From an initial thunder of “judicial emergency”, the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) is softening its war cry. It now wants judges, accused of corrupt practices, to recuse themselves, until they clear their names.
That is tribute to common sense.
But not so from the National Judicial Council (NJC) war room. That body seems fated, with all due respect, to that cynical old quip: those the gods would destroy, they first confound!
In that rarefied NJC chamber, scoffing down from the clouds at the unlearned hoi polloi on the dusty streets, stubborn procedure must trump common sense.
That fixation with technicality is clear hubris, which may yet prove fatal for the NJC brand integrity.
That was clear from its stonewalling — not entirely unreasonable — of the Department of State Services, DSS’s rather cheeky call on NJC to “suspend” judges it is accusing of sleaze.
NJC was right to bristle: if DSS could go solo, and with satanic gusto, jettisoning constitutionally stipulated procedures on disciplining errant judges, why doesn’t it complete its solo demolition run?
The DSS Leviathan doesn’t need NJC’s puny powers to suspend anyone, does it? Perfect sarcasm!
Still, it would be extremely reckless, with all due respect, for NJC to spurn the NBA-offered soft-landing.
For one, the NBA suggestion gives the judiciary the opportunity to regain a moral high ground. What is more? NJC would suspend nobody; and would continue to hold DSS in high judicial contempt its hurt soul now needs for mental balance.
Yet, the accused judges would graciously stay off, pending their days in court, as they would in any civil community. The onus would now be on DSS to prove its allegations, thus defanging the so-called trial by the media.
For another, the initiative would have been the judiciary’s. That would send the message that though it would resist — to the death, if necessary — the DSS’s alleged jungle methods, it would not condone any judicial corruption.
But by its response to the NBA pitch, it would appear clear the NJC would rather, parodying English Poet, John Milton in Paradise Lost, rule by its stubborn procedure in hell, rather serve with it in heaven!
If you think the heaven-hell comparison is extreme, just take a glimpse at the judicial netherworld NJC, by its stubborn insistence on procedure, is pushing.
It would not suspend judges, because DSS usurped procedure by its sensational arrests. Neither would it hearken NBA’s plea that the accused judges recuse themselves.
So, blimey! His Lordship, accused of graft, arrogantly sits in judgment over others, in a sensational case of an alleged felon trying another alleged felon!
If that is not the eminent judicial disgrace — and ruin — NJC is fleeing from, it is hard to contemplate a worse equivalent!
Adegoke Adelabu, had he lived in these troubling times, would simply have snorted: a judicial peculiar mess! To which his doting Ibadan country yokels would have roared, “judisia pen-kele-meeesssssiiiiiiiiii!”, with a few even attempting a yodel, in the hilarious hubbub of the moment!
It is that peculiar mess of history that the contemporary judiciary (perhaps without fully realizing it) is grappling with.
If the NJC must be fair to themselves, they must ask when the Nigerian Judiciary cascaded from the Mount Olympus of honour, to the Hades of disgrace, to borrow an illustration from Greek mythology.
A proud national institution that earned near-universal acclaim with the likes of Taslim Elias, Chukwudifu Oputa, aka Socrates, Kayode Esho, Daddy Onyeama, Udo Udoma and Akinola Aguda (all of blessed memories) now diminuted to the grim conclave of what Justice Esho called “billionaire judges”, allegedly trading Justice — or more correctly, injustice — to the highest bidder!
Remember that biblical racket, that riled the meek Christ Jesus to ire? My father’s house of worship has become a den of thieves!
Just replace, with the NJC, Pharisees and Sadducees and the colluding high priests feeding fat from that holy racket, and contemporary Nigerian judiciary may well find itself in that holy company of the Jews of yore!
Yet, let no one, in romanticizing the past, be deceived that the judiciary had always been perceived spotless — at least by those in the unlearned streets, that neither knew law nor procedure.
CJN Adetokunbo Ademola virtually made the law an ass for the ruling establishment to spur as they wished. So, when in 1967, he championed a National Conciliation Committee to fend off war — a noble enterprise — voices across the Nigeria-Biafra divide rejected him as a credible voice for mediation.
Forty-nine years later, his grandson is one of the judges in the eye of the DSS storm. If the allegations are proved, would it be from alleged personal failings? Or the case of the Biblical fathers eating sour grapes but setting their children’s teeth on edge?
Justice Elias was razor-sharp, both as lawyer and CJN. But as Prime Minister Tafawa Balewa’s attorney-general and Justice minister, he midwifed, on 29 November 1960 in the House of Representatives, the parliamentary canonization of the legal voodoo that in 1962 supplanted the West, under the guise of a dubious emergency. That proved the beginning of the end for the 1st Republic.
Ironically, the “Elias solution” — searching for CJN, outside the Supreme Court’s present hierarchy, hangs like a sword of Damocles.
The “weight of evidence” himself, the irreplaceable FRA Williams, SAN, would at dawn take a brief from Satan but balance it out at dusk with a brief from Christ and claim, in all honesty and integrity, he was bound by the lawyer’s creed!
His opponents, particularly the equally irrepressible Gani Fawehinmi, SAN, SAM, did not like it. But almost everyone agreed his motives were anything but robust fidelity to the law, even it became a bully crushing morality.
That was the law yesterday, warts and all. Still, the public perception of it was a great national enterprise which though imperfect, held humanly promises — profound promises founded on robust erudition and near-celestial integrity.
The law today would appear the diametrical opposite. Despite stellar though quiet work by probably a majority of Nigerian justices and lawyers, the overwhelming public perception is the Bench is yet another conclave of hustlers. And that the Bar is not exactly aghast at that unholy racket.
Help, the ghosts of Esho’s “billionaire judges” are haunting the hallowed chamber, and are fast turning it a hollow shell!
That is the heavy burden of history the present generation NJC and NBA carry. You don’t discharge that by instinctively raising a flag of solidarity, and stonewalling grave allegations with “defending the judiciary”.
Corrupt judges are a scourge to justice, much more than any arbitrary DSS action, no matter how brazen. And if justice departs from the judiciary, what is left?
If that thinking necessitated NBA’s softening rhetoric, it is hugely welcome — but much more to the judiciary themselves.
But when would the NJC wake up and, as the Americans would say, smell the coffee?
Maybe when, to parody Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the hurly-burly is done, when the battle is lost and won!
