Is the judiciary complicit as charged?

Charges that the judiciary is complicit in the executive rascality that has seized this country since the Fourth Republic began in 1999 never cease to rear its ugly head. The charges are not from aggrieved politicians alone but also from the top echelon of the Bar. Retired judges have also been known to express dissatisfaction at the performance of some of their colleagues still on the Bench. Truly, that the judiciary plays second fiddle or is subservient and servile to the Executive branch of government is not in doubt; the rulings and comportment of many of them embarrass even a lay man like me. I wonder why such judges have chosen the path of destruction, not only of themselves but also of their profession. Whimsical desecration of the hallowed chambers of justice by men and women constitutionally empowered to act mini-God, able to take the life they are not able to give, cannot be taken lightly. These are men and women who, on their own volition, without compulsion, swore on oath to dispense justice without fear of favour, with neither malice nor affection to anyone, regardless whose ox is gored. To turn afterwards, treat these with levity, and even laugh their oath to scorn!

Is it fear? Is it the love of money? Is it a lack of understanding? Montesquieu’s theory of separation of powers apart, the judiciary is the branch that should hold the two other arms of government – the Executive and Legislature – to ransom. Because it wields the power of life and death over all of us. Because it has the final say – at least here on earth. In heaven it may be Jehovah (Who has the final say/Jehovah, Jehovah, Jehovah/Has the final say!). But here on earth, the judiciary has the final say. It is the only branch of government empowered to overrule the two other arms. In doing that, brilliant judges who are so minded have been known to make laws while interpreting the law. They have the powers to strip anyone – including even the most powerful office holders – of privileges and entitlements; they are known (in other climes at least) to strip governors and presidents of their office; even sending them to jail. Why, then, are they effeminate here? Who or what emasculated them?

I moaned for the judiciary, often touted as the last hope of the common man and mourned for the common man himself when I read the intervention of Chidi Anselm Odinkalu, SAN, and former chairman of the Human Rights Commission. Shall we call it a dirge or requiem for the judiciary? It is titled “Yahaya Bello and a complicit judiciary”. I will return with parting shots.

“Josiah Majebi is the fifth Chief Judge of Kogi State (in north-central Nigeria) in four years and the fourth to exist almost entirely in the pocket of the state governor. He has been in office as substantive Chief Judge since the beginning of February 2023, having acted in that role since 26 June 2022 when his predecessor, Richard Olorunfemi, retired. Henry Olusiyi served in that office for just under seven months from the end of June 2020 until January 2021. Sunday Otuh, who succeeded him, spent eight months in office before retiring in September 2021.

The last Chief Judge of Kogi State who attempted to hold that office with dignity and independence, Nasir Ajanah, paid with his life, unmourned and exiled from the state. He was the second Chief Judge of the state to be politically lynched by the government of Kogi State in one decade.

At the beginning of April 2008, the Kogi State House of Assembly, defying an order of the state High Court, adopted a resolution asking the state governor to remove long-serving Chief Judge of the state, Umaru Eri. On that basis, then acting governor, Clarence Olafemi, promptly announced the sack of the Chief Judge on 2 April, 2008 and designated another judge, Sam Ota, to act in his place.

In his defence, Umaru Eri claimed that his crime was that he had declined the request of the politicians to act as go-between in bribing the election petition tribunal on behalf of the then state governor whose election was in dispute. On 16 May, 2008, AlabaAjileye, a judge of the High Court of Kogi State, reversed the sack and reinstated Umaru Eri.

Eleven years later, on 18 June 2019, AlabaAjileye presided again in deciding a case that seemed uncannily to reprise issues in his earlier decision. As with the 2008 decision, the claimant in 2019 was another Chief Judge of Kogi State, Nasir Ajanah, with his Chief Registrar, Yahya Adamu. The defendants included the Kogi State House of Assembly, its Speaker, and the state governor, Yahaya Bello.

At the directive of Gov. Yahaya Bello, the Secretary to the Government of Kogi State wrote on 14 November, 2018 to Chief Judge Nasir Ajanah, asking him to provide “the payroll of judicial staff for the ongoing pay parade of civil servants in the state”. At the time, the governor was a defendant in the court of the Chief Judge; so the Chief Registrar responded to the letter and explained that the judiciary was a self-accounting and co-equal branch of government supervised by the state Judicial Service Commission.

An affronted Gov. Bello wrote under his own name to Walter Onnoghen, then Chief Justice of Nigeria and chairman of the National Judicial Council (NJC), asking the NJC to find the Chief Judge guilty of misconduct requiring that he “step aside and (an) Acting Chief Judge (be) allowed to take his place”.

While his petition was still waiting for the attention of the NJC, Yahaya Bello resorted to political self-help. He referred the perceived effrontery of Nasir Ajannah to the State House of Assembly, which promptly constituted an investigation committee. The Chief Judge sued. While his suit was pending, on 2 April, 2019, the State House of Assembly adopted a resolution asking Yahaya Bello to remove the Chief Judge and also requiring disciplinary action against the Chief Registrar. On 18 June, 2019, AlabaAjileye sitting at the High Court of Kogi State in Kotonkarfe, determined that the Kogi State House of Assembly and the governor acted unlawfully in seeking to remove the Chief Judge.

The reaction of the governor was bestial. He first went after AlabaAjileye, a man of courage and learning whose judicial record was unblemished. With a doctorate degree in law, AlabaAjileye is an expert in the rarefied subject of digital evidence. Following this judgment, however, Yahaya Bello’s government made it known that they could no longer guarantee his safety. Yet, when he was put forward for elevation to the Court of Appeal, the same Kogi State government actively blocked it. A man who would easily have adorned the Supreme Court with distinction, AlabaAjileye retired from the High Court in February 2023 and has since then forged a career as a scholar and academic.

Turning to the state Chief Judge meanwhile, Yahaya Bello made life unbearable for Nasir Ajannah. He began by banishing the man from official state functions. When Chief Judge Ajannah attended the swearing-in of the new Grand Khadi of Kogi State on 21 May, 2020, the Chief Security Officer to Yahaya Bello informed him that the governor gave a directive that he should not be allowed to attend the function.

In the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, Gov. Bello made Nasir Ajannah persona non grata in the state. As a result, he was forced into internal displacement in Abuja, where his personal arrangements were worse than transitory. While in hiding in Abuja, Nasir Ajannah contracted COVID and died in isolation in Gwagwalada in the Federal Capital Territory on 28 June, 2020. His death went unacknowledged and even the institutions of the judiciary were reluctant to mourn his passing.

The men who followed Nasir Ajannah in the office of Chief Judge of Kogi State learned to stoke the vanities of Yahaya Bello and avoid his anger. Ahead of his departure from office at the end of eight years as governor of Kogi State in January 2024, Josiah Majebi as Chief Judge and chairman of the Kogi State Judicial Service Commission prepared a list of candidates for nomination as judges of the High Court of Kogi State. At the top of the list was a wife to Yahaya Bello, the basis of whose claim to the nomination was the dutiful fulfillment of the duties of connubium in Yahaya Bello’s bedroom. For the Chief Judge, it was also proof that he had truly abjured any pretensions to a mind of his own.

Alarmed at what they saw as perversion of the system of judicial appointments, a group of seven Senior Advocates of Nigeria from the State wrote to Josiah Majebi to dissuade him from this course of action. In January 2024, they sued, challenging his judicial nominations. Pending the outcome, the NJC suspended the process of appointment to the Kogi State judiciary. On 18 April, 2024, James Omotoso, a judge of the Federal High Court in Abuja, many of whose judgments usually have something of a smell problem about them, implausibly ruled that these senior lawyers had no legitimate interest in the process of appointment of judges in their state and that, in any case, the discretion of the NJC in appointment of judges was effectively not open to review!

It was the day after Yahaya Bello’s chosen successor and blood relative, Usman Ododo, chose to turn his predecessor into a fugitive from legal process and two days after Mr. Ododo opened his case in the petition questioning the lawfulness of his election as governor of Kogi State. As a bungling Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) waited to arrest Yahaya Bello in Abuja, one I. A. Jamil, a judge of the High Court of Kogi State, issued an order claiming to restrain the Commission from doing its job.

According to the order of the judge, the case, which was filed over two months earlier on 8 February, was hurriedly assigned while the siege was on-going in Abuja, was argued, heard and decided and the judge quickly signed the order and handed it to Gov. Ododo to take with him to Abuja from where he spirited his cousin away from legal process in a blaze of gunfire! The court was almost assuredly disingenuous about the date of filing. In all likelihood, the case was filed the same day on 17 April, 2024 and then back-dated!

The EFCC now claims it has declared Yahaya Bello a fugitive but the real question will be how a compromised and complicit judiciary will treat the nomination of his unqualified wife as a judge and the petition against the declaration of his violent cousin as governor of Kogi State. The judges who currently control Nigeria’s criminal politics now must show how much they owe Yahaya Bello!”

Knowledgeable men and women have said that the core problem of the judiciary is the process of recruitment to the Bench. Where merit is sacrificed on the altar of godfatherism, competence takes the back seat while incompetence and mediocrity strut the stage like a colossus. Wherever corruption is rife, justice takes fight!

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