His Lordship’s cross
“I want Lawyers, and Judges to know that if politicians can fail the society, military can fail the society, lawyers cannot afford to fail the society or else we are all doomed. We should not drag sentiment into law. No matter the people’s nomenclature, tribe, religion, we should be guided by the law”, said eminent […]
“I want Lawyers, and Judges to know that if politicians can fail the society, military can fail the society, lawyers cannot afford to fail the society or else we are all doomed. We should not drag sentiment into law. No matter the people’s nomenclature, tribe, religion, we should be guided by the law”, said eminent jurist, Justice Akinola Aguda, while delivering judgement against a legal practitioner.
To underline his zero tolerance for criminality/misdemeanour of those who earn their living in the temple of law, he declared: “Because you are a Lawyer, who is supposed to know better, I will give you the maximum punishment prescribed under this Act”.
That is how it ought to be. A cleric caught pants down in a brothel should not be pointing fingers at others who had got away with such indiscretion in the past. He should just answer for his own sins. What is wrong cannot be right. To sanitise society, the same rules must apply to us all.
No one knows all this better than Justice Walter Onnoghen, the embattled Chief Justice of Nigeria. The facts are that Onnoghen failed to include his domiciliary accounts in his asset declaration to the Code of Conduct Bureau.
A civil society group, the Anti-corruption and Research Based Data Initiative (ARDI) ARDI in the petition listed that Justice Onnoghen is the owner of Standard Chartered Bank dollar account No.1062650 with a balance of $391, 401.28 as at January 31, 2011; Standard Chartered Bank Euro account 5001062686 with the balance of €49,971 .71 as at January 31, 2011, as well as, a Standard Chartered Bank pound sterling account No. 5001062679, with the balance sum of £23,409.66, as at February 28, 2011.
Converted to Naira, those foreign currencies total over N170 million. By the time His Lordship’s Naira accounts are factored in, his worth would attract questions about source of funds. Justice Onnoghen has reportedly owned up to being the owner of the accounts. He said he forgot to declare them among his assets.
I recall that in May 2017, shortly after assuming the sacred office of CJN, Justice Onnoghen had advised Nigerians who had any information on judicial officers to blow the whistle instead of tarring all judges as corrupt. He urged his countrymen to employ well-established institutions and avenues to petition any judicial officer who engages in corruption and unprofessional conduct.
Apparently, ARDI has heeded his counsel!
Legitimate questions have been raised about the speed with which the investigation into the allegations against the CJN were conducted. How, for example, did ARDI lay hands on the account details of the CJN? Was there a collusion between the authorities and the whistle blowers? Should the case have been taken to the National Judicial Council (NJC) where the CJN himself is Chairman, rather than the Code of Conduct Tribunal?
Journalist Lanre Arogundade, a human rights advocate and former student leader, thinks we are all tending ring worm while leprosy ravages the body. “The statement by the CJ, if truly he made it, that he forgot to declare some of his accounts is shocking and highly embarrassing to that office”, he says. He frowns at the attempt by South-South governors to ethnicise the issue.
In my opinion, there is no fixed time to expose corruption. The argument that some corrupt people are walking about freely does not help the CJN’s case at all. It is like insisting that a soccer referee has no right to penalise a foul when similar fouls had gone unpunished earlier. A foul is a foul when the referee says so. If he turns out to be wrong, there are post-match rules to deal with him and consign him to the garbage bin.
The exposure of Justice Onnoghen need not have degenerated into another divisive political issue. In March 2018, Nepal’s Chief Justice, Gopal Parajuli, was fired after he was accused of faking his date of birth in order to stay in office past the mandatory retirement age. He claimed to be 64 years old while records showed that he was past the retirement age of 65.
Last August, Kenya’s Deputy Chief Justice, Philomena Mwilu, was arrested on suspicion of corruption, failure to pay tax, and improper dealings with a local bank in receivership. Chief Public Prosecutor Noordin Mohamed Haji revealed that Mwilu had abused her office for personal gain, undermining public integrity in the judiciary.
In both cases, there was no recourse to ethnicism or political manoeuvres.
“If the Chief Justice relies only on procedural flaws in the methods employed by these hounds to escape these charges and a proper scrutiny of his conduct, then he is finished. He would have surrendered every moral authority to talk about corruption in the judiciary, argues Ugo Egbujo, a public commentator.
Trust Nigerians, two messages were massively shared on social media in the outgoing week. One was Frederic Bastiat’s wise observation that, “When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time a legal system that authorises it and a moral code that glorifies it. “
The other was Niyi Osundare’s poem, “My Lord, Tell Me Where To Keep Your Bribe?”
“…Nigeria is a huge corpse/With milling maggots on its wretched hulk/They prey every day, they prey every night/For the endless decomposition of our common soul/My Most Honourable Lord/Just tell me where to keep your bribe.”
If I were His Lordship, Justice Walter Samuel Nkanu Onnoghen, I would have resigned.