PRESIDENTIAL PARDONS AND THE FAILURE TO NIGERIA'S JUSTICE SYSTEM
I promised to make this article no longer than one thousand words. I will try to play the philosopher and soothsayer in few words. Otherwise, this is an important topic, as it has engaged my mind since the past two years, when I came face-to-face with the worst criminal justice system in the world. I mean the Nigerian criminal justice system.
To profile myself chronologically within this system, I should delineate the three stages in which I have operated within it. The first stage was between the ages of 18 and 23. In this stage, I was a law student at the University of Benin. We studied law under military rule. Decrees and edits ruled the day. There was no constitutional law, as it should be known and taught at law schools. Even our jurisprudence classes then were tilted heavily toward the law of brute force. Hans Kelsen’s Pure Theory of Law, which was noted for its rejection of all moral contents, dominated the keen and impressionable minds of the youthful students of law. Also, the doctrine of necessity and some crude principles of effectiveness prevailed. Necessity, for those who may not know, means some omnibus justification for failure to follow the law of the people. Without a doubt, the doctrine of necessity, particularly the Nigerian brand of it, is a lazy lawyer’s escape from a duty to justify the use of law on moral and value-based grounds. Similarly, the principles of effectiveness was worse, as something akin to no more than a thief telling his victim that he had effectively stolen from him and there was nothing he could about it.
Nigeria’s dictators used these theories to keep themselves in power without losing sleep. Indeed, as the military rulers were really not smart enough to directly advance these theories, they relied on the readily available pseudo-intellectuals in our universities and professional class to peddle such theories. I left University of Benin and the Nigerian Law School thinking that Hans Kelsen must be the most important legal scholar of all times.
The second stage in my encounter with the Nigerian legal system was as a prisoner and suspect and an accused person within the Nigerian legal system. Exactly on December 16, 2010, the Nigerian Ambassador Ade Adefuye, in a well-orchestrated plot to conceal the fact that he embezzled millions of dollars in government money in Washington DC, in which I was one of the few capable of exposing him, wrote an email to an equally corrupt official, Mrs. Farida Waziri. She was then the head of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), who was eventually removed for her serial involvement in corruption. The two plotted to have me arrested and assassinated in Nigeria. They set me up through the SSS to be abducted at the Nigerian airport. That was the beginning of the drama and absurdities that saw me detained and maltreated for five months. During that period, I observed the Nigerian criminal justice system from yet a different angle. This perspective of the law was just as profound as anything else. It changed me both as a lawyer and as a person. That was when I discovered the need to change this country for good, whatever the cost. I became convinced that Nigeria had since been taken over by very dangerous people at the top. I could see precisely what they plan to do – to destroy this country by looting it bare, and then plunge the impoverished masses into war and massive bloodshed, while they would run away overseas with their families to enjoy the money they have stolen. And when the masses are done with killing themselves, the same people would return to continue ruling whoever survived the bloodshed from where they stopped. The strategy for this system of oppression is rooted in an abusive criminal justice system, whereby they use arbitrary arrests and detentions and perverted and pretentious prosecutions to eliminate opponents, constantly counting on a gullible and ironically self-persecuting mass of the population to succeed in harming the masses further.
Then the third stage in my encounter with the Nigerian criminal justice system is the present stage, where, instead of running as they had expected, I decided to make my stand, fighting not just for myself, but for the masses of this country that have been so terribly abused and endangered.
Of course, my preparation would not be complete without mentioning the years I have spent in America studying and practicing law. It was an import counter-experience to my legal training in Nigeria. For instance, while at Harvard Law School, I realized that Hans Kelsen had applied to teach at Harvard, but was rejected particularly because Harvard did not find his dictatorship-friendly theory of law appealing enough. It was for me an epiphany – that this almighty Kelsen was rejected at Harvard. Systematically, I began to reject and challenge many of the backward notions and ideas Nigeria imparted on me. I began to question many things. I question a system where the people in power could fail so glaringly to care for the people they are supposed to be leading. I question the Oga system that has nearly completely damaged my countrymen and countrywomen, creating an atmosphere where officials refuse to take responsibility for their actions, but rather blame their failures on some Oga at the top. Why are our schools in such shambles? How could our leaders abandon the children of this country in the worst imaginable school system in the world, while they educate their own children overseas? How could they abandon our hospitals to the level of total collapse while they rush to treat themselves and their families in foreign hospitals even for headache and indigestion? How do these Nigerian leaders go to bed and be able to sleep at night, when they know that millions of heir people have no food, no electricity, no clean water and live in squalid and mosquito-infested place?
With the politics of failure and the dysfunctional criminal justice system that midwives that failure, we have faced several abnormalities and outcomes that confound even the most adept manipulator of the system. What we witnessed in the recent pardons granted by the President of Nigeria was an incredible self-destructing maneuver by the President and his advisers. They have dribbled the ball into their own goalpost. The Pardons are a clear admission that the EFCC system is finished and has fully served its usefulness to the decadent machinery that propelled it. About five years ago, the EFCC orchestrated the most elaborate scheme that spanned across continents to get Governor Diepreye Alamieyeseigha to jail. Billions of Naira was spent to jail the man. Helicopter gunships and all manner of military equipment were deployed just to arrest him, and that is without mentioning the shenanigans that led to the first ever attempt to outsource Nigeria’s criminal trial to England. To now hear that the President of Nigeria pardoned the man makes a mockery of everything, while at the same time affirming what we knew for some time now, that most of the system of Nigeria justice is a sham.
As I write this, 48 Nigerian youths, some as young as 20, are on death row in Malaysia. One would expect a clemency-minded President and his advisers to dispatch a diplomatic offensive to get Malaysia to commute those sentences. But no! It is rather the case of Alamieyeseigha, a man who has actually been enjoying life as the best friend and Godfather of the President that would take up the generous dispositions of the President on clemency and pardon.
