Palladium, do you live on Mars? Our judiciary is ‘a laughing stock around the civilized world’!

Should President Buhari continue in his present course of fighting brutally by hitting below the belt and biting in the clichés on the excuse that the mill of justice grinds too slowly, he will not only have defined his presidency, he will have defined Nigeria and made her the laughing stock of the civilized world, far worse than the corruption he speaks so loathingly about.

My fellow columnist in this newspaper, “Palladium” (Idowu Akinlotan), must be the only columnist in our country today who apparently does not know that when it comes to the trial of alleged looters, our judicial system is one of the most disreputable national criminal justice systems on the planet; it is indeed, in Palladium’s own words, “the laughing stock of the civilized world”. Every well informed, literate reader of Nigerian newspapers knows that high-profile Nigerian looters are a hundred times far more likely to be successfully prosecuted abroad than in Nigeria itself. But again, Akinlotan is blissfully, even militantly unaware of this fact. Finally, everyone but Akinlotan knows that trials of alleged high profile looters in Nigerian courts are typically so endlessly prolonged that most of them are either never concluded or lapse into a state of suspended animation while the looters walk away free, their loot intact in their domestic and foreign bank accounts. Now, I know that Akinlotan does not live on planet Mars; he lives in Nigeria and is indeed almost unmatched by any other newspaper columnist in the country in his grasp of personalities, details and intricacies of political affairs in our country. So: why is Akinlotan so blissfully ignorant of the well-known fact that the Nigerian judiciary is, at home and abroad, a laughing stock when it comes to the trial of alleged high profile looters?

This was the question that I kept asking myself as I read and reread Palladium’s column last week.Now, most readers of Akinlotan’s column know that in the last couple of months, he has been persistent, he has been relentless, he has been outspoken in his criticisms of the President, the AGF and the EFCC in their handling of the prosecution of the alleged looters in the law courts. Indeed, Akinlotan has included the masses of ordinary Nigerians in his tirades against the President, the AGF and the EFCC. On the whole, his criticisms have rested on two basic claims. One: that the guilt of the alleged looters having already been decided before their trial, the President, the AGF and the masses are more than ready to ignore or perhaps trample to the dust all the standard protocols of fair judicial trial like the independence of the judiciary, the authority and dignity of trial magistrates and judges, and the right of the accused to a fair hearing. Two: in his criticisms of the manner in which the President and his AGF have been prosecuting the alleged looters, Akinlotan asserts that the new administration is doing irreparable damage to the rule of law in our country, so much so that, in Akinlotan’s view, there is a distinct, creeping move toward a dictatorship in which after the trial of the alleged looters might have been forcibly “won” by the President, the judiciary would have been so crippled that we, the Nigerian people, will have no rule of law left to protect and enforce our many civic and political rights. As a matter of fact, on the basis of this second point, Akinlotan has consistently argued over the last few months that Buhari is doing far more damage to the judiciary than anything that corruption and the looters have done to Nigeria and our judicial order.

In his column last week, Palladium took these criticisms to a new high – or anew low, depending on whether one is in agreement with Akinlotan or one finds the intellectual – and now also factual – bases of his arguments and criticisms false, biased and tendentious, as I do.Titled “Justice Haliru’s welcome boldness”, Akinlotan went way beyond all his previous pieces on the war on corruption to claim, vigorously and passionately, that we are more or less already at that dreaded moment he had been warning all of us when the rule of law would have been so gutted that only its shadow would remain. Against the massive and perhaps even overwhelming evidence that one can easily bring to Akinlotan’s attention, he asserted that the whole of the Nigerian judiciary comprising the Bar and the Bench are quaking in fear and trepidation before the tyranny of the President, the EFCC, the DSS, the Army, etc., etc.It was against the backdrop of this alleged universal climate of fear hanging over the Nigerian judiciary in its entirety that Akinlotan praised Justice Haliru’s “boldness” in terms so superlative that the stature that Palladium bestowed on the judge was larger than life. Perhaps it is useful at this juncture to put this point across in Palladium’s own words:

“Until Justice Haliru seized the bull by the horns, judges were in a panic to avoid the waspish tongue of the EFCC; and because of the bind Ricky Tarfa, a lawyer and senior advocate found himself, lawyers tiptoed around the anti-graft agency and spoke in whispers around its officers. In fact, for many months until now, it was perhaps only the Chief Justice of Nigerian (CJN), Mahmud Mohammed, who stood up to the presidency and the rampaging anti-graft agencies, warning against the wholesale condemnation of the judiciary”.

Since there is no other delicate or sensitive way to put the matter, I assert here that the profile of a cowed and quaking judiciary that Palladium paints in this quotation is not only overblown, it is completely false. For instance, on the first day of the hearing of the Ricky Tarfa case, the accused was accompanied to the hearing by a horde of SANs so large, so aggressive and so demonstrative in their demeanor that the trial judge was compelled to remark that if this show of force was meant to intimidate him, he wanted the learned senior advocates to know that he was not intimidated. By the way, this is a case in which the accused is alleged to have transferred large sums of money to judges trying some looters with the express purpose of influencing them in the cases they were trying. Moreover, contrary to Palladium’s claims in our quotation from his column last week, the senior advocates of virtually all the accused looters are not shaking with fear and trepidation; they are militantly and confidently ignoring ACJA 2015 and staying put with the existing status quo of criminal justice administration in Nigeria that allows the endless prolongation of the trial of high profile looters, And for the most part, except in a few notable cases, they are getting the willing cooperation of the trial magistrates and judges. Here we might as a matter of fact invoke the case of Bukola Saraki and his lawyers: every time that they show in up court in the endlessly adjourned and resumed sessions, they appear with a large throng of supporters in an evident show of force that is obviously meant to show the trial judge, the country and the whole world that they are not intimidated, that they are not cowed. And haven’t the President of the Nigerian Bar Association and many other senior advocates made public statements intended to isolate members of the NBA opposed to the countless invocations of stay of proceedings in the trials of the looters? What is the factual source of Palladium’s portrait of universal fear and trembling in the Bar and the Bench?

Factually, one of the most amazing claims of Palladium in his column last week is the claim that the problem of the Nigerian judiciary in matters pertaining to the trial of high profile looters pertains to only a “few corrupt judges and lawyers” (his own words). Please listen to the following expression of alarm by Akinlotan that Buhari’s manner of conducting his war against corruption in the law courts might cause a calamitous loss of faith in the judiciary among the Nigerian public: “How, in their enthusiasm to clean up the country, President Buhari and the anti-graft agencies became inured to the dangers of provoking incalculable damage to the judiciary and even instigating public loss of faith in that vital institution is hard to explain”. Was Palladium mentally asleep when he wrote words and sentences like these in his column last week? What can one say to an adult, literate and highly articulate Nigerian who does not know that for at least more than a decade now, there has been a widespread and profound public loss of faith in the Nigerian judiciary, whether one is talking of justice for low-level common felons who often languish in jail for long periods while awaiting trial or, more portentously, high profile looters who get away with mindboggling sums of loot on the basis of the impossibility of bringing their prosecution to a conclusion one way or another? And indeed, I ask again: does Palladium live on planet Mars?

There are quite a number of other terribly negative facts about the Nigerian judiciary that are common knowledge but that astonishingly, Palladium feigns complete ignorance of them. One: it is well known that the Nigerian judiciary is the ONLY national judicial system in the world in which interlocutory injunctions to prolong trials are allowed in criminal cases; everywhere else in the world, they are allowed only in civil cases. Two: bail is normally regularly granted to high profile looters, no matter how humungous the amount of loot they have stolen. This also is well known: when they are granted bail, they are asked to surrender their passports; but after the case might have lasted for months or years, their passports are returned to them and they are then able to leave the country, thereby making the prolongation of their cases more possible. Three: by an overwhelming percentage, the number of trials of looters more or less permanently stalled in the law courts is far greater than the number of cases that have been resolved with conviction of the accused and the recovery of the stolen loot. Four: the corruption perpetrated by high profile looters in our country could never have assumed the impunity that has become world famous if it did not have the systemic backing of the Nigerian judicial order. If Palladium says he does not know or has never heard or read of these facts, I will ask him to tell it to the marines.

In conclusion, let me say this: to Palladium, Justice Haliru and the CJN are heroes who are speaking out boldly and courageouslyagainst a creeping trend toward the Nigerian public’s total loss of faith in our judiciary. But to me and I dare say to most Nigerians, what Palladium regards as the heroism of Justice Haliru and the CJN is really more like hypocrisy. Where have Justice Haliru and CJN Mohammed been all the years and decades when the looters, their lawyers and compliant judges have seized control of the Nigerian judiciary? Why have Justice Haliru and the CJN not cried out and struggled for justice for the millions of Nigerians whose lives have been looted again and again? And why has this CJN in particular never expressed regret or shame that our judiciary is the laughing stock of the civilized world?

Biodun Jeyifo bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu.