By Sunny Awhefeada
The Nigerian state is undergoing a series of turmoil that is a desideratum in her sojourn to nationhood. Great nations did contend with such moments in their history. The journey to nationhood is not a hundred metre dash. It is long, tortuous and treacherous. It births heroes and throws up villains. While the heroes struggle to delineate the clear path the nation should walk, the villains deploy everything including subterfuge to subvert the quest in order to satisfy some base desires that often denude the majority of the people of stability, fairness and justice. What often baffles humanity in the course of the struggle laden quest is that some of the heroes turn out to be “heroes” who were wolves in sheep’s clothing.
The history of developed nations is replete with this trajectory. Time, resilience, focus, determination and the emergence of torchbearers in every generation help to illuminate paths that were once dark and ultimately the people’s vision materialize as they inch towards a new dawn and the ideal that engendered the quest. That quest is often inaugurated by writers and philosophers. Even when the dawn was made possible by a revolution realized by cavalry, the cataclysm often has the imprimatur of writers and philosophers and our history books offer us more than many instances. So, the many oddities that now asphyxiate Nigeria and Nigerians should be read in the light of the fluctuating experience that will birth the nation of our dreams. When that will happen, we do not know.
The invasion of the office of Dele Farotimi, his abduction, detention and arraignment in handcuffs and surrounded by armed policemen reflect the ordeal that is embedded in the struggle for nationhood. It is misleading to think that the struggle for independence would usher us into nationhood. No! The attainment of independence closes a chapter and opens another that is not only contradictory, but virulent in the tangle between the new rulers and their own people whom they took the oath of office to protect. This new reality which is post-colonialism also wears the unflattering garb of neocolonialism. The experience has been disappointing to the extent that philosophers codified it as “post-independence disillusionment”. Farotimi’s ongoing ordeal could pass for an episode taking place from 1946 to 1957 which were the years of intense anti-colonial activities when the nationalists fought for Nigeria’s independence. It was understandable then, at least from an imperial perspective, that the nationalists were subversive. So getting them arrested and arraigned over libel was not out of place. But Farotimi’s experience did not happen decades ago when Nigeria was struggling to unyoke herself from imperialism. It happened in the Nigeria of 2024, some sixty-four years after independence and twenty-five years after the routing of military dictatorship and return to civil rule.
The crux of the matter is in the public domain. Citizen-victim Farotimi authored a book he titled Nigeria and Its Criminal Justice System in which he accused a legal leviathan of malfeasance. If indeed Farotimi erred deliberately or inadvertently and that his submissions against the leviathan were false, the latter could have quietly sued him for libel as the law he has professed and practiced, even before Farotimi was born, prescribed. Rather, using his overwhelming influence over the apparatus of state, he caused the abduction and detention of Farotimi and his eventual arraignment in handcuffs. The matter is already in court and those who know tell us it is now sub judice and one cannot say much about it! I leave the lawyers and judges, if we still have judges, to do their work by Farotimi who is himself a lawyer who needs no introduction. What we all know is that Nigeria is with Farotimi and not the entire Nigeria Police Force can shake his resolve knowing that God will ultimately range on the side of the people who have been at the receiving end of oppressive rulers ironically from that day that ought to have set us free in October 1960! No matter the antics of the oppressors right now, it shall pass and time the ultimate decider that has proved to be more definitive than the judge will select those to be confined to the dustbin of history.
Farotimi is now having his day in court, but he is not the one on trial. The nation and our collective conscience are on trial. The forces that orchestrated the present episode were uncritical and did not envisage the magnitude it would assume so soon. May be, they thought they were teaching him a lesson, but they will be the ones to learn some lessons from this incident which is bound to assume a milestone in our quest for a just, fair and equitable country. The book’s title and its overarching subject matter must be taken beyond the leviathan. My wife pungently educated me on the significance of the book’s title, Nigeria and Its Criminal Justice System, that it is not just referring to “criminal justice”, but our justice system that has become criminal, a kind of pun and personification. And is there any Nigerian, except the few living in denial that will contradict the reality of how criminal our justice system has become? And if the justice system is criminal, what hope is there for Nigeria?
The role of the judiciary in nation-building is neither in doubt nor quantifiable. A judiciary can make or mar a nation. Judicial pronouncements are the ultimate stabilizers of a nation as they confer fairness, equity and justice which in turn ensure order and progress. The recklessness and the downward spiraling that has been the fate of Nigeria since 1999 can be attributed to the inability of the judiciary to live up to its manifest role in the scheme of things. We are all witnesses to how debauchery and allegiance to lucre have become the dominant ethos among judicial officers. The pristine image of the judge as God has long been obliterated and replaced with the representation of the judge as a devotee of mammon! Judges like Chuwkudifu Oputa, Kayode Eso and other incorruptible jurists embodied integrity, ethics, impartiality, courage, independence, fairness, knowledge and humility. If Justice Sodeinde Sowemimo’s hands were tied by the law, the hands of many a judge today are tied by dollars and pounds strung together and enabled by some learned silks. A judge that ought to be infallible has become clay footed. The judge is no longer a colossus, but a Lilliputian. Lawyers and litigants call the judge “my lord” in court, but playfully toss his wig the way a goat tug at the mane of a dead lion.
Whatever is wrong with Nigeria is wrong with the judiciary. Despite deriving its mainstay from a solid tradition of jurisprudence with redoubtable incorruptible judges of old, the present judiciary has been captured and defanged. Judicial appointments have been corrupted and seen as gifts to family members and mistresses even when they were neither qualified nor showed the sagacity that the occupant of such an office should possess. This is the reason that we now have judges who cannot write judgment and end up contracting such to lawyers, law teachers and in some cases sophomore law students! Farotimi is not the one on trial, but Nigeria. If the trial process is followed through, it is bound to trigger a chain of revelations that will rattle and probably clean the Augean stable that the judiciary has become. In all of these penkelemes Nigeria remains our goal and focus as she is the one on trial. We shall not give up on Nigeria because she will get acquittal some day! The Nigeria of our dreams shall be born. It is already beckoning!
