When ThisDay reported the other day that the Attorney-General of the Federation (AGF) had declared inconclusive the police investigation on which a criminal indictment against the two principal officers of the Senate was grounded, you could almost hear a collective sigh of “Here we go again” from a weary attentive audience.
The charges had been brought, according to the paper, following assurances from the AGF, Abubakar Malami (SAN), that investigations into the forgery – or should we now call it alleged forgery? — had been concluded and that prosecution was fully warranted.
Now, said the paper, the AGF was asking the police to commence further investigations that might furnish evidence to nail, and force out of office, Senate President Bukola Saraki and his deputy, Senator Ike Ekweremadu.
The whole thing had seemed like an open-and shut-case. The rules for electing principal officers of the Senate had been amended in two crucial respects between the time the 7th Senate was prorogued and the 8th inaugurated.
The old rule stipulated that all members of the Senate shall participate in the election of its principal officers. The amended rule says members would be encouraged to participate in the election. Again, the old rule stipulated that voting should be by secret ballot. The new rule dispensed with that provision.
Saraki and Ekweremadu owe their present positions to this curious tampering with the rules, which was unearthed by some of their disaffected Senate colleagues. If the twain did not instigate it, they certainly profited from it, and so did everyone else who connived in it. And it is trite that the law will permit no one to profit from a crime.
The matter was turned over to the police, who carried out an investigation and submitted their findings to the AGF, who then moved to indict, based on those findings. Some persons learned in the law who had seen the court papers said Saraki and Ekweremadu did not figure in the police report, and should not have been indicted.
Had the AGF, then, engaged in an unseemly rush to prosecute? The AGF had no iron-clad case and yet went to court with an inconclusive police report, hoping that the court would convict? Had he in the process perjured himself?
These, at any rate, are some of the questions thrown up by ThisDay’s report.
I was trying to make some sense of all this when, last Friday, the AGF filed to withdraw the charges against Saraki and Ekweremadu and two senior officials of the Senate, not on the premise that the report on which the indictment was grounded was inconclusive, but on the ground that the same case or one closely related to it was pending before a superior court.
The court accordingly struck out the charges and discharged the men in the dock. But was this an acquittal?
It certainly was not a nolle prosequi, at least not explicitly.
Whatever its purport, it was enough to set off jubilation in the camps of the beleaguered Senate leaders.
When the matter comes up before the Abuja Federal Capital Territory High Court, Jabi, to which the AGF said he was deferring, will the AGF file to withdraw the charges again, thus leaving the court no choice but to discharge the persons indicted?
That, I gather, would still not amount to an acquittal, unless the AGF enters a nolle. Will he? Without entering a nolle, he could file the case anew even after withdrawing it a second time. The jubilation in the Saraki/Ekweremadu camp may yet turn out to be premature.
In whatever case, few could have foreseen that the case would take this curious turn. Fewer still could have expected that as the case was unfolding, armed operatives of the Department of State Services (DSS) would launch a raid in the dead of night on the homes of six senior judges, apparently with the approval of the Ministry of Justice.
By the time they were done, they had two justices of the Supreme Court, Sylvester Ngwuta and John Okoro, in custody, as well as Justice Adeniyi Ademola of the Federal High Court. They also raided the home of another judge of the Federal High Court, Nnamdi Dimgba, but did not arrest him.
Also whisked into custody were Kabir Auta of the Kano High Court, Muazu Pindiga of the Gombe High Court, Mohammed Tsamiya of the Court of Appeal in Ilorin, and the Chief Judge of Enugu State, I. A. Umezulike.
Efforts to search the home of a Federal High Court judge in the Rivers State capital, Port Harcourt, escalated into a tense stand-off between DSS operatives and the police, backed by stalwarts allegedly rushed to the scene by Governor Nyesom Wike.
It almost turned bloody.
The DSS said the raids followed close monitoring of the lifestyles of the judges and complaints as well as intelligence reports that they had received valuable consideration from some litigants in return for delivering verdicts favourable to those litigants, without regard to the merit of their case.
Two other judges concerning whom evidence of graft had been uncovered were merely retired by the National Judicial Council when, according to the DSS, prosecution was indicated.
Various sums of money in foreign currencies and the Naira recovered from the three judges, amounting to the equivalent of N93.5 million, were indicative, the DSS seemed to imply, of corrupt dealing.
Whatever the yield, these raids fly in the face of President Muhammadu Buhari’s pledge in his National Day Broadcast that the war on corruption would be waged with due regard to the rule of law. The ink had not dried on this newspaper’s editorial endorsement of that pledge when they were carried out.
The legal community, civil society and indeed the attentive audience are right to feel outraged by the DSS’s tactics. Yes, the raids were backed by search warrants. There was reasonable fear that vital evidence might be destroyed if the DSS did not move quickly. Still, there is something so creepy about it all, something so eerily reminiscent of a not-too-distant past, that it is insufficient consolation that it was done for a worthy cause.
Even the worthiest of causes stands tainted if pursued by repugnant means.
The authorities doubtless felt frustrated in their efforts to bring to justice high political and judicial officials against whom damning probative evidence of malfeasance might indeed have been compiled.
Many in the attentive audience will say that the judges brought this calamity on themselves, and that it serves them right.
It is the stuff of gossip that some judges would write two judgments, each plausible in the domain of law, but with the more favourable verdict going to the parties that bid the highest.
It is also notorious that senior attorneys, officers of the court, serve as conduits for funnelling corrupt inducement to judges.
No system of jurisprudence can account for a court ruling that restrains the police in perpetuity from investigating charges of misconduct against a political official or arresting him. Yet, some court judges in Nigeria have issued such injunctions.
The way things were going, the courts could one day issue an injunction restraining the National Assembly from passing a bill, or barring the President from signing a bill into law.
A comprehensive purge of the judiciary was surely indicated. But not with the tactics the DSS employed lately. It may well be, as some have argued, that no other procedure could have guaranteed the desired result and that, given the goal, the government deserves sympathy, not condemnation.
That is like walking a slippery slope, along which only a dangerous descent is guaranteed. It must not become a habit.
