“Call no one happy until he is dead” — Greek saying
The Onnoghen debacle, Nigeria’s worst judicial stain so far, brings to mind a stream of sayings, like some troubled stream of consciousness.
One is this piece’s opening quote: “Call no one happy until he is dead”, which not a few attribute to the great Greek historian, Herodotus.
That could well validate the Greek native belief, gleaned from great Greek tragedies from Sophocles and co, that their gods could be malevolent; and think little of cutting uppity man to size, even with but just seconds left of his breath!
Such conspiratorial passion would resonate with the Onnoghen sympathy orchestra.
They wail and rail over his fall, at the acme of his career — the same Onnoghen that could easily have entered Nigerian judicial-democratic lore as authentic hero: the sole courageous Supreme Court judge that voided the rotten 2007 presidential election!
Call no man happy until their death!
But it could also be the Greek equivalent of the Yoruba superstition (against the direr taboos), targeted at the mind of childhood, to enforce the norms.
Interpreted that way, it could just be a logical warning: watch your ways; for your seedy past can always catch up with you!
Seedy pasts! That recalls a censorious tone, from one of Nigeria’s all-time judicial greats, the late Justice Chukwudifu Oputa, aka Socrates.
Against the Onnoghen allegations, it is a dramatic juxtaposition: the thunder of a glorious past, against the dross of a sorry present.
It’s the unfolding tragedy of the Nigerian Judiciary, shorn of old glory — by the unfazed venality of a loud and reckless minority!
“No one should go to the Bench to amass wealth,” cautioned Justice Oputa, “for money corrupts and pollutes not only the channels of Justice, but also the very stream itself.”
But the Socrates of Nigeria’s Supreme Court, at its finest epoch, wasn’t quite done: ”It is a calamity to have a corrupt judge. The passing away of a great advocate does not pose such public danger as the appearance of a corrupt judge on the bench, for in the latter instance, the public interest is bound to suffer and elegant justice is mocked, debased, depreciated and auctioned.”
Does that — the death of a dazzling legal mind versus the wreck of a corrupt judge — speak to the debacle of former Chief Justice of Nigeria (CJN), Justice Walter Samuel Nkanu Onnoghen, who just resigned with rather serious venal allegations buzzing around his name?
Indeed, the glorious past and the blasted present!
Oputa wasn’t even CJN, in a conclave of legal giants that included the late Justice Kayode Esho, the late Justice Taslim Elias, who became CJN straight from the academia and the late Justice Akinola Aguda, who never even made the Nigerian Supreme Court, though he was Chief Justice of Botswana!
Indeed, Esho’s name would appear a sharp rebuke from the grave. He not only decried “billionaire judges”, he also once recommended this same Onnoghen for sanction, over some alleged misconduct, during Onnoghen’s high court days!
Talk of an epoch of Titan jurists, brilliant and upright!
But juxtapose that era with the present, when even serious allegations of putative sleaze, wasn’t enough to make the CJN quit, until the rope virtually tightened around his throat!
The parting shot from Socrates, to the present judicial Sodom and Gomorrah: “When justice is bought and sold, there is no more hope for society. What our society needs is an honest, trusted and trustworthy Judiciary.”
But justice “bought and sold” takes the tale from the holy-of-holies of the Bench, to the priestly vestibules of the Bar — and again, compare the old and new!
The late Fredrick Rotimi Alade (FRA) Williams, with his formidable “weight of evidence”, towered over the conventional bloc of the old school.
The great FRA, Nigeria’s first-ever SAN, would get a brief from Christ; poach yet another from Satan, and plead the Lawyer’s Creed — everyone’s right to legal representation!
But then arrayed against FRA and his bloc was a slew of radicals and non-conformists, best epitomized by the great Gani Fawehinmi, aka just Gani, SAM, SAN!
Gani and co would rail and roar, thunder and bluster; and insist higher morality, not narrow technicality, ought to drive the Lawyer’s Creed.
Still, look closely: nary any venality on both sides; just the fierce jousting of contrasting legal traditions!
But now? The abomination of some dichotomy of SANs: the ones that know the law; the others that “know” the judges!
All too true: one SAN was convicted and gaoled one month, for a proven attempt to buy justice, with hot, fresh and smoking dollars — to parody Geoffrey Chaucer’s Pardoner, in Prelude to Canterbury Tales, with his hot fresh and smoking papal pardons from Rome!
A few other SANs await their days in court, on integrity charges that would have been unthinkable, when FRA and Gani battled for the soul of the Nigerian Bar!
When did the Nigerian Judiciary get to this sorry pass? That is the grim metaphor the Onnoghen debacle presents — a stinking fish rotten from its very head!
But again, the psychologists were right — didn’t they posit a (wo)man shows the true essence when in crisis? So, did the leading lights of the judiciary, when the scandal broke!
On seeming Onnoghen’s behalf, courts were trading illicit injunctions — and even the National Industrial Court (NIC) pushed its own right to be part of that sickening racket. Pray, when did a CJN asset declaration controversy became a Labour dispute?
Top SANs too flexed their muscles, scowling and howling, threatening and growling, not because of the intrinsic justness of their cause but because of a strange hubris, that decreed the CJN, because he is CJN, must be lord and master over the law that made him so!
The politicians! Never one to shun inanity, Onnoghen soon became a partisan ding-dong, in a fierce electioneering ping-pong! Why, Abubakar Atiku, master of the political piffle, even suspended his presidential campaign, his PDP in tow, in fond hope of some rogue mileage!
Onnoghen himself didn’t quite lead from behind, in the judicial drama of the absurd. He hung grimly in there, not unlike the Biblical King Saul that sat pat, even if regal glory had long departed his throne!
But why the hasty resignation, when honour decreed that needful, a long time ago? Perhaps, because the last escape route, the National Judicial Council (NJC) was expected to conjure, had vanished!
Since the Jonathan era, when the NJC under CJN Aloysius Katsina-Alu short-circuited Justice Ayo Salami’s career, as president of the Court of Appeal, we all knew the judiciary was in a terrible mess.
So, a sunken Onnoghen is only a grand and fitting metaphor for a diminished judiciary. But the judiciary, more than anyone else, must pull themselves from that rot.
That duty they owe, both to their glorious past; and to renewed hope, for the coming generation.