PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA

The Danger of the Judicial Civil War

ndajika@yahoo.com

Politics, specifically the Nigerian variant, may yet prove the death of this country. The reason is simple; in Nigeria, unlike in most of the rest of the world, politics has since become not only a full time job. It has also become the easiest and surest path to fortune, fame and power.

People everywhere would do anything for all three. That is why everywhere there are rules of engagement for their pursuit. The extent to which a people are ready to obey those rules determines whether their nation develops or degenerates into a jungle.

The History of Nigeria’s politics, it seems, has essentially been one of either bending or breaking its rules of pursuing power. This explains why democracy is yet to find its feet in the country more than 50 years after it became independent in October 1960.

Of all the elements of a thriving democracy – free speech, free choice, freedom of association, the rule of law, etc – obviously none is as important as the rule of law. And none has been under as sustained an attack from our politicians as the rule of law.

This goes to the heart of the civil war that broke out recently inside the judiciary between the Chief Justice of Nigeria (CJN), Justice Aloysius Katsina-Alu, and the President of the Court of Appeal (PCA), Justice Isa Ayo Salami, ostensibly over the move by the CJN to “promote” the PCA to the Supreme Court. The war had actually been in the making before early last year.  And stripped of its legal veneer it has been a proxy war by politicians determined to suborn the judiciary in their bid for power.

On the one side is the ruling behemoth, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), determined to rule the country for ever or, as some of its chieftains have often boasted, for at least the next 50 years. On the other side are some of the opposition parties led by the most well-funded of them all, the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN), which has evolved from the ashes of the mainly Yoruba Alliance for Democracy (AD) whose de-facto leader is Senator Bola Ahmed Tinubu, the two-term former governor of Lagos State, arguably the country’s most viable state.

In this civil war it seems the leadership of the country’s Supreme Court has lined itself behind the ruling party while that of the Court of Appeal has lined itself behind the opposition.

When I first wrote about this proxy war on January 26 it had not yet broken out in the open. Then the PDP senator, Chief Iyiore Omisore, the man who had won his seat in 2003 from detention as a suspect in the murder of Chief Bola Ige, the country’s Minister of Justice and Attorney General, had published an advert in The Guardian (January 11) and Thisday  a few days later accusing the ACN and Tinubu of bribing the Court of Appeal, sitting in Akure, with five billion Naira to sack the PDP governor of his native Osun State and replace him with the governorship candidate of the ACN.

The judgement obviously meant the senator would have to put his governorship bid for this year on hold till at least 2014.     

At the time of my article the fight seemed to be between chieftains of the PDP and the Court of Appeal leadership with the court leadership seemingly left on its own to defend itself. The degeneration of the fight in to a judicial civil war has now sucked in several “outsiders” notably the Bar, the media, the academia and several retired members of the high Bench.

Most of these outsiders have waded in on the side of the CA. All of them have criticised the move by the CJN to “promote” the PCA to the Supreme Court apparently agreeing with the PCA’s description of the move as a “Greek gift” in his petition declining the CJN’s offer.

Of course not everyone has been in support of the PCA or against the CJN. An organisation calling itself Equity and Justice Forum placed a full page advert in Thisday (February 9) that ridiculed the PCA’s English in his February 4 letter to the CJN declining his “promotion” to the Supreme Court. His letter, said the advert was “replete with errors in grammar, syntax, tense, diction, agreement, etc”

As a result, said the Forum, “We are of the view that the President of the Court of Appeal’s already untenable position has been made worse by his unwarranted vituperations against the Chief Justice of Nigeria. If he refuses to jump, he should be pushed. In the face of his atrocious incompetence in the use of English language he ought not to be in that position in the first instance.”

If this can be dismissed as reducing a serious issue of law to the relatively trivial matter of grammar and syntax, another organisation calling itself Judiciary Watch Network also carried a full page advert in the Nigerian Tribune (February 9) with a list of questions it said “Justice Salami must answer.”

Among the questions it asked was why, as the PCA said in his lengthy self-defence in Thisday of January 25, does he trust only a few of the scores of judges under him in the CA? Why, it also asked, would he want to “continue to lead Justices he does not trust and who do not trust him?”

Somewhat more gossipy, the organisation asked the PCA if, “in all honesty” he would deny that his letter to the CJN declining his “promotion” was not written “for him by someone in Bola Tinubu’s employ.” It also asked him to explain how the letter “got to saharareporters and The Nation newspaper so soon after he signed it.” It is an open secret that the latter is owned by Tinubu.

What is obvious from all this is that the politicians have succeeded in dragging the judiciary in to their fights for office to an extent that is clearly unhealthy for the development of democracy in our country.

As The Punch (February 9) said, “The ongoing controversy in the upper echelon of the nation’s judiciary suggests an unsavoury politicisation of the temple of justice that should be stopped forthwith.” The day before The Guardian had entered a similar pleas to politicians. “All politicians,” it said, “should guard against dragging the judiciary into the political arena. Politicians have done too much damage already through corruption, mismanagement and violence.”

Both newspapers and others who have expressed similar concern about the undue politicisation of our judiciary are right to feel worried about the future of the country in the hands of seemingly desperate politicians. This is why I said at the beginning if this piece that our own variant of politics may yet prove the death of the country.

Even then I believe the greater onus for solving this problem lies with the judiciary itself. If our politicians prove the death of our democracy or of our country it would be more because the men and women who have sworn to interpret our laws without fear or favour have tended to put other considerations ahead of their conscience than because politicians have tried to suborn them.

After all what else would you expect anyone who wants power at all costs to do?