Democracy has become a fashion, indeed a world fad. It has spread by dissemination across nation boundaries rather than institutional fulfillment of election manifestos and needs developed internally by an increasingly participant society. Democracy has its embedded core values, principles and aberrations.
The deceased president Umaru Musa Yar’Adua had rumbled through the political scene loud mouthing the basic principles of democracy as his political slogan. I remember as if it were yesterday, former president Yar’Adua’s pedantic and pedagogic rhetorics on rule of law, separation of powers, due process, checks and balances, transparency, accountability and fiscal responsibility in a majoritarian, procedural and deliberative democracy.
Yet Nigeria’s democracy is still in shambles today. Our democracy is a ruse. It creates bureaucratic institutions that strengthen the strong against the weak. Attempts to reorder and re-engineer our democratic values to engender ethical leadership had consistently met with overt psychological resistance particularly from an insensitive and deceitful judiciary. The judiciary is responsible for the sordid and squalid condition of Nigeria today. Judgements given by the judiciary since 1983 to date have been a great disservice to democracy. The judiciary is the most conservative and insensitive of all the bureaucratic estates in Nigeria. Looking back at the self-serving and lack-lustre performance of the judiciary in 1983, 1999, 2003 and 2007 one is constrained to agree with Thomas Jefferson that law on its own will not resolve social conflicts. It is the honour in men that makes the law to work. Our judges have reduced our democracy to mere rhetoric, empty political sloganeering used to subject the electorate to a set of dominance rules over the controversial election years 1983, 1999, 2003 and 2007. Some conservative judges have been putting out the light of justice when they ought to have enkindled it. There are venal judges inured by greed and graft that have become deaf to the sound of weeping and the cry of the suffering and the oppressed in the land. Like Andrew Langs proverbial drunken man these judges prefer to use their lamp-post for personal support rather than for illumination.
Despite the layering of control institutions in the bureaucratic estate, our democracy has woefully failed to engender dividends of democracy on account of wrong-headed decisions of some delinquent judges. Our bureaucratic institutions nearly always collude like gangsters to deny the people of this nation justice, peace, free and fair elections, free education, free health services, potable water, good roads, food and shelter and uninterrupted power supply. Our democracy has posted only dismal performance to the records of the judiciary, the legislature and the executive realms.
Our democracy fosters and sustains high level of bureaucratic corruption notwithstanding that the government is based on a mixed constitution. Our law courts have been short-changed by the introduction of deceit in state craft by a corrupt executive that uses its levers of power to hector or even coerce the legislature and the judiciary to toe the line. How can a criminal or rogue estate investigate or probe itself effectively outside a credible system of internal audit? The judiciary glosses over overt aberrations that spoil our democracy. But our constitution is mixed and thus permits the judiciary to act in concert with the legislature or the executive to nip in the bud corruption, fraud, injustice and perversion of justice or other forms of criminality evinced by any institution of government. There are Federal Executive bodies created by the 1999 constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria (1999 CFRN). These include the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, the office of the Auditor General, the police service commission, the Code of Conduct Bureau and Tribunal respectively among others. For effectiveness of control these institutions ought to report either to the judiciary or preferably to the legislature, not to the executive. The control process is vitiated once an institution sets up a panel to investigate itself. This is why we have become bored with probes that create other probes because ab-initio they were instituted as time wasters and dissatisfiers. These probes are deliberately designed for public ventilation of angst, acrimony and conduit for letting off the heat in the polity and to cool off public temper, that’s all.
A nation is finished once its judiciary is also corrupt. This may have been the grounds on which the late Lord Denning asked the mind-boggling question-“who Guides the Guardians?” Our judicial history is best described as 50years of legal despotism. The Supreme Court verdicts of 2003 and 2008 respectively were uninspiring legal realities. The Supreme Court justices were aware that the country is not doing well and so direly needs diverse, if not pervasive reforms. For the country not doing well, political pundits have put the blame on sundry reasons. Some blame the constitution, some blame the executive and the legislature. This writer puts the blame squarely on the judiciary. i.e. on the bar and the bench for approbating and reprobating. You may find it hard to reach the same conclusion unless you have passed through the crucibles of our law courts. Have you ever gone to our law court in search of justice? Have you ever sought the verdict of any court in Nigeria? It is only then you will realize that Nigeria has come under satanic bondage and that proxies of satan have held the nation hostage. Most of these proxies of satan belongs to the school of positive law. Besides the open malversation and asportation in their courts judges club and hobnob with hedonists, epicureans and dominant party charlatans in the executive and the legislature to foist their delinquent members on the nation whether they are competent or not.
Luckily there is another school of jurisprudence called the natural law school. The later school is the one referred to as the beacon or the last hope of the common man. That the judiciary is the beacon of hope of the common man could be dismissed as another political charade or gospel of mammon forming part of the deceitful strategies of proxies of satan. The natural lawyers believe that the rough edges of the law can be pruned and tempered with morals, equity and good conscience. But positive law vehemently asserts that there is no morality in law.
Like their counterparts in the executive and the legislature, men of the judiciary belonging to positive law school believe in the Machiavellian dictum that the end justifies the means. To our tribunal justices, it wouldn’t matter how you arrive at your electoral victory. To them it wouldn’t matter that you fouled your way through provided you were not caught in the act red-handed. At times even where the sceptre of authority and power was handed down through the back door our presidential elections tribunal had consistently upheld the strong to ditch the weak however genuine the complaints.
Again, why would a highly placed member of the judiciary allow his or herself to be put in the pocket of an incumbent executive contestant? For instance, shortly before the verdict of the Supreme Court in 2008, one of the contestants distributed National Honours. The list of the recipients included some justices handling his case. The justices did not see this honour as a Trojan horse. So they received the tainted honour. See how dishonor could be laced with the veneer of honour.
Nigerians will forever continue to be proud of the three justices that wrote the minority-report on the presidential electoral contest 2007 given in the year 2008. My guess may not be wide off the mark if the three justices belong to the natural law school. The four justices that wrote the majority report could not sympathize or empathize with the nation in need of a drastic paradigm shift. The 2007 presidential election was rigged by the party for a man of honour and integrity who said he did not want to rule on a flawed ticket. Nigerians expected the justices to be unanimous in quashing the first and calling for a second ballot. Some Nigerians are so rich that they can buy over the entire judiciary. Hence, it was not clear whether the law was weighed down by the doctrine of precedence or by a golden handshake.
There is a well-spring of conservative doctrine ingrained in precedence. When the circumstance calls for a dynamic and preventive jurisprudence, compulsive loyalists of conservatism and precedence often compel the nation to relive old injuries, injustices and traumatic ordeals of a previous life.
Note that conservative jurisprudence is not dynamic. It is positional, it is a static model. That was why the four justices of the Supreme Court though fully aware that the 2007 presidential election was rigged preferred to give a political decision. A judge with a dynamic mind can wiggle or wriggle out of the maze and stranglehold of a faulty and erroneous “ratio decidendi” (reason for the decision) using preventive jurisprudence in a fluid political environment like ours. Note that this conservative jurisprudence has often led to polarized verdict and negatively skewed decision cascades verging on the side of error and injustice. Our founding fathers like Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe and the late sage Chief Obafemi Awolowo lamented this injustice upto the time of their demise. The likes of General Muhammadu Buhari have been unable to obtain justice from our law courts and election tribunals inspite of their honour and integrity. Error in law is technically justice denied by design or default.
This nation has suffered serious set-backs in form of judicial miscarriages caused by fallacies craftily embedded in the premising of legal decisions based on specious orbita dicta (comments by the way). This is achieved by using technicalities and deliberate falsehood to background the “ratio decidendi”. It will be recalled that in 2008 while giving the majority report one of the justices said Nigeria is a vast country made up of so many diversities in terms of tribe, culture, sociology, anthropology and many political parties. There must be always irregularities he said. So the justices think excellence is a utopian dream.
In turning its verdict to endorse a flawed election, the judiciary for the umpteenth time turned down another opportunity to give the nation a psychic shift at least, if not a paradigm shift. The judiciary has over the years 1983-2008 not done the nation proud on election matters. The judiciary has become a treacherous brook that begrudges this nation life-giving water from its well-spring of justice.
I am told that most justices are gestalt psychologists that can control the minds of men with their diverse psychic resources. Why then did our own justices not study thoroughly the traits of former president Umaru Musa Yar’Adua to discern that the late president did not mind a second ballot victory to give other contestants opportunity to prove their claims practically.
It is true that our democracy is anchored on majoritarian principle, the cliché that majority carries the vote. Yet majority vote alone cannot legitimate electoral outcomes when basic rights, liberties and priviledges of an individual are at stake. Majority rule will only be deemed legitimate when the procedure taken to arrive at the electoral verdict or outcome is seen or perceived to be free, fair, objective and transparent. The future of this nation is in the salvation of the judiciary.
No comments:
Post a Comment