The desecration of the Supreme Court

On March 26, 2017, I had a successful defence of my doctoral dissertation at the Department of English, Obafemi Awolowo University. Subsequently, on August 30, 2017, the Senate of the university awarded me the degree. The title of my dissertation: A Pragmastylistic Analysis of Some Supreme Court Judgments on Chieftaincy Disputes in Nigeria. Pragmastylistics or pragmatic stylistics, by the way, is a way of looking at texts using the tools of stylistics (the scientific study of style) and pragmatics (the study of utterances/texts in context). Let’s quickly illustrate what we mean here. Consider the following exchange:

The thesis, what do you think about it?

Well, it’s well-typed

An exchange like this can actually take many pages to analyze but let’s stick to the bare details. At the stylistic level, we look at the words and sentences used here and try to determine their meaning. On a discourse plain, we have a question and answer. The answer in (B) above is what discourse analysts would call a preferred second pair part, because it follows, if you like, the normal logic of language, which is that you are given an answer when you ask a question. However, if you look at the answer closely, you find that it reveals certain things that are worthy of closer examination. This is where pragmatics comes in. Speaker B’s answer seems to suggest that she does not like the thesis in question. Look at the hedge (Well,) and the rest of the utterance (it’s well-typed). You would expect Speaker B to comment on things like the thesis’ contribution to knowledge, literature review and so on. We suspect that Speaker B, through indirectness or by giving information that is not really required, is trying to be as polite as possible in giving her assessment of the work in question. The kind of deduction we make here in context, beyond the ordinary meaning of the actual words used, is called implicature.

In my dissertation, I identified and described the stylistic and pragmatic features in select (note: select, not selected) judgments of the apex court on chieftaincy disputes delivered between 1990 and 2015, examined the interrelatedness of the features and related this to the contexts of their delivery. My overall objective was to characterize the linguistic style of the judgments. What did the study find? That the justices utilized lexical parallelism to keep the main issues in focus, avoid ambiguity and reinforce proper identification in the administration of justice. They used syntactic parallelism (similar sentences) to encode similar meanings and relate the contending issues in the judgments. At the pragmatic level, they contextualized the cases with reliance on presupposition, shared sociocultural knowledge, and exophoric and endophoric references. I found that their degree of harshness, if you like, was as follows: lower courts, counsels and litigants. That is, they were harsher on the judges of the lower courts, where necessary, than on lawyers (counsels); and harsher on counsels (lawyers) than the owners of the case. That is understandable, because you would expect judges to know better than lawyers, and lawyers to know better than their clients.

I have said all of the foregoing to show how much I was fascinated by Supreme Court of Nigeria judgments. I read endless pages of judgments before eventually settling for 10, each of them containing a lead judgment and four others (meaning that I analysed 50 judgments in all). As a language student, my interest was in language use, not the principles of law. However, the study did expose me to some principles of law. I will state some of these in simple terms: If you fail to assert certain rights (e.g by stating your case when you should), you will be deemed to have waived those rights on appeal. Anyone dissatisfied with a chieftaincy process can approach the court at any stage. Unless there are compelling reasons to do so, the Supreme Court will not disturb (set aside) the concurrent findings of the lower courts. The court is not a Father Christmas: it won’t dash you reliefs you have not sought. I came across names such as Datijo, Onnoghen, Ariwoola, Mary Odili, etc, and their delightful, exciting analyses. In a particular case, somebody came to court just to prove that it was the turn of his village to produce the chief. Mary-Odili called him something I had never heard before, meddlesome interloper, saying that he did not show how that fact (of his village emilokan, if you like) benefitted him. In other words, he approached the court with no case at all. What am I saying here? That Supreme Court judgments enlightened me, just I sought to beam a linguistic searchlight on them.

However, as I write this, the apex court has been badly battered in my eyes. Look at the grievous allegations, this week, against the man that is supposed to be our chief dispenser of justice and look at his jejune reply. That is what happens when people assume positions in dubious circumstances. What do you expect when the authentic holder of the position was removed merely to gain political advantage? Before Onnoghen, Bukola Saraki, the head of Nigeria’s legislature, was harassed, hounded and hunted down. That was crass. It was gross. It was unjust. And as if that wasn’t bad enough, CJN Onnoghen was persecuted in the name of prosecution. He was given no quarter; not even the basic courtesy of responding to the allegations against him. Even the money given to the man by his brother justices during his daughter’s wedding was used against him as evidence of corruption. All the ideas I had formed as a non-lawyer during my study of Supreme Court judgments were dispensed with as Onnoghen’s persecutors, supposed lawyers, behaved like stark illiterates. It was only people like Mike Ozekhome that were saying things that agreed with what, as a non-lawyer, I had read in Supreme Court judgments.

I have absolutely no confidence in the Supreme Court right now. It has been tainted. Justice is dead. The government was unable to prove its case, yet Muhammadu Buhari used a tribunal to remove the CJN!. But now, Tanko Muhammad, a man credibly accused of monumental crimes by his own brother justices, is guilty of nothing. And Godwin Emefiele, the CBN Governor who said Nigerians could have a heart attack for all he cared, can only be queried by the CBN Board! Sometimes, yam pounded 20 years ago can scald one’s fingers.

Unless and until the Onnoghen injustice is redressed, the apex court shall know no peace. I am sick and tired of a country ruled by intellectual midgets and moral minions who permanently Lord it over others.