It is only a person who does not read his column, “Palladium”, regularly that will accuse Idowu Akinlotan of willfully and perversely placing respect for the rule of law above justice for Nigeria and Nigerians in the current war that the Buhari administration is waging in our law courts against corruption. But having made this cautionary observation, I must add that anyone who has been reading Akinlotan’s column in the last three weeks without a prior familiarity with his formidable and impeccable credentials as a patriot and a radical democrat can be forgiven if he or she comes to the conclusion that it matters far more to Akinlotan that the formal principles and protocols of the rule of law be observed than that those who have been accused of looting the nation be brought to justice and restitution be made to the looted and the wronged nation and its citizens. Definitely, I have been utterly taken aback by thestrident tone of Akinlotan’s tirades against what he has called jungle justice and lynch mobs in his column in the last three weeks, week after week.
This perturbing trend rose to a climax, indeed a crescendo in last week’s “Palladium” column that was revealingly titled “Abubakar Malami’s inquisitorial tendency”. Dear reader, please consider the postulate that Akinlotan makes in the sentence that serves as the epigraph to this piece, this being a quotation from last week’s “Palladium” essay: “What both the president and Mr. Malami are doing to the judiciary is even more damaging to the judiciary than the corruption they conclude has hobbled justice delivery”. By what logic, by what demonstrably civic-minded and good-intentioned reasoning can such a claim be made? I suggest that Akinlotan in fact gives us something that does look like a rationale, a ‘theory’ in the light of which his allegation that Buhari and the AGF are doing worse damage to the Nigerian judiciary than the monumental impunity of corruption in the judiciary itself can be accepted. However, the problem is that this ‘theory’ is itself highly tendentious in the manner in which it pits respect for the rule of law far above the universal demand for justice in our country at the present time.
Now, it is of course true that many columnists and pundits beside Akinlotan have declared,publicly and extensively, that both Buhari and his Attorney General, Mr. Malami, have come pretty close to arrogant disregard for the rule of law in the willful manner in which they have deliberately disobeyed court orders granting bail to some of the accused in the ongoing trials concerning the alleged stealing of funds intended forprocurement of arms in the fight against the Boko Haram insurgents. Indeed, many prominent members of the Bar who are known to be uncompromising in their dedication to the cause of justice for the nation and its citizens in the ongoing legal battles against corruption have called on Buhari to obey the law courts in the matter of the bails granted to Dasuki and his cohort of co-accused litigants. But this is not the location of Akinlotan’s savage quarrel with Buhari and his AGF.
Beyond this obvious terrain of arrant disregard of the rulings of the law courts, Akinlotan thinks that the president and the AGF not only do not have an adequate grasp of the full ramifications of the political economy of corruption in our country, they also quite dangerously regard the judiciary as an extension of the executive to be ordered or kicked around in the war against corruption. Against this profile – which, I hasten to add, can hardly be faulted – Akinlotan makes some ringing, clamant declarations: that the judiciary is not an extension of the executive; that in a properly functioning democracy the independence of the judiciary must only be respected but must be adequately funded and institutionally protected; and that none of the three arms of government – executive, legislative and judicial – has a claim to moral probity that entitles it to act as the tribune, the arbiter of values to the other arms of government.
For this particular reason, Akinlotan argues passionately that a disproportionate burden of responsibility is being placed on the judiciary for the vast scale and impunity of corruption in Nigeria. And most significantly of all, in a manner rather reminiscent of the Spanish philosopher, Ortega y Gasset’s haughty liberal anti-populism in his celebrated book, The Revolt of the Masses,Akinlotan thinks that not only is the Nigerian public starkly ignorant of these subtler dimensions of the phenomenon of corruption in our country, Buhari and his AGF are deliberately exploiting this ignorance of the masses in the manner in which they are waging the war against corruption in the law courts.
These are unpalatable facts and it is hard not to agree with some of the inferences, if not the conclusions, that Akinlotan draws from them. For instance, it is incontestable that Buhari and his AGF were so unprepared for the granting of bails to Dasuki and the other accused persons that so far they have seen no other way out of the problem than to simply disobey the courts. As I have pointed out in a previous essay in this column, the Buhari administration had strategic and tactical options other than the prevailing status quo in the administration of criminal justice in Nigeria in the legal battle against corruption but they chose to stick with the status quo which notoriously andexorbitantly favours looters and their lawyers.
This situation is so astounding that one is left with no other conclusion than tactics and strategy being so absent in the administration’s war on corruption in the law courts, no ‘theory’, no overarching set of values drives Buhari’s war on corruption. In other words, the prosecution of the war is completely subsumed by its declaration; anything that stands in the way of the prosecution amounts to opposition to the declaration. The intellectual bankruptcy of this aspect of the president’s battle against corruption in our law courts is incalculable.
Unfortunately, Akinlotan is also right on aspects of the Nigerian public’s perception of the war on corruption. Buhari has risen immensely in stature just on account of the dizzying number and scope of disclosures of looting and looters, even as other aspects of his “change” slogan and program have either come unstuck or are extremely slow in their execution. Indeed, many of the president’s supporters have declared, against the evidence, that the war on corruption is on course, Lai Mohammed, the Federal Minister of Information, being the most vociferous of such people. Quite possibly, the president is intuitively placing high value on the cathartic impact of the disclosures: even before and beyond actual recovery of stolen loot in billions of dollars and trillions of naira, the parade of looters, some of them in handcuffs, digs deep into powerful emotions of symbolic revenge that shaming rituals evoke in the collective mind.Speaking only for myself, I remain completely unimpressed by the disclosures since the looters were always hiding in plain sight and all it took to get at them was a change of ruling party at the center. I shall applaud if and only when the new ruling party wages the war on corruption in a manner that shows clearly that we have arrived at a stage in the moral progress of this country in which it will be next to impossible for corruption in high places to go unpunished.
The preceding point leads directly to the heart of my quarrel with Akinlotan’s ‘theory’ whose principal error or defect lies in the fact that it is completely blind to its own interpretive or analytical limitations.The most startling of these limitations – and the only one that I will engage in this article – is Akinlotan’s extreme formalism. In pure formal or ideational terms, Akinlotan is quite right to insist that all the three arms of government are deeply tainted by corruption and none of them can presume to act as guide or arbiter to the others. But this entirely misses the fact that in the real world of corruption in Nigeria, more than the other arms of government, the judiciary has perfected the art of hiding its corruption behind the shield of the abstract principle of the rule of law. In plain language, a judge who has received hefty bribes which makes him grant bail to a looter can impose heavy fines and strictures against a political officeholder that disobeys his ruling, this purely on the basis of the abstract, formal principle of respect for the rule of law. It so happens that everyone knows that this happens routinely and persistently in the Nigerian judicial system, yet no one has stopped invoking the rule of law as the determinant of justice in the last instance, even if, as everyone knows, justice happens very, very rarely in the Nigerian judiciary.
What I find most disturbing of all in Akinlotan’s ‘theory’ is the utter indifference to the revolutionary possibilities of the popular demand for justice by Nigerians in their tens of millions in their support of Buhari’s declared war against corruption. All Akinlotan can see is, apparently, the unawareness of the masses, their ‘ignorance’ if you wish, of the subtler aspects of the political economy of corruption in our country. But what of their demand that the looting should stop and that the recovered loot be used to finance programs that alleviate the hardship and suffering of the masses? What of consideration of how this popular demand can in fact be used to initiate deeper structural redistribution of wealth in our country? Must this demand wait until much needed reforms in the Nigerian judicial order have been undertaken? And can such reforms come only from above, without the active support of the masses? These and similar questions will serve as our point of resumption of the discussion in next week’s concluding essay in this series.
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