THE decision of the National Judicial Council to set up special courts to handle corruption and financial crime cases has the icing on the cake in the creation of a special committee to monitor the trials. A retired President of the Court of Appeal, Ayo Salami, heads the 15-member panel that will carry out this critical national assignment. Its work is well cut out with treasury looters’ habitual practice of putting a spanner in the works when prosecuted.
No fewer than 43 high-profile cases filed in various courts by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, and 400 others by the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission, will be monitored. They include cases against 16 former governors, most of whom left office in 2007. Besides monitoring, the committee will also conduct background checks on the judges that will head the designated courts and evaluate their performance; advise the Chief Justice of Nigeria, Walter Onnoghen, on how to eliminate delay in the trials; and give the NJC a progress-chart of the trials.
Salami’s choice as the committee’s chairman has been widely hailed because of his antecedents. It was his principled stance against the bid by the powers-that-be to corrupt an election petition trial in a Court of Appeal division in the North that led to his untimely exit from service. Outside the bench, he has remained a quintessential advocate of a dignified and incorruptible bench. This radiated in his public condemnation of the degrading indulgence of retired senior judges in bribing judges under the guise of legal consultancy for criminal suspects.
On the committee with him are the President of the Nigerian Bar Association, Abubakar Mahmoud, his four immediate past predecessors: Wole Olanipekun, Olisa Agbakoba, Joseph Daudu and Augustine Alegeh, all of them, Senior Advocates of Nigeria. There are also chief judges of Borno, Delta, Imo and Oyo states; representatives of non-governmental organisation and the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Nigeria; Secretary of the NJC; and another SAN, Garba Tetengi.
However, the committee’s composition has elicited public interest. Potential conflict of interest has been raised as some of the senior lawyers are also handling some of the corruption cases to be monitored. Professionally, every lawyer’s business in a case is to see that his or her client wins. Does this present a conundrum? Opinions differ.
For this reason, the Socio-Economic Rights and Accountability Project, a non-governmental organisation, in an open letter to the CJN, advised him to spare the panel of this paradox. It argued that “for the Salami committee to perform its tasks effectively and with propriety, it should preferably be composed entirely of members of the judiciary, particularly from available pool of brilliant incorruptible retired judges.”
Others have suggested that the committee be made up largely of SANs in the academia on the grounds of not being embroiled in the cases. The issue of conflict of interest should not be dismissed with a wave of the hand. However, others argue that the Salami-led committee needs active lawyers with profound knowledge of day-to-day nuances and sharp practices deployed by lawyers and judges to manacle justice dispensation here.
Therefore, there should be no mistake in the selection of the judges. This is seminal to achieving the overall goal of this pragmatic endeavour. If Femi Falana’s (SAN), view on corrupt judges – that “the information is freely circulated among lawyers” and members of the public who bribe them directly or indirectly through lawyers or court clerks – then the committee should not depend on itself alone in screening the judges. As a public crusade, critical stakeholders should be on board.
Evidence that crooked judges are still on the prowl can be seen in the NJC’s recent decision to probe 15 judges after it considered the reports of its two Preliminary Complaints Assessment Committees that vetted 46 petitions of wrongdoing against judges at federal and state courts. It is sad that a judge whose removal it had recommended in 2011, based on a demand for N200,000 bribe, remained in office until recently.
This is laughable; more so that the NJC applauded his sacking by his state almost seven years after. An NJC alive to its responsibilities should have followed the case through, and pressed for the judge’s trial as is the case in Italy, the United States, Ghana, and other nations. Judges are supposed to be like Caesar’s wife – above board. In Africa, Ghana is showing us the way. In 2013, a High Court Judge, Edward Boateng, and a Court Registrar, Jacob Owusu, were sentenced to nine and 12 months jail terms respectively. Their offence was that they converted $50,754.9 paid to the court into Cedis and put it in a bank fixed deposit; and shared the interest each time it matured.
Between 2009 and 2014, 64 judges were fired by our NJC, again, without any of them being made to face the full weight of the law. Palpably, this is a mockery of the principle of equality of all before the law.
These warped, purported servants in the temple of justice and their allies in the bar have crippled the Administration of Criminal Justice Act 2015, initially thought to have an oracular effect on justice delivery. Salami and his team, therefore, should see corruption and financial crimes as the “greatest form of human rights violation,” once so described by President Muhammadu Buhari. Nigerians have been denied basic social services like quality education, good roads, well-equipped hospitals and potable water, as a result, thus undermining national wellbeing and the future.
Yemi Akinseye-George, a professor of law, believes that, had the Salami-led committee been in place before now, many of the cases pending since 2003 would have long been determined. Against this background, the committee should justify the public confidence reposed in it; and prove to the rest of humanity that ours is a decent society where there are consequences for criminality.
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