In 1984, the late Gani Fawehinmi, SAM, SAN, spectacularly broke ranks with his legal commune. That clan dotted on “due process” — no crime! — and distanced itself from the post-2nd Republic corruption trials, before special tribunals.
Those trials handed convicted former political office holders jumbo gaol sentences for corruption. The Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) decreed its members should stay off the cases, since it perceived the process as skewed against justice.
But Gani, famous loner often at his best when acting solo, cut to the chase: this was humongous, nation-ruining sleaze, not to be deodorised by any legalistic cant. So, Gani balked.
Was he right? Ripples, then as an undergraduate, bristling at the “brazen injustice”, thought so. But what if Gani was right; and the rest of us were wrong?
What if Gani was so prescient he thought if Nigeria didn’t crush the elephantine greed of its thieving elite, with as little misleading legal fizz as possible, the country could, 32 years later, just be fated to another Dasukigate, quite stratospheric, when compared with the industrial-scale looting of the Abacha era?
And if the present generation, cheering or jeering Dasukigate, did not fully grasp the danger of this tragic continuum of greed and lunatic graft; and the stealing status quo were to continue?
In another 32 years: would there even be a state, from which citizens under serious censure — and rightly so for alleged heist — demand “rule of law” with such self-serving hypocrisy? And if the state had been eaten into pulp by a rapacious few, how can it guarantee any rights to anyone?
All these queries are coming up because two vital pillars of the modern state, the bar and the media, on the Muhammadu Buhari anti-graft war, are already equivocating. Yet, they know galloping graft brings clear and present ruin.
In fairness to the lawyers, and with all due respect to their most altruistic, they tend to have a rather sweet penchant for private joy, rather than collective bliss. One of them sensationally declared the alleged disobedience to court orders, by the Buhari Presidency, would endanger legal practice! Now, was that wilful truth or awful Freudian slip?
Still, a towering legal voice has spoken for the epoch, beyond the titillating aroma of present client briefs. Olisa Agbakoba, SAN, declared: any court ruling on present corruption cases should take cognisance of law as it takes of public opinion. A golden intervention there! The great Gani too, in 1984, did a procedural equivalent of class suicide, just to underscore his outrage against sleaze, while his peers got fixated with sterile procedure.
Still, from the least socially conscious to the most radical of crusading attorneys, every lawyer is covered by the lawyers’ creed: the right of every accused to legal representation.
The media has no such luxury, particularly in society-damaging times, that the free and wild looting of the Jonathan era has made of the present.
In times of great throes, the media ought to champion the spirit of the age: editorials echoing the great angst in the land, and columns speaking the pains and anguish of the meek, the silenced and the repressed.
But even with the outrage in the land, a section of the media stay wrapped in a sterile cocoon; as cold and insensitive as the uproar in the streets is hot and impassioned.
Take two of the brightest stars in the glittering sky of The Nation.
For two consecutive Sundays (January 3 and 10), Palladium, that formidable back page column on Sundays, went into a deep philosophical, analytical and theoretical trance; and with a vengeance, conjured the alchemy and metaphysics of democracy; and its inalienable rights.
At the end of that trance, Buhari (who tries hard to right grievous wrongs) had become the villain; those accused of egregious sleaze, unfairly repressed citizens; and the throes in the land, which their stupendous heists have caused, mere “popular sentiments against the so-called treasury looters.”
So called! Call that the Palladium beatification, and you are spot on!
By his third straight offering (January 18), Palladium had worked himself into virtual hysteria, dismissing both the president and the entire anti-sleaze outrage as “wrong”. Well, Mighty Palladium is entitled to his romantic fixation, fast morphing into quixotic delusion!
Sam Omatseye, in his “Catching a thief” (January 11) entered and exited with great flourish and élan, with every line dripping with charming erudition. But at the end, the columnist ended up as a finger-pointer. The anti-corruption war, he tended to imply, is Buhari’s personal battle, in which the president must float or sink! How so?
Yeah, a more sympathetic reading has suggested Sam only decried the lack of an elite anti-corruption critical mass; as well as an organised mass vanguard. That is not unreasonable — and perhaps the administration should do more mobilisation on this score.
But where stands the columnist? And, for that matter, you: the grand victim of those grand heists?
The hegemony of Western culture stands on ancient Greek civilisation. Yet at an epoch, Greece would appear even more debauched than contemporary Nigeria.
Draco (7th century BC), bristled at the mass decadence of the Athens of his day. He tackled it harsh and hard; but earned notoriety by bequeathing humanity the word, “draconian”.
Solon (6th century BC), reformed Draco’s harsh laws. He earned admiration down the ages, for he was hailed as “Solon the Wise”.
Pericles (5th century BC), an Athenian naval general, was even victim of his age’s liberality. By the instrumentality of the ostrakon (which birthed the word, “ostracise”), he was banished for a period, for being “too popular”. But he came back in triumph to be lawgiver, and presided over the most golden era of Athenian — and Greek — civilisation.
A common thread runs through the triad, over three different centuries: each faced the challenge of his time, guided by the temper of his age. But without Draco, would there have been Pericles?
From the “ten-percenters” of the First Republic, Nigerian unconscionable elite thieves have grown more brazen in their prependal crimes. A Draco shock therapy would, therefore, appear inevitable, nay imperative, to nudge them, the hard way, back to redemption. Perhaps that is President Buhari’s historical mission?
Still, let the courts be fair to all. But with glaring records of bad faith from these elite thieves and their colluding lawyers, let no procedural romantics conjure scarecrows that canonise the impunity to commit crimes and get away with them; but demonise state agents that apply legitimate measures to secure justice for the rest of us.
That is as much corruption of the public space, as unbridled stealing of public funds is corruption of the polity.
Therefore, President Buhari should shun the din of naysayers and do the needful to retrieve every kobo, stolen from the public till.
Ripples is with him all of the way. What about you?
Just 40 days of vacation and it looked like 40 years, watching from the sidelines, Nigeria’s ever gripping public theatre. It’s nice to be back. Happy new year, folks!
