman Editorial Board of the Daily Times, Amuta is currently member of the Editorial Board of THISDAY.
The depth and sweep of his contributions to social ferment bespeak the eloquence of old school restraint, commitment and panache. Unfortunately, these ingredients that define professionalism, for some reasons, are largely missing in current journalistic discourse. Has Amuta lost his chutzpah? Not many would contemplate this. Then what gives?
At a critical juncture in the convoluted socio-political evolution of the Nigerian state, what should be the focus of the nation’s intellectual class? Amidst contrived chaos, economic nightmare, unending bloodletting, human misery and extreme governance deficits that continue to define Nigeria’s democracy, many are wont to lose faith in the polity. This may be understandable. But history shows that mere loss of faith, a pathway to surrender is taking the easy course.
The path of courage is to interrogate the policies, concepts, leadership vision or visionlessness and socio-political triggers that generate regression using reasoned, temperate logic and candour. Next is to offer alternative vision of sustainable strategies to resolve extant human development and socio-economic challenges. This is the path Amuta should have kept to.
Contemptuously thrashing a former First Lady and her spouse and comparing her with the “delectable glamour of a Mrs. Aisha Buhari,” does not represent the best of Amuta or validate his hard-earned reputation. According to Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, incidentally, a former US First Lady, “The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.” Former First Lady, Mrs. Patience Jonathan certainly believed and believes in the beauty of her dreams. She brought an earthy, folksy charm and total lack of affectation to her ‘tour of duty’.
This scenario throws up legitimate posers. In crafting his last week’s column or better still – blitzkrieg – what was Amuta’s motive? Could it have been the Biblical voice of Jacob and hand of Esau scenario?
Amuta himself perhaps unwittingly supplies the smoking gun. Hear him: “A return to Goodluck Jonathan beyond the ritual of professional peace missionary or envoy of the incumbent president does not look like an object of much interest. It is a dream path littered with fields of mines and shrapnel.” Whether as a warning or free advisory, this adroitly veiled allegation essentially suggests that Dr. Jonathan is contemplating a return to active politics ahead of 2023 and some interested parties are already buying some powerful pens to demonise him!
In the face of the trending narratives that former President Jonathan may succumb to the alleged courtship of the ruling Northern political intelligentsia to fly their party’s presidential ticket in 2023, several political calculations are being spawned. Perhaps more potently, this scenario is understandably generating some fear in several political quarters.
At the time of this response, Jonathan, a scientist who has morphed into a respected national and international statesman has not given an indication of whether he will bite the alleged Northern bait. He has even formally debunked such course. But this has not calmed the jitters – understandably.
From Jonathan’s South-South region, several powerful Turks are eyeing the presidency and a successful enlistment of Jonathan, who would be constitutionally limited to a single four-year term, by the North, would effectively destroy such ambitions. Ditto for the South-East and South-West!
In the literary turf, Amuta has taken on bards of kindred plumage. He is the author of “Towards a Sociology of the African Novel” (1986) and “The Theory of African Literature” (1989). He used these works to adroitly take on intellectuals like Chinweizu, Onwuchekwa Jemie, Ihechukwu Madubuike, Charles Nnolim, Sunday Anozie and Wole Soyinka. Like a great boxer, a great writer should not have a glass jaw or he could be knocked out easily in the fray. But boxing in the political fray comes with collateral dangers – especially if it is anchored on jejune instead of genuine conviction.
After all, according to Dennis Brutus the South African protest poet, “Writers must not live a lie.”
