Buhari is yet to show he is possessed of Lee Kuan Yew’s exceptional leadership style and determination to do the right thing in his country’s hour of need, but this judicial purge is a good start.
JUDICIAL PURGE IS BUHARI’S FINEST ACT OF LEADERSHIP YET
Every student of dialectics knows the limitations of individual leaders – the subjective factor – when faced with the objective structure of socioeconomic relations and the conditions of human existence in any society. It is known for instance, that capitalism breeds corruption and human misery, and any attempts to fight corruption within the framework of pretentious capitalist democracy, especially its flawed third world variant, is doomed to fail, or at best attack the problem cosmetically. So, I neither bought into Buhari’s anti-corruption noise nor APC’s snake oil deceptively marketed as change to a Nigerian electorate determined to get rid of the corrupt and inept Jonathan administration.
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Buhari’s policy summersaults, divisive and uncouth rhetoric, narrow-minded nepotism, and a stunning ideational blankness on even the most basic acts of governance since assuming office, vindicated my cautious stance. Even today, I remain skeptical of his ability to champion the comprehensive systemic overhaul required to fix our country’s multiple problems.
Yet, I commend his unprecedented crackdown on a patently corrupt Nigerian judiciary whose sleaze and unchecked perfidy has aided and abetted the perpetual bleeding of our public treasury by common criminals and thugs thrust into leadership positions by our nation’s remarkably anti-merit system. Indeed, I believe this crackdown on the judiciary, going as far as the Supreme Court, represents his finest act of leadership yet. Let me explain.
Every administration since Yakubu Gowon has fed the Nigerian public with salacious tales of its predecessor’s rottenness, followed by carefully orchestrated media trials designed to shore up its public image and in many cases justify its rise to power. But none has ever seriously prosecuted a strategic, holistic, and consistent war on corruption both within and outside the constraints of a democracy. None has been bold enough to place the searchlight on a judiciary heavily compromised at all levels and increasingly incapable of playing its role as impartial arbiter and supposed hope of the common man. This failure is of monumental significance given our unique model of Western bourgeois democracy.
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The relative success of the Western bourgeois democratic model is strongly predicated on a presumption of judicial integrity. A presumption that judges having undergone rigorous training in character and learning, should evince the better angels of our nature, exude incorruptibility, eschew the primordial desire for material acquisition, and view corruption of any genre as anathema.
Such expected high standard of behavior justifies judicial independence and its presumed ability to check the excesses of politicians in the executive and legislative arms of government. This presumption of judicial integrity is so powerful that the only permissible constitutional derogation from the fundamental right to life is a judge’s powers to levy the death penalty on an accused person upon conviction.
Western democracies recognize this power of judges to profoundly shape society and make or mar the lives of ordinary citizens hence judicial corruption is vied with utmost contempt and visited with the sternest sanctions. In one of many recent examples, a US Judge in the state of Pennsylvania, Mark Ciavarella was handed a 28 year prison sentence for accepting up to $1000, 000 in bribes from a private prison business in an apparent pay for play deal involving the needless incaceration of mostly juveniles . It goes without saying that if we must copy the Western model, we should at least copy its best features.
So the hollow cry of democracy and rule of law by Nigeria's corrupt elite must be properly situated.It is their time tested ploy, in connivance with corrupt judges, to evade the law and maintain impunity while emptying the public treasury and plunging millions of our hapless citizens into existential misery. As an attorney who litigated numerous cases within the Nigerian judicial system, I got an insider’s view of the mockery the system has become. Judges gave frivolous and conflicting decisions, and sometimes issued rulings in conflict with their own earlier decisions on cases of similar facts. But, inconsistent law is bad law, and the only explanation for the plethora of terrible judgments emanating from our courts is the depth of judicial corruption now being exposed by Buhari’s purge.
If memory serves us well, we should still recall the case of a certain Peter Odili who currently enjoys a seemingly inviolable 'perpetual injunction' granted by a one Justice Ibrahim Buba, shielding him from prosecution for the rest of his natural life. Interestingly, Odili’s wife sits as a justice of Nigeria’s Supreme Court. Another corrupt judge, Marcel Awokulehin granted James Ibori acquittal from corruption charges despite overwhelming evidence that the former Delta State governor had looted the state’s coffers. It took the intervention of a British court for the good people of Delta State to get justice.
It is therefore no surprise that no elected political office holder of consequence, from local government councilors to the presidency, has been thoroughly investigated, prosecuted, and jailed in recent memory. They either get a pat on the wrist from the judiciary, or the case is deliberately bungled by the prosecuting state agency. This has created an extraordinary problem which must be fixed by extraordinary means. Buhari’s judicial purge is one of such extraordinary means, and our history of judicial malfeasance makes the purge an absolute necessity.
The only question the administration must confront is whether the purge and his wider war on corruption will become more strategic, holistic, and consistent. Strategic in the sense of operating with a clear plan to investigate, and prosecute specific cases, with an eye on the potential jeopardy legal loopholes may pose to obtaining convictions; holistic by way of comprehensive judicial reforms and a serious consideration of suggestions for the creation of special corruption courts to expedite trials and impose punitive sanctions aimed at deterrence; and consistent by way of applying the same standards for all cases including those of his closest aides, advisers, and ministers since the president as chief prosecutor of the war on corruption must also demonstrate his incorruptibility by harboring no sacred cows. A war on corruption should not only be fair, it must be seen to be fair.
In reaching these conclusions, I am not unmindful of the genuine concerns about the implications of the judicial purge for democracy and the rule of law. I contend that the purge will strengthen these tenets in ways only an incorruptible judiciary can. The purge is not anti-democratic as sensational critics have alleged, rather, it is the boldest attempt in our 56 year history to protect and advance democracy so that it works for all our citizens instead of providing a shield for those who will impoverish society by stealing from the people.
No serious nation should allow legal loopholes or hackneyed chants of democracy and rule of law to be exploited in ways that perpetually hinder its development and the happiness and fulfillment of its people. In a nation as endowed as ours, it is unconscionable that millions of our people are steeped in inescapable poverty while politicians collude with judges to loot the common till. Those who cite legal niceties and the nonsense of judicial inviolability should tell that to the dying babies at IDP camps in the Northeast, or the old pensioners dying on endless queues awaiting pensions that never come, or the thousands of our compatriots killed on dilapidated roads every year, or the hundreds of thousands of public sector workers across the country starving due to unpaid salaries owed by treacherous governors whose obscene wealth explains our collective poverty.
I have examined the argument by critics of the crackdown to the effect that the National Judicial Council (NJC) should be allowed to discipline judges, and that judges should not have been arrested or harassed by law enforcement. This argument, assumes that judges are above the law they administer. It treats the NJC as a special court, perhaps, the only court where judges can be prosecuted. But this is wrong. The NJC is a professional disciplinary committee like the Legal Practitioners’ Disciplinary Committee. Although recognized under the constitution, it is not a court. It can discipline judges for professional overreach, but does not preclude the power of regular courts to try any judge on charges of corruption and criminal betrayal of trust. Nowhere in our jurisprudence or corpus of laws are judges granted a carte blanche making them subject only to trial by the NJC. And when judges are reasonably suspected to have breached the law, they, like every other citizen, can be arrested and prosecuted by law enforcement agencies.
The disgraceful reaction of the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) which should be at the forefront of efforts to sanitize the judiciary, is only indicative of the impunity that has gone on for too long. The outrage is not because the judges are saints. It is because we are not used to judges being arrested and held to decent standards of accountability. And it is precisely in breaking this vile wall of protection for corrupt judges that the Buhari administration - despite its flaws and the hypocrisy of surrounding itself with integrity-challenged characters such as Tukur Buratai and Abba Kyari, among others - deserves credit.
Corruption is a global phenomenon, and it is present in various forms even in the advanced world. But its consequences are far more devastating for developing countries due to the dearth of capital desperately needed to close the developmental gap between the first and third worlds. For Nigeria, efforts to combat the scourge must be drastic, and there are examples even outside the West.
In his quest to deconstruct the flawed structures of a failing Singapore and redirect its trajectory on a path to self-actualization, Lee Kuan Yew, renowned father of modern Singapore was determined in his implementation of a two-pronged approach of increasing living wages while sternly punishing graft. Buoyed by an honest appraisal of the depth of public corruption and its profound implications for his country’s development, Yew decided he would not be constrained by legal loopholes exploited by the corrupt to evade justice under the supposed banner of democracy and rule of law. In one fell swoop, he cracked down on corrupt public officers, arresting about 149 officials in a single day. He diligently prosecuted them, thereby establishing the deterrence that would set the stage for a new era of probity and accountability which radically transformed his country from a third to a first world country in less than four decades.
Buhari is yet to show he is possessed of Lee Kuan Yew’s exceptional leadership style and determination to do the right thing in his country’s hour of need, but this judicial purge is a good start.
ONYINYE-GANDHI CHUKS is an attorney, public policy and international affairs analyst and consultant. He writes from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
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