First, an acknowledgement, and then a caveat.
I owe the title of this piece to Femi Osofisan’s play, Once upon Four Robbers. I cannot claim much familiarity with that work. But somehow, its title bobbed up from the deepest recess of memory, and I shamelessly adapted it.
So, to Himself the Okinba, ìbà.
The caveat: Other than the title, Osofisan’s play and this piece have nothing in common.
Twenty-seven years and two months separate the dramas related here. The first one was acted out in a hallowed courtroom of the High Court of Lagos, and the other in a rowdy session of the Senate. The one was riveting drama, the other an unsubtle show of power.
First, the court drama.
The famous prisoner, jailed for expressing a perfectly legitimate request that his case be assigned to a judge other than the one before whom his prayers had been denied in as many as 10 previous appearances, insisted on turning up before yet another tribunal in his prison uniform.
Prison officials would have none of it. He was a prisoner all right, but they maintained that it would be unseemly for him to appear before a tribunal in prison clothes. That may have been a concession to the fiery attorney, one of the sharpest dressers in the business.
But he was not flattered. He was not ashamed to be a prisoner. He was not embarrassed to be seen in public dressed in prison uniform. Whose body was it, anyway?
The Tribunal was just as troubled as the prison authorities. Why would the suspect insist on appearing before so grave and dignified a body in prison clothes? After all, he was not your run-of-the-mill prisoner but an honourable member of the Bar who, in another circumstance could be standing before the Tribunal as counsel rather than culprit.
Perhaps the prisoner’s attorney could persuade him to appear before the court in his everyday clothes and not in his prison uniform?
No, thanks. All that the law required, his sedate and urbane leading counsel replied, was that his client appear before the Tribunal. His client was ready to answer the Tribunal’s summons, without preconditions.
The police officer despatched to fetch the prisoner returned, without him. The prisoner would not step out of the precincts except in his prison uniform, the officer reported. The proceedings were adjourned.
Two weeks later, the prisoner was brought to court wearing that contentious uniform, ebullient as ever, showing not the faintest sign of embarrassment and decidedly not asking to be pitied. If anyone ever looked spiffy in a prison uniform, it was Prisoner Number J60/4990.
The press photographers clicked away. They knew a unique moment when they saw one.
A robust sense of humour was unlikely to be counted even among the prisoner’s minor assets. But he had an almost infinite capacity to surprise. And so, he urged the photographers to make a good job of taking the snapshots, and to be sure to send the prints, with his compliments, to the kabiyesi judge who had jailed him for contempt.
The Tribunal commenced its assignment at last, under an intriguing division of judicial labour whereby a suspect, arrested by the federal authorities (unlawfully, said a judge) and detained by the same federal authorities (lawfully, the same judge said), is prosecuted by the Lagos State Government before a Tribunal empanelled by the federal authorities.
But its discomfiture at having to try the suspect in his prison uniform was almost palpable.
Not for long, however. Between the first session at which the prisoner did not show up and the second one at which he turned up in the prison uniform they found so discomfiting, some enterprising prison official had combed ancient statute books and found, to the immense relief of everyone in that corner, a law that apparently prohibited appearing in court or before a tribunal wearing a prison uniform.
This deus ex machina was read out solemnly to the prisoner. He was unimpressed, and so was his attorney. It was not immediately clear whether this was a contrivance, an ingenuous interpolation. But it resolved the problem, and the prisoner soon regained his freedom.
Prisoner Number J60/4990 was none other than Gani Fawehinmi, our Gani of cherished memory, and the foregoing is based on my column with the same title for The Guardian (January 30, 1990), reproduced in my book, Diary of a Debacle. His attorney was the legal titan Chief GOK Ajayi (SAN), also since deceased.
The second case about a uniform has been playing out lately on the floor of the Senate, with television cameras beaming it live to a national audience. It has little of the texture, the subtlety of the Fawehinmi case. But who cares for subtlety when you can have mass entertainment guaranteed to take away attention from the pains of the recession and other discontinuities of social life, however briefly?
At the centre of the drama is an unlikely figure, Colonel Hameed Ibrahim Ali (retired), a former military governor of Kaduna State, and currently Comptroller-General of Customs and Excise, or rather the official uniform he has chosen not to wear to work, or to appear before the Senate.
The Customs Service had been demanding proof of payment of duty on pre-owned vehicles from end-users who had bought them directly from smugglers, or from dealers who had bought them from smugglers. Brimming with unaccustomed solicitude for the plight of the unfortunate end-users who stood to be gravely exploited, the Senate asked that the practice be stopped. For good measure, it invited the Comptroller-General to appear before it to defend his controversial directive.
Ali had sent two of his deputies to represent him. The Senate would not receive them, saying that its rules precluded appearances by persons other than heads of agencies. It was Comptroller-General Ali, or nobody else.
Bowing to pressures from the Senate, Ali announced that he was suspending the directive ahead of his scheduled appearance, which he made in mufti, not in his full official uniform as the Senate had demanded with all the threats and tantrums that Dino Melaye and his cohorts could work up.
They rebuked him for insubordination, warned him severely to come dressed in his official uniform for his next appointment or face some unspoken consequence, and walked him out. But not before he had told them that no law enjoined him to wear the uniform of the Customs Service.
As far as I know, nobody has cited any law that Ali has breached. Convention perhaps, or tradition. In any case, the kerfuffle is not about law. The Senate rarely cares about law, except when it serves its purpose.
The whole thing is about power. In formal terms, the balance lies with the Senate, which can, at summary proceedings, invoke its contempt powers to jail for a limited time those who disobey its orders.
Ali could defy the Senate and end up in jail, like Gani, or walk away from the job. The one will portray the Senate as overbearing, if not overreaching; the other will hand it a dubious victory.
There is a third possibility.
Ali could challenge the Senate’s order at law and then, taking a cue from Senate President Bukola Saraki, find or manufacture every conceivable distraction, explore every interstice of the law, no matter how unpromising, pile objection upon objection and adjournment upon adjournment, and with scant regard to jurisdiction hopscotch from one court to another and generally draw out the hearings until the Eighth Senate will have run its term.
