In the olden days, judges, justices and even lawyers were some of the most respected public figures of the time. They commanded enormous respect because they deserved it from behaviors, character delivery of objective judgments and sincerity in service. They were feared because of what they were, incorruptible in the temple of justice. They lived very simple styles and abhorred anything filthy. They were role models to many.
Nigeria had credible and honorable men from the bench; Justices Adetokunbo Ademola, Atanda Fatai Williams, Darnley Alexander, Bola Ajibola, Okputa, Muhammed Bello, Mamman Nasir, Anthony Aniagolu, Muhammed Lawal Uwais, Aloma Mouktar, Fati Abdulsalam, Lego Kutigi, Niki Tobi, Owen Feibai, Amina Augie, Sabo Suleiman Darazo, Lawal Danyaya Abdullahi, Hussaini Othman etc.
Today, the story has dramatically changed. Judges and justices have metamorphosed to some of the most corrupt and insincere specie smelling corruption and abetting crime for a bowl of porridge. They now hang their price tags on their necks trading justice for sale like recharge cards in the temple of justice through fronts.
To refresh memories, it was Justice Tanko Muhammed (rtd), the immediate past Chief Justice of Nigeria (CJN) who on September 6, 2021 summoned the Chief Judges of Rivers, Kebbi, Jigawa, Cross River, Imo and Anambra States for a meeting in Abuja to convince him on reasons for sudden flurry of conflicting judgments and reckless exparte orders granted by some judges in their respective states.
The aftermath of the meeting saw three judges appearing before the National Judicial Council (NJC) to explain why they could not be disciplined for the recklessness. Muhammed’s unprecedented action was a clear indication that the temple of justice is still not safe from rats and rodents; men and women who choose to be liars and deceivers to their sacred public offices and too weak to rise to the high demands of the impartial discharge of their public duty.
The temple of justice should ordinarily be the last refuge of professional scoundrels and unsavory characters. Sadly, it was but not today. Greed has taken over their moral values because it is incurable with a strong pull on individual conscience.
The last time we had a flurry of contradictory judgments, orders and exparte injunctions granted and nullified by courts of coordinate jurisdictions was during the June 12, 1993 debacle. Courts of co-ordinate jurisdictions in Abuja, Lagos, Benin and Port Harcourt fell over themselves to impose exparte and counter-exparte injunctions ordering the electoral commission to release or not to release the results of the presidential election. It was a huge shame to the judiciary, a disgrace and a huge mess.
An exparte motion is filed by one party to litigation and heard by a judge before whom the matter fends without giving the other party a chance to contest it. It is a twist in litigation and a subterfuge employed by litigants and their lawyers to delay the cause of justice. It serves satanic purposes but politicians love it much. They employ it in the unholy pursuit of their unholy interests without qualms.
The Supreme Court of yester-years had always frowned on such unholy practice but not today. My recollection is that the National Judicial Council under Justice Aloma Mouktar, the first female Chief Justice of Nigeria, had once directed judges not to entertain exparte motions in order to avoid injuring the interest of the party against whom the exparte injunction is sought. Somehow along the line, the directive lies in the courts like a tattered piece of arrested justice.
Justice Tanko summon raised the hope that the resort to blatant exparte motions and injunctions would once more be arrested and thus restore public trust and confidence in the impartiality of judges in dispensing justice most especially in election cases, not to the highest bidder but the party that is right in the eyes of the law. That was defeated openly from several election cases tried in the various tribunals and in some, affirmed by the Courts of Appeal.
One can easily recall with mixed feelings the sacking of all elected winners of various elective offices on the platform of APC in Zamfara State in 2019 on flimsy excuse of no party primary election was conducted and same miscarriage of justice was served in Plateau State in 2023 where all elected winners were sacked by the Election Petitions Tribunal and affirmed by the Court of Appeal except that of the state governor upheld by the tribunal but quashed by the Court of Appeal on claim that the PDP that won the elections, had no valid structure to have contested the election relying on a 2021 Plateau State High Court directive claimed by the petitioner (APC) that was ignored. The imbroglio is now before the Supreme Court. But from a layman’s view, is that not an internal affair of the PDP that the court lacks jurisdiction to entertain?
Funny enough and disturbed by his conscience, one of the Court of Appeal Judges who delivered the ‘banditry’ judgment against the victories of PDP in Plateau State, AbdulAziz Waziri, penultimate week shameless stood before a crowd of legal practitioners in Yola, Adamawa State to defend the ‘banditry’ with rhetoric.
The case of Kano State gubernatorial legal tussle is that of interest that may expose the level of corruption in the judiciary. It is pending before the Supreme Court for finality. The table may turn against the winner going by the body language of the Supreme Court that appears a stooge of one of the political parties. What the courts are telling Nigerian politicians from the various judgments that surfaced is that they should save money to hire lawyers that can purchase victories in their favor at the courts without wasting time, energy and resources campaigning in future. That’s the language from our present day judiciary. It is an insult to the judiciary, to the legal profession and a big shame and disappointment to the country. The judiciary has lost the respect it enjoyed. Justices, Judges, Khadis and Magistrates now have bargaining prices for favorable judgments. What an irony! The giant has fallen disgracefully and corruptly to the dustbin of history!
In some few instances, the judiciary is not to be blamed for welcoming and accommodating corruption with bribe taking as its secret code. Hitherto, the Nigeria Police and Nigerian Custom were the epicentres of corruption but now relegated to fourth position by the judiciary, civil servants and private sector operators.
The problems bedeviling the judiciary are a bit intellectual and multifarious. It faces serious internal and external challenges to its constitutional independence and capacity to provide a refuge from the storms of power, money and influence. As the third tier of government, it may be passive but it is actually the most powerful of the three arms. It has the power to mess up things for the electorates, executive and legislature as in annulling credible elections and ‘robbing’ by awarding same victory to the rejected at the poll backed by flimsy legal technicalities. It has the power to mess up the entire structure government stands on.
This is the primary source of its challenge from external influence as presently witnessed through what observers labeled as banditry judgments from the tribunals and the Courts of Appeal.
The executive arm has an unsavory history of encroaching on the independence of the judiciary by bending it to its will and keeping it on a short leash because it controls finance and security architecture. It treats its orders and judgments with contempt. It underfunds the judiciary and intimidates it. Both are calculated steps to make the judiciary subservient to the unholy will of those who have problems with appreciating the finer points of the beauty in the separation of powers among the three arms of government. The executive arm favors a quiescent judiciary. Katakata on play!
At the special session of the Supreme Court at the formal commencement of the 2019 legal year on September 23, 2019, Justice Tanko shocked the audience with part of his speech when he said he had to beg the executive for release of funds to run the judiciary. He said: “The gross underfunding and neglect of the judiciary over the years has impacted negatively on the infrastructure and personnel within the system. It is to a large extent, affecting productivity, increasing frustration and deflating moral”.
Sometime in 2018, Department of State Security Service (DSS) had to stage a midnight raid, Gestapo style on the residences of some suspected corrupt judges and justices of Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court, including that of the then Chief Justice, Walter Onnoghen, ostensibly as part of government effort to rid the judiciary of corrupt judges. The raid was timely and it exposed how some of judges and justices had soiled hands.
The timely raid was also intended to serve notice on the men and women on the bench that the eyes of the big brother, the executive were on them. I doubt if the present executive has such courage and guts to execute such a raid. It lacks the courage and the zeal because it seems to be a beneficiary of banditry judgments.
A judge quaking in his underwear cannot be trusted to have the courage to minister to his own conscience. It will be hypocritical, clownish, naïve and foolish for anyone to deny the fact that the judiciary is riddled with corruption. This has been a huge problem for the dispensation of credible justice and the rule of law. Some judgments are tributes to the degree of corruption in the system. Two systems of justice now exist in our Nigeria—-one for the rich and the influential and the other for the downtrodden masses. The rich buy justice because justice by any means is still justice. The downtrodden, cynically denied credible justice, is left to wallow in self-pity and rue the unfair decision by the great naira to be absent from his pocket. The downtrodden has the deliverance of jungle justice as the last hope.
Two disasters have crept up on the judiciary over the years. First, it is proving increasingly difficult to be what it was established to be—the defender and the protector of the weak and poor. The sight of naira and dollar in Ghana-Must-Go bags is as much unsettling for judges as it is for the rest of the people.
The weak that run to the judiciary seeking protection from the strong, is no longer guaranteed of that protection for lacking naira or dollar for bribe; the poor who, run to seek justice from the tyranny of the rich and influential, see a system that favors the rich and the influential at the expense of credible justice. When judges foul the temple of justice with the disagreeable perfume of their professional perfidy, they bend the arc of justice to the vulgar abuse for which they gain but the people lose.
The second problem, equally as serious as the first, is that the politicians have systematically hijacked the judiciary and justice is hawked and sold on trays for the highest offer. Court dockets are filled with politically related cases with an exponent rise in such cases before, during and after every election season. The cases earlier mentioned for which the Chief Judges were made to provide answers for the professional venal sins of judges under them were all political cases. The contradictory decisions of today are all evidences of unscrupulous men buying the co-operation of unscrupulous judges to bend the law and the rule of law to oil their political adventures. The situation is a big problem to the survival of the democracy.
The only way out is for security agencies to redouble monitoring effort to fish out corrupt judges and send them out of circulation for the system to survive. The judiciary is now a breeding ground for all sorts of criminality. It is a rotten entity as we have lost hope!
Muhammad is a commentator on national issues
