Tag: Abubakar Malami

I confess that I had not expected the flood of calls and emails that I got on the essay on the Attorney General of the Federation, Abubakar Malami, that appeared in this column last week. Please recall that the essay was based on what I alleged to be a grave misfit between Abubakar Malami as AGF and the extraordinarily idealistic and humanistic provisions of the Administration of Criminal Justice Act of 2015 (ACJA). In the essay, I argued that against the general despair and disillusionment prevailing in the country on nearly all counts but more specifically on the reversals and losses in the war against corruption declared by the Buhari administration when it came to power in 2015, ACJA ought to give all Nigerians hope – as far as we can make the AGF obey the responsibilities and obligations of his office spelt out in ACJA. The general idea behind this cautious optimism is the belief that if we have a wonderful document like ACJA as the law of the land on the administration of criminal justice in our country, half of the battle is won and what we have to do is win the remaining half of the battle by making, indeed forcing our rulers and public officials to obey the legal instruments of their posts. It is perhaps useful to briefly go over the finer points of the things that I said in the column last week.

In my central argument, I had proposed that ACJA’s stipulations about the administration of criminal justice in Nigeria are so clearly stated, so heavily weighted in favour of efficiency, fairness, and equity for all – and especially for the powerless and the downtrodden – that only a very inept and lackluster AGF like Malami could persistently screw things up by the innumerable acts of refusal of court orders and refusal to prosecute protected criminals that have ineradicably defined his tenure to date as President Buhari’s AGF. And please remember that in that article in this column last week, I had sought to de-link Malami as AGF from Buhari as President in my supporting argument that based on ACJA, the primary responsibility for the refusal either to obey court orders or to prosecute suspects or criminals lies with the AGF, not the President. All the respondents to last week’s piece agreed with this separation of the President and the AGF but they went much farther than me in carpeting Malami. How did these respondents frame or express their devastating focus on Malami?

Well, in the first place, they alleged that I was both wrong and naïve about AGF Malami; they said that what is wrong about Malami’s work as AGF is worse than incompetence and ineptitude; and they concluded, with a unanimity that both startled and ultimately convinced me, that Abubakar Malami is a very conscious and determined opponent of the smooth, efficient and equitable operationalization of the provisions of ACJA. Central to their contention is what, for want of a more appropriate term, I would call the wuruwuru and barawo use of discontinuance by Malami and other high officials of his office. Yes, there is the refusal to obey court orders by Malami and there is the refusal to prosecute protected criminals and these are bad enough, these respondents to my article declared. But beyond these two refusals, they also insisted, look to discontinuance and you will get a more chilling but more accurate profile of who Abubakar Malami is as our AGF, heavens help us!

In our predators’ republic of a country, you learn new and unspeakably depressing facts every day. So it is with this phenomenon of “discontinuance”, compatriots, especially as elaborated and allegedly put into operation by Malami and his minions in the Federal Justice Ministry in the last three years. Ordinarily, discontinuance is ethically and legally a neutral term that carries no inherently positive or negative connotations. Yes, it may seem rather odd if and when a plaintiff who initiates a court case that he or she feels or knows is unassailable comes to the realization that his or her case is either without merit or would fail and therefore asks for discontinuance of the case. Friends and relatives of such a litigant may shake their heads in surprise but they would give him or her the benefit of the doubt. But in all the law courts of all the nations of the world, it is rare, very rare, to hear of discontinuance in cases where the guilt of the accused or defendant is absolutely irrefutable or undeniable. Well, not under Abubakar Malami as AGF!

It was in great astonishment that I went through reports and accounts of the many cases of discontinuance that Malami has either himself personally executed or made his subordinates execute on his behalf and by his orders, reports and accounts forwarded to me by respondents to last week’s column. Some reports stand out in in the sheer scale of the fecklessness and cynicism of the AGF and his “partners in discontinuance”. Here’s one: Godsday Orubebe, Minster for Delta Affairs under Goodluck Jonathan, brought to the courts by the Independent Corrupt Practices Commission (ICPC) on charges involving the theft of N2.1 billion naira intended for construction of Trunk A roads in some parts of the Niger Delta; case withdrawn on the orders of Malami, to the utter surprise of both the prosecuting agency (ICPC) and the presiding judge. Here’s another case: Ahmed Saleh, Registrar of the Supreme Court (RSC), charged by the EFCC for theft and money laundering to the tune of N2 billion naira, a watertight case; also withdrawn on the orders of Malami on the patently dishonest and illegal grounds that at some future date not specified, Saleh would act as state witness in the prosecution of judges of the high courts and justices of the Supreme Court about whom the accused RSC had over the years gathered damaging information about their corrupt practices. Where is the N2 billion Saleh was alleged to have gotten through his nefarious practices? Please ask Malami if recovery of the money was part of his deal with Saleh!

In the immediately preceding paragraph, I used the term or phrase, “Malami and his partners in discontinuance”. I do not use the phrase with levity, I use it with utter seriousness. This is because shortly after he became AGF, Malami set up a body that he called the National Prosecution Coordination Committee (NPCC). Ostensibly, this body, NPCC, was intended to coordinate the prosecution of what Malami called high profile cases of corruption by which he meant those cases that involved humungous sums of looted money and looters with very prominent and exposed posts and positions in the country, either in government or in business. The overall aim of this body was stated to be a desire to give Buhari’s declared anti-corruption war an enabling institutional framework. If even at its “birth” Malami’s NPCC was vigorously queried about its relevance and usefulness, today it is nothing more than a joke, a bad joke. It has not improved the prosecution of looters and money launderers one bit; rather, it has become much better known for discontinuance than for successful, fair and expeditious prosecution of the mega-looters. Perhaps most astonishing of all, Malami’s NPCC has also extended its discontinuance activities to relatively low-level criminal cases, raising questions for its critics as to whether or not this NPCC is actually a protection racket organized and operated by the AGF and his “partners in discontinuance”. I mean, what is the purpose of the Office of the AGF asking prosecutors in the Nigerian Police Force to transfer cases involving scamming operations of small scale enterprises to the NPCC only to have such cases put into discontinuance?

There is a particular twist to this phenomenon of discontinuance that is worthy of special mention in this discussion if only because though technically it does not involve the discontinuation of a case already in the law courts, it nevertheless is nothing if not discontinuance in another form. This is the notorious case of Abdulrasheed Maina, probably the single most embarrassing case for the validity and legitimacy of Buhari’s declared war on corruption. As is well-known, Maina, as Head of the Pension Reform Task Force, made away with over N2 billion naira. With the aid of highly placed officials, he absconded from Nigeria and was then placed on Interpol’s International Wanted List. And then, worst of all, he reappeared in Nigeria and was installed in the Interior Ministry as Acting Director of one of the Ministry’s agencies. When this was revealed, Maina again vanished into thin air, no doubt aided by the same highly placed officials. Well, we do not know which officials helped Maina to abscond from justice twice; but we do not know who was behind his reinstatement into the Federal Civil Service and with promotion. Who was it? It was AGF Abubakar Malami.

Maina’s notorious case involves “discontinuance” at its most brazen, cynical and arrogantly contemptuous of the due processes of the rule of law. How else should we see the reinstatement, in broad daylight and hidden in plain sight, of a fugitive from the law, Nigerian law and international law? If this is the case, for me or anyone to say that the AGF was responsible for his reinstatement, without having ever had his name cleared of the charges against him, is to make very grievous allegations about the AGF. But what if it is the AF himself who made such an allegation against himself? This is what Malami did at Senate hearings on the Maina case when he admitted, first, that he had met with Maina in Dubai when the fugitive from justice was still on the run and, secondly, that he, Malami, had written four letters to the Federal Civil Service Commission on Maina’s behalf. Four letters on Maina’s behalf over the course of many months until he was finally reinstated into the civil service, without having been tried. Is this not discontinuance even before the case could be tried? Is it not a discontinuance that was itself discontinued only by the outcry of the Nigerian public?

Where are those who drafted ACJA 2015 and saw it to legislation as the law of the land? Yes, this is a rhetorical question, but I ask it for one reason. What is this reason? Well, it is this: I count myself as a fairly well-informed Nigerian. But as I have said earlier in this piece, until I got the flood, the barrage of reports and accounts of Malami’s saga of discontinuance galore this past week, I simply did not know enough about both the scale of our AGF’s war against the war on corruption or the Buhari’s administration’s free pass to Malami and his discontinuance partners to do as they please. And now that I know these things, is it enough for me to simply say all I can in this column and move on to another topic next week? What else can we do? Will progressive and patriotic lawyers and jurists in our midst please step forward and tell us what is to be done and what they, can and will do?

• Biodun Jeyifo

bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu