The other day, Daily Trust broke, on its front page, complete with battleground map, a secret Baga counter-attack plan, against Boko Haram.
The military, with other security agencies, promptly raided the Trust premises.
Reacting to the outrage – which indeed, it was – a top editor howled: the military, invading a newspaper house, in 21stcentury Nigeria, under a democracy!
Splendid! But why his loud silence on the newspaper’s counter-outrage: the reckless publication of combat information, which could alert the enemy, lead to needless casualties and jeopardize the country’s security?
It was a perfect emotive whoop, complete with cynical and ruthless card-stacking. The military were the villains – to be sure! — for not following “due process”, in a democracy.
Much more: it was a signal for the “media rights” herd to bleat, hoot and roar; and drown the republic with a hubbub of own perspective – simply because they could and would! Call it the media’s democratic right to self-help!
But if that was the regnant illogic, why then blame the military too, for raiding Trust – simply because they could and would? Or is one self-help any less democratic than another?
Welcome to Nigeria, the republic of elite bullies! Beyond that, nothing else matters – no shared values, no grand ethos, just elite waywardness!
That same elite conceit now drives the Nigerian Judiciary, even as it faces its direst catastrophe ever – calling to rude question, the integrity of Chief Justice of Nigeria (CJN), Justice Walter Samuel Nkanu Onnoghen.
And how did the flower of the Bar – and probably the Bench, since those are not easily quotable – react to that stain? Pushing forth a clatter of technicalities – simply because they can and they will!
In a scandal that is easily a record, even with Nigeria’s cascade of chartered sleaze in the public space, CJN Onnoghen is accused of not declaring all his assets.
The jurist has not denied those grave charges. All he reportedly said, in response, was that he forgot to declare some of them – among those three bank accounts: a trove in foreign currencies, thus naturally fuelling suspicions, in a country that thrives on conspiracy theories.
Given the sacredness of his office, the CJN would appear mortally wounded; if not outright destroyed.
In that famous Caesar-speak, he is not Caesar’s wife that must not only be above board but be seen as so. He is the very Caesar, whose conduct must be absolutely unimpeachable.
In any case, that is society’s expectation of the Judiciary – and CJN is head of that hallowed chamber.
But why these superhuman expectations, when the CJN, leading other judges, is just a mere mortal and fellow citizen? It is because judges enjoy super-human reverence and privileges. When any citizen appears before their courts, they become Their Lordships, even in a full-fletched republican democracy!
This reverence is less because of their profundity in scholarship, though lawyers often claim sole monopoly to learnedness, when they bristle with procedures; and ripple with arcane legal technicalities.
It is rather because piety and the most rigorous of ethical behaviours are presumed an integral part of the Judiciary, at the apex of which nestles the immaculate Lord CJN.
So, when the CJN faces a dire integrity question – as it would appear in the present case – you just remember the Parson’s value lament, in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Prelude to Canterbury Tales: “If gold rusts, what will iron do?” That is the hole the judiciary has found itself.
The mere shame of it all ought to have struck everyone dumb. Polite society, gravely led by the CJN himself, ought to have embarked on a judicial Operation Shock and Awe to sanitize the judiciary, after the CJN had quit without much ado.
But what do we have? Senior lawyers, rallying their junior ones, rattle with grating technicalities.
True, law qua law, of which they are grandmasters, you probably cannot fault their triumphant finality: “the law is the law. If you don’t like it, change it. But until then, that’s all we have and that’s all we’d work with”!
Still, in their self-serving, all-knowing clatter, they appear blind, deaf and dumb to other citizens’ basic sense of right and wrong; and whose plebeian noses get assailed by a thick stench, oozing from the supposed sacred temple of justice.
Tragically, as this posturing heightens, the Judiciary sinks deeper into infamy, no one could have contemplated in 2007, when out-going President, Olusegun Obasanjo, broke all previous records in electoral infamy, with his “do-or-die” electoral heist!
And irony of ironies! The same Obasanjo, who procured a certain Maurice Iwu for his grand election steal, is now writing a sterile rigmarole, casting aspersions on the current INEC! Laughable, isn’t that? But that’s story for another day.
Back in 2007, when former CJN Muhammadu Lawal Uwais, proposed the CJN should sit-in-council with NJC to nominate the electoral chief, many thought it was a brilliant idea. Indeed, such was the high faith that not a few even clamoured that the president should cease that power to the CJN.
Barely 11 years later, that very suggestion appears utterly ludicrous.
First, it was CJN Alloysius Katsina-Alu (now dead) that unconscionably gamed Justice Ayo Salami, for upholding the law on electoral matters; and railroaded the NJC into rubber-stamping that crap.
Now, it’s CJN Onnoghen, caught in a messy asset non-declaration blot.
In-between, it was a slew of justices, some of them from the Supreme Court, caught with allegedly questionable assets. They were neither found guilty nor innocent.
It’s a measure of how the glory is vanished from Nigeria’s Judiciary that the best senior lawyers could essay, in their CJN rally, was ratchet up hollow procedure, used to spring those justices from their jam — not some definitive push for his integrity.
How are they so blest!