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  • The Sorry State Of Nigeria’s Judiciary Among Others Makes The Battle Cry For A Revolution Inevitable By Francis Adewale

    The Sorry State Of Nigeria’s Judiciary Among Others Makes The Battle Cry For A Revolution Inevitable By Francis Adewale

    Lawyers
    Lawyers

    “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”
                                                   – President John F. Kennedy (1962)

    This week may be one of the worst weeks for Nigerian judiciary and they might have made the much vaunted Sowore’s revolution inevitable. The first salvo was the list of judges released by the National Judicial Council replete with the names of their sons and daughters as well as hangers on. Second is the farcical decision in EFCC vs Kalu where the Supreme Court “suo motu” created a new section to the constitution of Nigeria by vacating a conviction duly given under an extant law. The strange rationale by the Supreme Court is that the presiding judge, now elevated to the Court of Appeal should not have pronounced the sentence. The Court conveniently ignored the fact that the accused counsel had invited the judge to come back and continue the hearing by a formal letter!

    Gone are the days when Nigerian judiciary is famously celebrated as the last bastion of defense for the common man. The days of Kayode Esho, Chukwudifu Oputa, Muhammed Uwais is long gone. Our judiciary is no more like Caesar’s wife, above board. The problem however is not necessarily down to the hydra headed monster of corruption alone but a more sinister evil called, nepotism. It is my humble opinion that an opaque process for selection of judges led us to where we found ourselves this week. And the problem did not start with the current chief justice. The dysfunction and bastardization have been long in coming, and as we will find out in this piece, the cancer has eaten deep into the fabric of this nation. The revolution is inevitable. 

    The Sorry State Of Nigeria’s Judiciary Among Others Makes The Battle Cry For A Revolution Inevitable By Francis Adewale 1Lawyers

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    What precipitate this write up is a social media post by a good friend of mine and I obtained his permission to repost his comment with my personal edits:
    “It took Orji Kalu only 4 months including Covid lockdown challenge to move from the High Court to Supreme Court to get his so called sound judgment from Supreme Court while it took ten years to get his case completed at the High Court level. Ten good years! And we are told justice in Nigeria is not cash and carry? The Supreme Court is preparing the ground for a revolution and very soon something extraordinary will take place. The same Supreme Court that will give 2021 and 2022 court date for poor defendants, sat and summarily decide a case within 4 months while cases of those facing a life sentence languish in the labyrinth of jungle justice!”

    My first response to the post, is to retort that the problem did not start with judiciary, but they seem to have led the “nunc dimitis” for the internment of democracy in Nigeria. The judiciary may have pushed us to the praecipe but they were not the only one. We all recalled the impunity days of PDP rule and how they ride roughshod on people’s right, celebrating acquisition of jets obtained from corrupt practices while hordes of masses suffer the indignity of scrapping for foods from the gutter. Towards the end of that era, we all thought, if we can just get a man of integrity into Aso Rock, someone who will brook no atom of corruption, we will change the country. The election of 2015 seems to have lulled Nigerians into thinking that all we need is someone or a duo with integrity, so we elect Buhari and Osinbajo, a puritan and a pastor and went home satiated. What we were not prepared for or more appositely choose to ignore is the fact that the vehicle that brought them into governance is none other than the decrepit system that PDP used to feather their nest. In the first 4 years, we were told that the problem is with the National Assembly where the legistlooters shifted their control of the vortex of power in Abuja, opposing every anti-corruption moves of the executives. Then come the last election where the ruling party now controls the executive and legislative arm, but corruption runs through the gamut of the judiciary and Aso Rock looks the other way while nepotism festers in its rank.

    It is as if the cancer has completely swallowed up the entire fabric of the nation. Cases involving the poor dragged on for years while those who can afford senior advocate can get quick justice. Many warned that this will sound the death knell of democracy in Nigeria. Every attempt to even build on free and fair election has been truncated by the judiciary. What with the recent confounding judgment from Imo and Bayelsa. Our two gargantuan political parties now owned our judiciary lock, stock and barrel. They sit in smoke filled rooms to determine who will be governors, legislators and judges, and those who will play ball are readily appointed as pawns in the chest board of the Nigerian ruling class, wives, nephews, cousins, sons and daughters are made judges and senior advocates overnight without recourse to any modicum of meritocracy. A friend of mine recently quipped that the problem of nepotism is not just that it defeats meritocracy and breeds mediocrity but that it infects the entire body politics and renders it comatose. Corruption can be traced, and ill-gotten wealth recovered but nepotism is more sinister. Those who obtain position of power and authority through nepotism hold fealty only to their masters who appointed them. Such appointee will readily twist the constitution, made up section that does not exist all at the behest of their “godfather”. It is insidious and evil.

    I graduated from Nigerian Law School 30 years ago, after an excellent stint at Great Ife. My class at Ife, drawn from the north, east, west middle belt and south-south has in its rank some of the best legal minds any country will be proud of. We graduated with high hopes to take on the world and change the land. Few of us found ourselves abroad on scholarship where we flourish and excel. Those in legal practice in Nigeria, either at the federal or state ministry of justice or private practice are the ones my heart bleeds for, especially those without access to members of the National Judicial Council. I have had the privilege to advance my career abroad as an attorney and public defender. I frequently sit on panels that recommend colleagues for appointment as judges in a fair, open and transparent process; something my colleagues in Nigeria could only dream of.

    When I look at the state of Nigerian legal practice my heart bleeds. The career growth of colleagues in the legal profession in Nigeria is stunted not for lack of excellence but influence in the right place. Influence peddling is an art form in Nigeria and politicians used to have the exclusive preserve of selling it to the highest bidder, but our Judicial Council seems to have mastered the art. The problem will not be this pronounced if the sons and daughters they are foisting on Nigerian judiciary are steeped in the Nigerian experience or have a modicum of merit. As many of my colleagues are apt to complain, majority of the recent appointees hardly spend few years in Nigeria. They all went to schools abroad. Totally devoid of the Nigerian experience, and constantly removed from the everyday life Nigerians suffers under. Majority of them lives in the gilded mansions of their forbears in Abuja and other state capitals, where they are rarely touched by the “better angels of our nature” to use the phrase coined by Abraham Lincoln. It is therefore no surprise that they care only for what their “godfather” demand.

    Let me however warns that the biggest mistake we could make is to think that the rot is only in the heart of our judiciary. Think again. Nepotism is next door, next street, next town and everywhere in Nigeria. It rampages through the land, be it North, East or West. Just look at our churches and mosques, who do you see minister or lead the prayers when the founder/visioner is not around? You guess right,  if you say their sons and daughters. Gone are the days when Pa Fadayomi push to have a meritorious doctor of aerodynamics succeed him. Gone are the days when the leader of the faithful in Nigeria is selected by their aptitude in the knowledge of the Quaran. Nowadays, the exit of the leader is the beginning of the reign of the progeny. It has infected our colleges and universities, scholarship and opportunities that used to be available on merit are now exclusive preserve of the vice chancelor’s children and family members. Woe betide the school senate members that dare ask questions. Advertisement for jobs that has already been reserved for the children of the privileged are means to extort money in the form of application fees a la Abba Moro immigration recruitment scheme. A recent recruitment without advertisement at our apex bank reported by Sahara Reporters shows that successful applicants names were picked out of the rolodex of the governor. Commercial Banks staff are not an exemption, they are either recruited based on sex appeal or influential ministers/senators’ “recommendation” which doesn’t come easy for the educated but less privileged applicants.

    A friend concluded an animated discussion on social media on this issue with a distinctively Nigerian resignation: “It is clear that those who do not want things to work properly in Nigeria are more powerful than those who are working towards finding solutions to our problems.” Again, my response is what do we have to lose if we embrace Omoyele Sowore’s revolution, even with its youthful disdain for experience? Especially when our current experienced leadership seems to treat the Nigerian masses with contempt. Look at it this way: They do not need our votes to win election, as they could procure midnight judgment in Abuja a la Bayelsa and Imo. They do not need to legislate to fill any lacunae in our constitutional experience as the Supreme Court proved in Kalu’s case. In fact, as long as oil flows and they have the means to fill their Cayman Island bank accounts, we may as well not exist. Greed and avarice have become the directive principle of Nigerian ruling class. To rescue ourselves from their vice grip, we need revolution now!

    Francis Adewale
    Tioluwanimi@gmail.com

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  • Introduction to the EBook of Self Knowledge and Guide to Sex Instruction, by T. W. Shannon

    The saddest thing in all this world is a human wreck,—a man or a woman, young or old, who is undone and who, in one or more walks of life, is a failure. There are so many of them! Mental wrecks, physical wrecks, nervous wrecks, social wrecks, business wrecks, character wrecks. The aspect of these derelicts is the more pitiable because of the possibilities before every well-born human being, who, with the endowment of intelligence and other gifts and powers bestowed upon him by a kind Creator, is capable of rising to heights of human perfection. Ample provision made for man’s every need and want by God, and yet we find misery where there ought to be happiness, poverty where there ought to be riches, darkness where there ought to be light, ignorance where there ought to be knowledge, vice where there ought to be virtue, and turmoil and strife where there ought to be peace. Only too accurately do the poet’s words apply:

    “Of all the sad words of tongue or pen,
    The saddest are these: ‘It might have been.’”

    This problem of human wreckage becomes more depressing when we consider that in the breast of every person there is an innate desire to live true, to win success. The day dreams of every boy and girl picture themselves as the hero or the heroine in the story which weaves into its plot their ideal men and women. Their ideals may be low, that is the fault of their environment and training, but their ideals always represent their own highest conceptions of manhood and womanhood. But sooner or later struggle comes, appetite craves, and passion cries out, and if they are unprepared for life’s real conflict, they go down, and another failure is recorded and another wreck left to float and endanger every other craft upon life’s seas, until human wreckage is becoming so enormous that it is a question in the minds of scientists and sociologists as to how long humanity can keep up its present pace and survive the centuries.

    The causes of human wrecks are many, far too many to be tabulated or enumerated. In a sentence they result from the principle that it is easier to coast than to climb; so much easier to float than to struggle against the current. Like the weeds that kill out the crops, just so is humanity beset by enumerable temptations at every turn, social and economic customs force downward a great many who would otherwise rise to higher things, and, it is suspected, that in the very nature of man there is a strong tendency to evil which can be overcome only by divine grace. Appetite and passion are the two forces to which man’s higher aspirations most often give way. Intemperance and impurity, in their broader meaning, are the two bars upon which most human wrecks have stranded. Social impurity, or the abuse of the sex function and nature, is by far the most insidious, and with respect to the number and degradation of its victims, the greatest evil in the world to-day.

    This book is one of the most valuable ever written because it treats fully and wisely this question of personal and social purity; it points out the reefs, the bars, the snags, the icebergs, the shallow and dangerous places where human wrecks are made; it guides those who accept it as their pilot into the deep waters of an unobstructed channel where the voyage of life will be ever safe, successful, glorious. Here will be found an incentive to climb rather than to coast, an inspiration to struggle even against the current if in the struggle may be won some of the more valuable prizes of life. Here is a book that holds high the single standard of morality, and demands that men shall be as pure as women; it stands boldly for the education of the young in sex hygiene, and proclaims a truth that ought long ago to have been universally known, that it is the right of every person to know every knowable fact pertaining to themselves, and that such knowledge ought to be imparted to them before the lack of it has brought injury to their lives. This is a book that will help to forever banish that false modesty and prurient thinking which has made the tremendous growth of public vice a reality, until every girl is in danger of enslavement and every boy threatened with its corruption.

    This is not a pioneer book on these questions. Other most excellent works have preceded it, for which we should all be grateful, and have paved the way for this latest volume. The excellence of this work consists largely in its completeness. It is a book for the home, for every home, and for every member of the home. It tells exactly what ought to be known concerning the sex nature and life of the individual, and the normal relations of the family and society, and best of all it teaches parents how to impart this saving knowledge to their children. Any and every home that takes this book as a friend and counselor, and faithfully studies its pages, will fortify every person within the portals of that home against the baneful influences of impurity and vice.

    The writer has known Prof. T. W. Shannon, the talented author of this book, for some years, and we have watched his efforts with interest and admiration. A voluminous writer, a wide traveler, he has probably reached more people with his uplifting message of purity through his books and upon the platform than any other living man of the same age. His methods are never sensational and he does not stoop to uncovering all the cesspools of sin and vice, but he leads people upward by directing their minds and hearts to the beauty and rewards of pure living and right thinking. Through the strength of his personality and the profound truth in his message, he has helped thousands of college students and other young men to avoid the pitfalls which have brought disaster to so many young lives. By education and experience Prof. Shannon is eminently fitted to prepare just such a book as this and his authorship should at once entitle it to a high place among the standard works of the day dealing with these problems.

    As the volume has received my own endorsement, even so I trust it may be most cordially received into the homes of America, that our sons and our daughters may be fortified through the truth, presented in an attractive and safe and sane manner, against the temptations which constantly meet them; that human wrecks may be fewer, and that every life may have a fair chance to attain all for which it was created.

    B. S. Steadwell.

    La Crosse, Wisconsin,
    December 18, 1912.

    Extract from EBook of Self Knowledge and Guide to Sex Instruction, by T. W. Shannon

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