When the hands of the law are short

On April  4, Donald Trump, the immediate past president of the United States, knew what the common criminal in his country knew long ago – you do not trifle with the law because it will get you, rich or poor, powerless or powerful. As he sat there between his lawyers in a Manhattan high court […]

On April  4, Donald Trump, the immediate past president of the United States, knew what the common criminal in his country knew long ago – you do not trifle with the law because it will get you, rich or poor, powerless or powerful. As he sat there between his lawyers in a Manhattan high court that Tuesday morning, deserted by power and deprived of the insensate applause of his followers who worship the ground he walks on, the wisdom of the Onitsha lorry owner must have dawned on him: no condition is permanent.

Trump’s fate is now in the hands of the judge.  He saw the truth about the law and the rule of law. The various sayings about the power and the place of the law in all human societies may have more or less become cliches but they still carry eternal verities – to wit, we are all equal before the law; the law is no respecter of persons; no one is above the law, etc.

His case is described by the various commentators as unprecedented. But as Racheal Maddow pointed out, there has been no American president like Donald Trump. He was an unprecedented presidential candidate, and his win was unprecedented. He went into the highest political office in the land, albeit the world, dragging along with him chains of unprecedented bad and unapologetic behaviours that ordinarily would have disqualified him from seeking to occupy the Oval Office. He made it there and became the law in his cloud cuckoo land.

Whether he wins or loses the 34 charges stacked against him is not of much interest to me. What is of interest to me is that because I was born and live in a country that has problems with what to make of its laws and the rule of law under a succession of African big men, some of whom believe that the law is an irritant and the judiciary is a nuisance, when the law forces even one rich and powerful man down on his knees, it makes me day-dream of a transformation of our government of men into a government of laws.

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We cannot aspire to be like America and the Americans, but it should not be impossible for us to see that in that country as in ours, laws, including the constitution, were made by man to protect the polity and man from his fellow man and indeed, from himself. An assault on laws and the rule of law by reason of arrogance of power puts a nation in jeopardy and forces the citizens to regress into the jungle where might is right and the strong reserve the power to dash the poor some measure of freedom from time to time.

The law often gives the misleading impression that its hands are short or even tied when it clashes with a moral issue and a judge finds himself wrestling with the law and his conscience. No, the arms of the law are not short. They are long and can reach back into the dark recesses of personal or national history to serve the cause of justice. Trump’s pending trial says to the rest of the world, especially the African big men, that the law and the rule of law have more than nine lives. It tells them that the law may be trampled underfoot; it may be treated like trash, but it always rises and when it does its traducers pay the price they least expect.

The Americans live the truth that nobody is above the law; we live the untruth that some people are not just above the law, they are the law. We are not equal before the law. We are unequal before the law. The law and the rule of law matter to the Americans but the law and the rule of law do not matter to us. The Americans know that if persons are elevated above the law by reason of the political or social positions they occupy, then the entire edifice called the rule of law collapses. In consequence, your freedom to swing your arm does not end where my nose begins. And the big man swings his arm as wishes, the threat to other people’s noses be damned. The big man’s freedom to do as he wishes in defiance of the law puts everyone’s nose in danger of being broken without warning.

We are a nation of excesses. We have managed quite remarkably since independence to create one law for the rich and the powerful and another for the poor and the wretched who are denied the right to seek refuge under the law and be protected therein. I am not suggesting, even faintly, that the law and the rule of law are perfect in God’s own country. It would be both foolish and naïve for anyone to offer such opinion. We know that in God’s own country the arc of right and justice bends with the skin colour of men and women in the dock; the darker the skin colour, the blinder the law is.

My point is that we are increasingly distancing ourselves from the modicum of respect we had for the law and the rule of law. The temple of justice rings hollow and is being turned into a temple of injustice where justice is sold and bought. Senior lawyers such as Olisa Agbakoba, complain. So do ordinary men and women whose trust in the integrity of the judiciary is frequently shaken by decisions that make first law students wince. The ruination of the rule of law is the ruin of good governance. It is impossible, even in a miracle-believing nation, for a bad, arrogant, and incompetent government to birth good governance.

Can you think of a judge on the lower or higher bench who will mistake his foolishness for courage and order a former president or governor in our country to turn himself in to answer charges of alleged crimes against him? As they say in Warri, who born monkey?

Trump is on trial for crimes he allegedly committed before he ascended the throne as president. Those alleged crimes haunt him. He was safe while in office, but no immunity covered him as president. By the way, the US constitution has no immunity clause that protects the president and other high public officers from being asked to answer for their alleged crimes while in office. President Bill Clinton answered for his alleged crimes while in office. He was impeached by the House, but the senate refused to remove him from office because of a woman.

Our own immunity provision in the constitution has been taken advantage of by our politicians and stretched to cover a multitude of transgressions by the courts. I refer you to section 308 of the constitution where you find what passes for immunity for top public officers. A couple of years ago, the senate decided to expand the list of public officers who must enjoy immunity. The attempt crashed but it told us that our public officers favour a constitutional protection that gives them immunity from answering for their crimes.

Immunity forces EFCC to helplessly watch state governors accumulate wealth at the expense of the people they purport to rule. The commission moves in when they leave office by which time their war chest makes them untouchable. President Buhari promised to kill corruption before it kills Nigeria. Corruption today laughs in his face. In his eight years in office, corruption has grown like well-watered grass under his feet. Because of corruption, the young majors struck in 1966. Still, our local lexicographers have not dropped corruption from our local dictionary.

We still live the untruth that some people are above the law and the law must bend to their wishes. Still, we wage the anti-graft war, the longest running war in the land. The big men and women treat it with contempt. There is an English word spelt SHAM. See if it applies to the anti-graft war, given the cumulative evidence that more is stolen from our public coffers now and with greater impunity than ever before.

I suspect Trump will rue his Americanness instead of his Nigerianness.