It is like a typical market scene: Everyone is talking at the same time even no one is listening let alone comprehending. A straight chapter from Achebe’s Things Fall Apartin which the fabled falcon had long gone past hearing the falconer. A time whenalternative facts rule and the niceties of old time respect for others’ opinion are increasingly a distant memory, when the delicate threads holding brothers and sisters together have long sundered.Welcome to Nigeria’s season of polemics – a season when everyone claims to be a plaintiff, defence, attorney – all rolled into one depending on space, time and circumstances!
As the immortal Fela would say – this season, surely will bring out either the best or beast in us!
Afternearly week of verbal gymnastics most of which were couched in arcane legalese, it is increasingly hard to remember where the brouhaha started from let alone the issues at the heart of the disputation. Unfortunately, were the situation not so tragic – or better still – were the country not dealing with a crisis as graveas touching on our collective claim to being able to discern between right and wrong as indeed the very essence of constitutional governance, one would be tempted to simply relax and enjoy the circus going on.
See what has happened – all in a space of a fortnight. On January 7, a civil society group, Anti-Corruption Research Based Data Initiative (ARDI) petitioned the Code of Conduct Bureau accusing Onnoghenof failure to properly declare his assets according to law. Exactly a week after, the CJN was dragged before the Code of Conduct Tribunal (CCT) to answer to the charges. In between, the embattled CJN was alleged to have admitted to omissions so grave as to constitute a terrible violation of the law.
Not so – at least in the eyes of some lawyers who reduced the matter to one of finding the loopholes not to serve the ends of justice but tom exculpate the self-confessed offender. And so began the judicial rigmarole – first at the CCT over an ordinarily settled issue of jurisdiction; and thenthe high court, the industrial court and finally the Court of Appeal in what would become one of the most inglorious circuses ever seen in these parts. And then the federal government, as if to compound the serial travesty, going for a power grab, following a curious order procured at the CCT.
To describe what happened last week was a multi-layered tragedy is to put things mildly – for want of a better phrase. Just imagine the individual, who is not only the High Priest but in normal times would personify the majesty of the law, to get kicked off the sacred stool for grave financial malfeasances. As if the self-confession of amnesiais not troubling enough for a man who, like the Caesar’s wife should be without blemish, the anti-graft bodies have since determined that they would not hold back from roasting him in the African sun even if it means putting the institution of the judiciary on the spot. With revelations being splashed out daily in newspapers and the electronic media about the man’s net worth, it is doubtful that anyone among the vociferous throng chanting ‘due process would dare to swear on their mother’s grave that those humongous sums in various currencies found in the accounts of their ‘beloved’ Honourable Justice Walter Onnoghen, GCON , were actually products of honest day’s enterprise.
Which is what makes it hard to fathom why the man wouldn’t take a bow when it was still possible to salvage whatever was left of his honour.
Hardly a way to end a career spanning a little over four decades – if you ask me.
As for the Nigerian Judicial Council, it used to be said that you do not have elders around with the neck of the young sticking out of joint. Even if we leave out the minor drama of the embattled CJN putting off the meeting of the august body indefinitely, what I cannot understand is how the body of eminent men would so readily acquiesce – without as much as a whimper– to a forced abdication by a leader whose moral credentials have been so terribly assailed. Esprit de corps? That none of the wise men saw the looming disaster, nor took steps – even if informal – to stave off the national embarrassment seems to me another variant of the same tragedy.
The lawyers we know too well. Once upon a time, our learned fellows used to be described as ministers in the temple of justice. Not anymore. At least not here. So is their claim to being ‘learned’ just as questionable. Much as they have a job to do, it is their penchant to defecate in the communal pond that many find galling. Could any case be ‘worse’ than the celebrated O.J Simpson trial in the United States? Many of us watched the trial of the former National Football League (NFL) player, broadcaster and actor on two counts of murder for the June 12, 1994, deaths of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend, Ron Goldman on television. I didn’t see his high-profile defence team, referred to as the “Dream Team” attempt to bring the judicial institution down. What wason display throughout the trial was class, intellect and elegance. In the end, justice, rather than technicalities won. Nearer home, one remembers the trial of Oscar Pistorious, the South African sprint runner who made history in 2012 as the first amputee to compete in track events at the Olympics. Accused of murdering his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp, the trial which opened in High Court of South Africa,Pretoriaon March 3, 2014 was initially concluded on September 11, 2014 even as global audience watched the legal fireworks on prime time television. Here, our lawyers would, rather than apply their rigour to the trial process, shunt the process!
Was the federal government right or wrong to have asked Onnoghen to step aside? On this, Nigerians are as sharply divided as on the notion of what is right and wrong, and whether the endgame should trump the process. Trust Nigerians in their indignation to latch on to whatever aspects of the law that suits them,the issue really is who has the authority to sanction the erring CJN. In an ideal setting, the weight of public opinion would ordinarily suffice to force the embattled CJN to do the needful. This was not the case was simply a case of failure of private and public morality. As for the lawyers, they did not help matters by their frivolous applications designed to obstruct the process of trial even as the NJC, in a demonstrably false sense of moral solemnity went on sabbatical. And so an indignant even if opportunistic presidency, sure that the prospect of immediate sanction stands no chance with the Senate,and increasingly disdainful of the slow legal and bureaucratic safeguards,went for the option of self-help. Talk of the ultimate symptom of society in free fall.
Troubling times, surely, lie ahead.
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