Supreme hubris

Olakunle Abimbola

From its apex, the Nigerian judiciary, slowly but surely, cascades down the nadir of polite society.

But only it can’t see it: trapped, as it were, in its own frothing, intoxicating and all-consuming legalese.

Supreme Court, supreme hubris, supreme joke?  That is clearly irreverent.  Indeed, it is harsh.

But the supreme crunch would dawn, when even the most placid and reticent, of genteel citizens, start upbraiding the Supreme Court, as some supreme curse.

That would be the day!  We hope — and pray — that day never comes!

Still, that would seem the troubling route the courts are heading, if the apex court continues to hoist crass technicality, over and above substantial justice.

That would appear clear, from that court’s May 8 voiding, via 7-0 verdict, of the 5 December 2019 conviction of former Abia Governor, Orji Uzor Kalu (OUK) and Ude Udeogu, the Abia State Government House director of finance, during the OUK governorship (1999-2007).

True, the Supreme Court only ordered a fresh trial, based on the technicality that the judge ought to have quit the case, though nearing conclusion at the high court, the moment he was promoted Justice of the Court of Appeal.

That such technicality could knock off a long-drawn case, that rippled with so much litigant bad faith to stall and escape justice, earned the ire of not a few.

But much more: that casual but costly technicality could have dealt a near-fatal blow on the Administration of Criminal Justice Act (ACJA) 2015.  Yet ACJA was enacted to checkmate cynics that apply procedural stalling, to escape justice.

ACJA, therefore, inspired the fiat, from the president of the Court of Appeal, that empowered the judge to complete the case.

But now, no thanks to the Supreme Court’s May 8 verdict, the courts may yet endure a deluge of appeals from past convicts, armed with fresh anti-ACJA technicality, hot, fresh and smoking, from the apex court itself.

Talk of a Supreme Court, bristling with supreme pride, crowning itself the supreme cog, in the war against procedural bad faith in Nigerian courts — hardly the apex court’s finest hour!

Though the danger of unravelling courts looms larger, as the seconds tick and days pass, the ghoul of a self-distracting judiciary would date back, even if faintly, to the early years of Nigeria’s flag independence.

Chief Obafemi Awolowo, in The Travails of Democracy and the Rule of Law (Adventures in Power Book Two), recorded Sir Adetokunbo Ademola, the first indigenous Chief Justice of Nigeria (CJN), as making reckless partisan comments, at a 1960 special luncheon to inaugurate Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe as Nigeria’s Governor-General.

There the CJN, and the dominion’s new Prime Minister, formed a tag team to dismiss the office of Leader of Opposition as some parliamentary scam, to the chagrin of the international community present, as Awo returned fire, tit-for-tat.

On 29 November 1960 (less than two months after independence), Dr. Taslim Elias, a future CJN but then federal minister of Justice and Attorney-General, bossed debates in the House of Representatives, on how the central parliament could summarily shut down — and take over — a recalcitrant region (read Western Region), using the law as a mere accomplice.

That appeared a parliamentary simulation of the 1962 phony emergency in the Western Region, brewed in that same parliament, which would signal the beginning of the end for the 1st Republic.

A controversial 1963 Awo conviction, CJN Ademola’s post-conviction manoeuvres to procure Awo a cynical pardon for humiliating partisan terms, and a January 1966 coup that buried that republic, didn’t exactly leave the judiciary smelling like roses.

Yet, when Dr. Elias (as second-term AG and federal commissioner for Justice, under Gen. Yakubu Gowon) was, in 1972, plucked from his twin job as Professor and Dean of Law at the University of Lagos, and made CJN, it was the legal gown come to boss the judicial town!  But then, both gown and town boasted high societal awe.  Hardly any more!

Still, at his removal in 1975, as part of the post-Gowon purge, Gen. Olusegun Obasanjo, the new junta’s second-in-command, said of CJN Elias and his sack, in Not My Will, Obasanjo’s immediate post-regime memoirs:

“His legal competence was not in doubt and we also acknowledged that he was a great academician,” he wrote but “his management competence and integrity to administer the judiciary was called to question, especially as a result of the apparent muddle, confusion and ineptitude by the judiciary previously.”

Now, the notoriously narcissist Obasanjo, he of tumbling and often meaningless adjectives, is fairly slammed for conflicting executive rashness with supreme wisdom, for most of his long power years.

CJN Elias was clearly a personal victim of that hare-brained headiness, that drove the Murtala-era purges. That would explain his rash sack, and near-instant push, for the World Court at The Hague, of which Elias would later become president.

Yet, as a class, the judiciary that Sir Darnley Alexander, then Chief Judge of Cross Rivers State, was picked to head was a tad lower in public estimation, compared with 1960.

Then came the 2nd Republic, and the Supreme Court, and its twelve-two-thirds controversial verdict, helped to give that short-lived republic (1979-1983) a huge legitimacy challenge, which it never really surmounted; just as the courts were part of the Babangida June 12, 1993 presidential annulment mess.

All through these periods, however, a section of the judiciary, galvanized by the exploits of the likes of Chukwudifu Oputa (JSC), Kayode Esho (JSC) and Dr. Akinola Aguda, one-time Chief Justice of Botswana, fine jurists in whom brilliance and character cohered, rallied to stay the course.

Still, with 1999’s democracy return would come new decadence, with the judiciary slipping further into the bog; and the courts, no more than bugs, in the mind of many.

That climaxed with the Code of Conduct Tribunal (CCT) conviction, on 18 April 2019, of former CJN Walter Samuel Nkanu Onnoghen, for false asset declaration.  Now, the CJN as convict, was a new low!

But that wasn’t even the news.  The dreary news was that the flower of the Bar and a section of the Bench rallied, via procedural technicalities, to shield one of their own from justice.

That was in violent breach of the solemn social contract that catapulted them as sacred votaries, in the immaculate shrine of Justice.  Indeed, until things turned nasty, a section of the Bar, with some roaring silks, was goading the embattled CJN to ignore the CCT!

But it was ACJA that saved the day — not because the CJN was convicted but because justice was served.  It wouldn’t have made any difference, had the CJN been discharged and acquitted.

Rather, the heart-warming lesson was never again, in our land, would crass technicality obstruct or trump justice!  But see how pyrrhic the Supreme Court has made that seeming breakthrough, with its supreme hubris — sorry, verdict — of May 8!

Each time the judiciary ruffles societal feathers, with controversial verdicts, some all-knowing lawyers come barging in, with frothing and arcane technicalities — bravo!

But the Supreme Court, by its verdicts, should ingrain substantial justice, rather than glory in technicalities. Any contrary path is nothing but expressway to self-ruin.