The dust raised by the President’s delay in submitting Walter Onnoghen’s name to the Senate for screening was finally settled last Tuesday, when he was confirmed as the substantive Chief Justice of Nigeria. He has been functioning in an acting capacity since November last year. For four years, he will be in the saddle, a period long enough for him to radically overhaul the judiciary.
With its loss of respect and public confidence, the judiciary is facing a most torrid time. It is a self-inflicted wound – no thanks to corruption that has seized its soul. Perhaps, it was for this reason that Onnoghen gave this guarantee: “The judiciary on my watch will be of unquestionable integrity. I believe that the judiciary will come out of the present situation stronger.” We have heard this before. Action, not rhetoric, is what Nigerians are waiting for.
Under the leadership of his immediate past predecessors, the judiciary reached a new low. This is why the new CJN has his job well cut out. Two of his colleagues – Sylvester Ngwuta and Inyang Okoro – justices of the Supreme Court, were forced to step aside over alleged corruption. Their homes were raided by State Security Service operatives last year, along with those of Mohammed Tsamiya, a retired justice of the Court of Appeal, and high court judges, Adeniyi Ademola, Muazu Pindiga, Kabir Auta, and Innocent Umezulike, as well as a former Chief Judge of Enugu State. Huge sums of money were found.
The corruption trial of over 10 state governors by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission since 2007 is deliberately being dragged on, mired in abuse of court processes and graft to pave the way for them to escape justice. In fact, the cases are still at the rudimentary stages.
Interestingly, judiciary stakeholders do not pretend about the damage corruption has unleashed on our justice delivery system. Onnoghen’s predecessor, Mahmud Mohammed, who launched the National Judicial Policy shortly after the judges’ arrest, was spot-on when he said the document “recognises that the greatest and most damaging challenge to (the) administration of justice is corruption and that tackling this challenge must go beyond mere exhortation and sentiments.”
Such a forensic analysis requires a CJN with a surgeon’s knife for an emergency operation of the system. We denounce the escapism that the judiciary is a product of the society and, therefore, not immune to corruption, or the sweeping generalisation that poor investigation or prosecution of criminal cases was the reason for the almost zero-conviction rate.
The conviction of a former governor of Delta State, James Ibori, in London, based on some of the charges for which he was controversially freed in Nigeria, belies Onnoghen’s submission in the Senate. A Federal High Court judge, Marcel Awokulehin, had dismissed the 170 charges levelled against him. If poor investigation and prosecution were to justify the absolute grounding of corruption trials, we dare say, it could not have been in all the cases.
For solid evidence, the CJN should look at judges and lawyers who still indulge in all manner of unethical practices to obfuscate trials, despite the rampart, which the Administration of Criminal Justice Act 2015 provides. Frivolous adjournments persist. According to Femi Falana (SAN), represented by Wahab Shittu, at a roundtable on corruption last year, some judges are still running riot, granting interlocutory or perpetual injunctions “to restrain the anti-graft agencies and the police from arresting, investigating and prosecuting politically exposed persons.”
Indiscipline and abuse of this industrial scale in any legal jurisdiction is a recipe for disorder. We need strong leadership from the National Judicial Council to defang the setting. Lack of it made the NJC to see nothing amiss in merely recommending a judge that demanded a N200 million bribe from a litigant to fix a judgement in his case for retirement, as the appropriate punishment. Such misconduct has earned many judges long jail terms in the United States and Italy.
As the President of the Nigerian Bar Association, Abubakar Mahmoud, rightly observed, when he set up, recently, a 23-member team to restore professionalism, the standard of justice was suspect because the “relevant or appropriate judicial authority failed” to do its work. For the judiciary to hit its stride, it should embrace judicial activism – using the law for its true purpose – promotion of justice and fairness, as Lord Denning’s judgements typified, instead of seeing it from the prism of legal technicalities. The gains of Singapore and Malaysia in the setting up of special courts in expediting corruption trials show how expedient the adoption of the system here has become. Onnoghen said the judiciary would not oppose it.
Under him, Nigerians hope to see dedication to the values that elevate the judiciary -the emergence of people’s judiciary. The country should not return to the past when 64 judges were sacked for misconduct, between 2009 and 2014, without any of them being put in the dock. The ongoing trial of a few suggests that many errant judges in the past might have escaped the long arm of the law. The same treatment should also be visited on the rotten eggs in the legal profession whose preoccupation is to traffic in bribery and abuse of court process – all aimed at perverting the course of justice.
The appellate courts need great minds, people with outstanding intellect from outside the Bench. Our jurisprudence was enriched by such novelty when Taslim Elias from the academia and Augustine Nnamani, a former Attorney-General and Minister of Justice, joined the Supreme Court in the 1970s. A judiciary in search of a new energy and direction needs such innovation.
