I start my column this week with two
separate but related questions and their answers, together with the
known, documented effects of the answers. First question: what does a
probe of probable or suspected cases of looting of government revenues
or assets achieve? Answer: if successful, it will reveal the identities,
the names of the culprits, together with the sums they might have
stolen. Known and documented effects: in most cases no effect is
achieved; there are no punishments, and no refund of stolen loot. Second
question: what will vigorous and effective prosecution of identified
and named culprits of looting of government or public funds and assets
achieve? Answer: it will recover vast amounts of stolen loot; it will
send culprits to long terms of imprisonment; and it will serve as a
warning, a deterrent to others that corruption will be met with the full
force of the law in our country. Known and documented effects: None,
precisely because vigorous and effective prosecutions of criminal
looters have been virtually absent in our law courts for at least the
last decade and a half; our country is a looters’ paradise, the most
redoubtable in the whole world.
The causative background to this series
of questions and answers is the controversy currently raging over the
announcement of President Buhari that his administration’s probe of
corruption in our country will be limited to only the administration of
his immediate predecessor in office, Goodluck Jonathan. I am not
uninterested in the controversy, but I confess that it is of very mild
interest to me. If I had to take a clear and unambiguous position on the
issue, it will be that Buhari ought not to limit the probe to the
Jonathan administration, that all the administrations since the return
to civilian rule in 1999 should be probed. This is because, absolutely
without any exception, looting with impunity was a constant and
invariant phenomenon as much in the Obasanjo and Yar’ Adua
administrations as in the Jonathan government. For this reason, Buhari
is playing into hands of those who, for their own self-interested
reasons, have been making loud and acrimonious noises that the new
administration’s intended probe is nothing but a witch-hunt directed
solely at the Jonathan administration. And now having stated my own
views on the matter, I wish to say with as much emphasis as I can muster
that this controversy is a diversion away from the most serious area of
the war against corruption and its ramifications for the survival of
our country. This area is none other than vigorous and effective
prosecution of criminal cases against our high and mighty class of
“untouchable” looters. Permit me to make a few comments in support of
this observation, this claim.
It is an understatement to say that
probes relating to official corruption are not lacking in Nigeria for
indeed, there are few places on the planet with as many probes and
investigations of corruption as in our country. Indeed, if probes had
any positive connection to the war on corruption, Nigeria would have
emerged more than a decade ago as one of the countries in the world with
the lowest levels of official or governmental corruption. As a matter
of historical fact, the tradition goes all the way back before 1999 to
the period of military dictatorships. So endemic, so constant but so
utterly of little or no use is the legal-administrative culture of
probes into corruption in our country that there have been even probes
to probe probes! In my recollection, the most recent of such uniquely
Nigerian and endlessly redundant “probes-to-probe-probes” is the well
known scandal-within-a-scandal involving the Hon Farouk Lawan. As
readers of this piece may recall, in the probe into the oil subsidy mega
scam of 2011 by a Committee of the House of Representatives that Lawan
chaired, he was caught in a bribery setup that then attracted a probe of
Lawan and his Committee by a Sub-Committee of the same House of
Representatives. In that notorious case, neither the person being probed
who bribed Lawan nor Lawan himself paid any significant price for the
revelations of both the initial probe and the subsequent
probe-to-probe-the-probe.
Given this inglorious history of probes
in the war against corruption in our country, the reader may wonder why
so much discursive energy and political capital are invested in calls
for probing either only the Jonathan administration or all the
administrations since 1999. Is it because probes and their revelations
act as a sort of shaming ritual against our “lootocrats”? Perhaps. On
this account, deep down in the Nigerian collective psyche and popular
imagination is the conviction that the law in general and most of our
very senior lawyers, and a great number of our magistrates and judges
are there to protect the lootocrats. On this account, the thinking is
that at least if, thanks to the prevailing judicial system, you can’t
jail them and you can’t make them pay back what they have looted, you
can at least shame them by revealing through probes who they are and how
much they have looted. If this underlying logic holds true, it means
that ours is a society that has already lost the entire war against
corruption even before the first battle – in the law courts – has been
fought and lost. And there is also the fact that our looters are
completely beyond shame; indeed to the contrary, they normatively wear
their “shame” like a badge of honor, unfortunately with the connivance
of the popular masses, the looted and the disenfranchised.
The great challenge now is to shift the
indisputably great public interest in the success of the war against
corruption away from calls for or against probes to why it is that the
battles are nearly always lost in our law courts and what we need to do
to end the control of the law by the looters and their advocates. In
making this particular observation, I ask the reader to please reflect
on the fact that only a very tiny segment of civil society organizations
and individuals, trade unions and professional associations, and
students’ bodies and voluntary organizations pay careful and sustained
attention to what goes on in our law courts with regard to how the high
and mighty of the land who have looted and continue to loot our public
coffers control senior lawyers, judges and magistrates. As I write these
words, there are dozens, indeed scores of cases tied up in our law
courts more or less permanently against successful prosecution. In the
few cases where accused culprits are actually tried and found guilty,
the “punishments” are so light as to be laughable in their
ineffectiveness, either as punishment or as deterrent. I cite just a few
of these. One: John Yakubu Yusuf who admitted to stealing more than 2
billion naira from Police Pension Funds; he was given only two years
jail sentence but with an option of a fine of N750,000 naira which he
paid and then walked away a free man. Two: the Judge who gave him this
“handshake” of a sentence, Justice Abubakar Talba, was found compromised
by the National Judicial Council (NJC). What punishment did the NJC
give him? One year suspension from duties without pay! Three: a certain
Justice Okechukwu Okeke of the Federal High Court who, in his appearance
before the NJC, had no convincing defense against the numerous
petitions against his judgments; he was not sanctioned at all but was
let off the hook because his retirement was close at hand!
I am not of course saying stop all
probes; far from it. Probes have their uses, especially if and when they
are complemented by vigorous and effective prosecutions. What I am
saying is that beyond the calls for probes, please pay far greater
attention to what is going on in the law courts! The names of the most
active and notorious senior lawyers, magistrates and judges who provide
cover and protection to the lootocrats should be publicized. Tear away
the cloak of judicial respectability and personal anonymity from their
“illustrious” careers! Don’t scapegoat them in place of the lootocrats
themselves, but unmask the hidden symbiosis between the two groups!
Above all else, pay attention to the Administration of Justice Act of
2015 and fight with all your moral energy and political imagination to
make sure that the provisions of this new Act are enforced in our law
courts.
Naturally, the reader will wonder: what
exactly is the Administration of Justice Act of 2015 about? Well, here I
must confess that I have myself just come into knowledge of both its
clearly revolutionary implications and the tremendous obstacles that we
may expect from the forces both inside and outside our judicial system
who benefit from the status quo that favors looters. For this reason,
rather than give a summary or outline of the provisions and implications
of this Act, I intend next week to invite one or two members of the
judiciary to share the space of this column with me in discussion and
explication of the Act. For now, let me close the present discussion
with the following “last words”.
One of the truly amazing ironies of the
war against corruption in our country in the law courts is the fact that
our looters have been far more widely successfully prosecuted outside
the country than in Nigeria. In some really unbelievable cases,
individuals who had been unsuccessfully prosecuted in Nigerian courts
have been victoriously prosecuted abroad for the same crimes!
This pattern has brought much ridicule and infamy to our judicial order
in the court of international juridical onion. Right now, at this
present historical moment when so many countries in the world have
promised to help the new administration recover the untold loot hidden
away in foreign countries and bank vaults, the very least we can begin
to do is prosecute our looters vigorously and successfully at home.
Charity, they say, begins at home. So does justice for the millions of
the looted and impoverished in the land.
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