PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA

Who Will Save The Judiciary?

ndajika@yahoo.com 

It’s been two weeks today since we last met on these pages. During this period several major events have taken place, among them the Senate screening and subsequent swearing in of Justice Dahiru Musdapher as the Chief Justice of Nigeria (CJN).

Coming in the wake of the disastrous acrimony between the former CJN, Justice Aloysius Katsina-Alu, and the suspended President of the Court of Appeal (PCA), Justice Ayo Salami, over the 2007 Sokoto State governorship election, Justice Musdapher’s appointment couldn’t have come at a worse time for the judiciary.

The acrimony started when the former CJN stopped the Court of Appeal (CA) sitting in Sokoto from delivering a judgement that was speculated to have been against the incumbent governor. However, the acrimony only became public when the former CJN tried, in effect, to promote Justice Salami sideways into the Supreme Court, a move which the latter loudly rejected by heading for the courts in protest.

Then followed accusations and counter-accusations between the warring judges of selling out, each to his alleged “political masters”. Predictably both bar and bench became deeply divided over who was right and who wasn’t. Thereafter all efforts by horrified well-meaning observers, especially former senior judges like Mamman Nasir and Mustapha Akanbi – both incidentally former PCAs – and senior lawyers to contain the acrimony failed.

The failure was compounded by the decision of the former CJN to set up a panel of members of the National Judicial Council (NJC), the disciplinary arm of the Judiciary, to adjudicate in the matter. The outcome - the suspension of Justice Salami for perjury against the CJN - was predictable; the vast majority of the 23 odd members of the NJC are, constitutionally, the CJN’s appointees.

Again predictably, Salami, who had been persuaded to withdraw his court case against the former CJN, headed back to the courts, this time to defend himself against his suspension based on the NJC claim that he had lied against the former CJN.

This development, as Justice Mustapha Akanbi, among others, has repeatedly pointed out in several newspaper interviews, was unprecedented.

It is against this background of a deeply divided Judiciary that Justice Musdapher has become the country’s new CJN. Obviously this makes his job unenviable. Add to this the fact that he’s been a major actor in the Katsina-Alu/Salami face-off as a key Salami witness who, however, in the end rejected Salami’s account of the judicial controversy over the 2007 Sokoto State governorship election, then the new CJN’s job looks like mission impossible.

Happily there’s hardly anything that is impossible in this world provided, that is, that there is the insight and the ability, and, above all, the will, to deal with it.

Already the new CJN has shown an appreciation of the enormity of his job. He did this during the Special Session of the Supreme Court to mark the beginning of 2011/2012 Legal Year by honestly admitting, albeit cautiously, that the judiciary has never had it so bad.

“As it stands today,” he said on that occasion, “it seems the society we serve is not entirely satisfied with our performance. Hard as it may be to accept, we feel it is less important to focus on whether this assessment is fair or not. The important thing is for us to transparently come to terms with the prevailing realities, accept the gap in expectations, and do our utmost to bridge it.”

He then assured his audience that the judiciary under him will carry out “the weighty responsibilities” hanging on its shoulders “with vigour, truth and dignity.”

More than anyone else the CJN obviously knows he has next to no time to do his own bit for the Judiciary; he has less than a year to reach his mandatory retirement age of 70. And even with the best of intentions and the strongest of wills, one needs years, not months, to clean the Judiciary of the rot that has eaten deep into it.

Still the CJN can make a difference even with the little time he has. He obviously has the ability to do so. Otherwise it is unlikely that he would have risen as far as he has. What remains is for him to show that he has the will. 

He has promised to raise a judicial reform committee to help redeem the image of the Judiciary by overhauling the administration of justice in the country.

This, to me, is rather a false start. The experienced learned judge, I am sure, must have heard the quip about the most effective strategy for sweeping a problem under the carpet is to set up a committee to look into it.

Of the many things that have served to dent the image of the Judiciary none, at least in my view, has been as bad as the Katsina-Alu/Salami face-off. Justice Musdapher can do worse than begin his effort at cleaning up after his predecessor by trying to resolve the fallout from the face-off.

The Nigerian Bar Association and many senior lawyers have, quite rightly, denounced the role of the NJC in the suspension of Justice Salami as PCA. Some people have even called for his recall in the face of the fact that he was suspended after he had gone to court to challenge his suspension on the ground that he lied against the former CJN, making his suspension sub judice.

I very much doubt the wisdom of such calls if only because re-instating Salami can only further divide an already badly divided Judiciary. Instead Justice Musdapher can direct that Salami’s case be given accelerated hearing. A quick verdict would provide an opportunity to sort out the Sokoto mess which is at the heart of the current judicial predicament.

Beyond that Justice Musdapher can do a lot by leading by example. Writing in an insightful collection of essays in Thisday by members of its editorial board in its October 1 Independence Anniversary edition, a lawyer, Sonnie Ekwowusi, in his own essay asked the very pertinent question, “Who Will Save the Judiciary?” His answer suggested he believed politicians are the ones. “The Jonathan administration,” he said, “should therefore take concrete steps to overhaul the country’s criminal justice and prison system.”

Ekwowusi couldn’t be further from the solution to the decay in our judicial system. Politicians have been part of, indeed are the root cause of, the decay. They are therefore unlikely to be part of the solution, much less the entire solution, to the problem.

The solution lies almost entirely with the members of the bench themselves.

Needless to say, all parties in any dispute, political or otherwise, will invariably try by means, sometimes fair, sometimes foul, sometimes both, to persuade judges to see things their way. It is entirely up to the judges to resist anyone who tries to suborn them to give judgment, not essentially on the merit of their case, but solely for a consideration.

Short as his tenure will be as the CJN, indeed precisely because of its brevity, Justice Musdapher has no choice but to lead the battle for redeeming the image of our judiciary as an institution whose members, generally speaking, are regarded as availlable for sale to the highest bidder, or worse, to the next bidder.

And if whispers coming out of the hallowed chambers of courts are to be believed, he has more than enough fellow judges on the high bench, notably the next in line to succeed him, Justice Alooma Mukhtar, to give him covering fire against any ill-willed compromiser.