Outrage may have been an understatement to describe the aftermath of the conviction of John Yakubu Yusuf, the pension thief, for his role in the N23 billion pension scam. In a clime where delinquency not only rules but has as its companion, impunity as directing principles of state policies, I couldn’t have imagined the quantum of emotive energy generated in the wake of the controversial ruling by the Federal High Court of Justice Mohammed Talba in Abuja. I guess that is the way we are.
So much for our collective sense of outrage. I watched as Nigerians raved, ranted and chanted all manners of expletives targeted at the judge. Did anyone ever imagine this would be our Mohamed Bouazizi moment? (Remember the Tunisian youth whose act of self-immolation prefaced the Arab Spring?)
And what was it that Nigerians griped about? Simple. That a man who admitted to being complicit in defrauding the Police Pensions Office to the tune of N23 billion – of which N3 billion represented a personal haul – was asked to pay N750,000 and to go home and sin no more!
What’s the N23 billion to the hundreds of billions allegedly carted away by subsidy thieves? Who refers to the 2009 class of alleged bank robbers these days? Does anyone remember the trillion-plus naira sunk into the banks to bail the sector out of the delinquency of the principal actors?
Nigerians, most likely would have tempered their outrage if they had bothered to recall those moments.
Note that the latest issue is essentially about the discretion of the judge to hand out fair sentence; in this case, the maximum sentence applicable was a two-year jail term with or without an option of fine. This is what those who question the prerogative of the judge miss. Need one add that discretion is what it is – and this within the confines of the law.
Why should Nigerians gripe?
Put in another way – what is the difference between the farcical pronouncement of a jail term under which a convict would spend his execu-thief time at a place and pleasure of his own choosing as we saw of a bank thief and the option of asking the felon to go home and rest after the due stress of trial as in the pension scam?
Now, seriously; when did that become an issue in our legal jurisprudence? Do we need to back to the 1999 – 2007 classes of politically exposed persons to appreciate the terrible dimensions of the crisis aptly described by the late Justice Akinola Aguda as the jurisprudence of unequal justice – a phenomenon under which different classes of society are exposed to different facets of the same law?
Does anyone remember the case of one Lucky Igbinedion who also got a slap on the wrist for abusing the public trust? And James Onanefe Ibori currently cooling his heels in a British jail? Now, was it a coincidence the judgment on the pension scam came in the week in which an Ibadan High Court sent the provost of the Federal Cooperative College, Ibadan, Mrs. Ruth Adehwe Aweto and the school bursar Adekanye Komolafe to jail without an option of fine for the crime of defrauding the same federal government?
The Ibadan case is interesting for the amount involved. Both provost and the bursar claimed to have employed 41 permanent staff for their institution for which they handed the federal government a wage bill of N7 million. As it turned out, their wage bill was no more than N4 million as all the staff were casuals. For ripping off the federal government of a paltry N3 million, the duo will spend four years apiece behind the bar without an option of fine.
Here is my point: I find the outrage against the ruling of Justice Talba somewhat misdirected. To start with, not a few of the genuinely outraged citizen would concede that the option of a plea bargain was the next best thing to end the ordeal for both parties. That way, everyone goes home happy: the government could claim that the war against corruption is no fluke; the thief left off the hook to enjoy a fraction of his loot. And for the bewildered citizenry – you guessed right: theirs is outrage therapy!
I must add also that no dilemma can be more confounding. We need the judiciary to help us fight corruption, but it seems to me that the niceties of its rules and the procedures – the age-long safeguards against arbitrariness of state power – have somehow become a cog in the path of justice. The result is that justice is increasingly sought off-shore while our judicial officers pretend that all is well. Is it part of their reading of the globalisation manual?
Let me highlight another aspect of the corruption story that seems to have escaped deserving attention. I refer here to the farce that our public finance system has become. The question of how a handful of officials could manage to cart away billions from the treasury without detection or without the trigger of an alarm obviously begs to be addressed. Of course, the problem is pervasive, cutting across every sector of our national life. It seems about time to re-examine the effectiveness of those extant controls in the system, those early warning systems that once served. Aren’t they ultimately cheaper and less frustrating than the current chasing after the wind after the act has been committed?
Finally, to say that the nation is engulfed in a moral crisis is to put things mildly. The truth is that the nation is dying in instalments; it is only a matter of time before corruption brought the nation to its knees.
What is the way out? Honestly, the solution is complex. First, we need to do something about the corrosive value system which promotes crass individualism. We need to put systems in place to reduce the possibility of heist being committed. A renewed national will is needed to stand up to the monster.
How can anyone talk of a fleeting chance of success when those who should ordinarily champion the war are not only pointing fingers but living in denial?
