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Vanguard, MONDAY, NOVEMBER 14, 2022 —17
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Saving the Supreme Court from
crises
OVER the past fortnight,
this column has addressed the
multiple dimensions of the crises of
attrition, retention, and replacement
in Nigeria’s Supreme Court, as well
as the pathologies that make these
crises resilient. Given the
significance of the Court in the
country, it is only proper to dwell a
little on how these problems can be
fixed. Three issues are immediately
in focus. One is occupational health
and wellbeing for Supreme Court
Justices. The tendency to reduce the
triple crises of attrition, retention,
and replacement in Nigeria’s
Supreme Court to an issue of the
appointment of brilliant academics
or supposedly proven practitioners
avoids the real problem. Indeed, the
records suggest that premature
mortality on the court has been most
unkind to its brightest and best.
For instance, Chukwunweike
Idigbe was reputed to be arguably
the sharpest and most rigorous mind
on the court at the time of his death
in 1983. Augustine Nnamani, was
only the fourth holder of a doctorate
degree in law to be appointed to the
court, after Taslim Elias, George
Baptist Ayodele Coker, and Egbert
Udo Udoma; and Okay Achike was
only the second law professor and
the third legal academic to sit on the
Supreme Court after Taslim Elias.
Adolphus Godwin Karibi-Whyte,
another academic who preceded
him on the Supreme Court and who,
like Achike, retired in 2002, was an
Associate Professor at the University
of Lagos before the onset of his
judicial career. Niki Tobi, the former
dean of law at the University of
Maiduguri, followed later.
The Supreme Court does not
appear to have been the kindest of
working environments to its most
brilliant minds, and there is nothing
to say that it will be kinder to any
bright minds who agree to go there
now. To the brightest legal minds, the
court has been somewhat of a
cemetery in a literal sense. The
complaint of the BOSAN about its
members being denied elevation to
the Supreme Court deserves to be
treated with suspicion. Regrettably,
it is also members of the BOSAN
who saddle the court quite often with
applications of the most disreputable
Any reform of the
court that does not
address the urgent need
to unbundle the office of
the Chief Justice is
doomed to failure
kind, needlessly clogging up the
dockets of the court and making the
work of the Justices unbearable. The
BOSAN can hardly complain when
Justices of the same Supreme Court
look upon many of these same
practitioners of dubious professional
ethics with determined suspicion
when they look prey with intent on
high judicial office.
The court's main problem is not
just that its dockets are
unmanageable; it also appears
inhumane and unsuited to its
primary workers, who are by
definition senior citizens. In June
2022, it emerged that the Justices of
the Supreme Court had written to
the then CJN complaining of
debilitating failures of health and
wellbeing, including the nonprovision
of housing and research
assistants. In particular, their letter
lamented that there had been no
meeting of the Justices over the entire
duration of the COVID-19 crisis,
pointing out that the standard of
healthcare in the court had
deteriorated to the point where "there
is a general lack of concern for
Justices who require immediate or
emergency medical intervention.
These complaints naturally raise the
possibility that the rate of mortality
as a form of attrition at the Supreme
Court is preventable.This naturally
leads to a third issue regarding the
leadership of the Court. Historical
mortality may be relatively high
among appointees to Nigeria’s
Supreme Court, but it has never
affected any CJN. This is surprising
because many will think that the
CJN, with the multiple portfolios and
offices that s/he holds, would be very
stressed. Over time, the office has
evolved from being a first among
equals to something akin to a
constitutional potentate, with infinite
capacity to dispense patronage or
penury in equal measure around the
legal profession. Any reform of the
court that does not address the urgent
need to unbundle the office of the
Chief Justice is doomed to failure.
It is, therefore, no surprise that the
recent occupants of the office appear
to have been undone by allegations
on the borders of judicial integrity.
In three years since 2019, Nigeria
has had three Chief Justices. Of these
three, two left office prematurely in
circumstances connected with
negative imputations on judicial
independence and integrity. Indeed,
it has been said that the penultimate
CJN left the judiciary and the
Supreme Court "in a mess." About
the sacking of his predecessor, The
Economist wrote that it was "not
merely unusual; it was also
unlawful.In that case, it appeared
that the judiciary was willfully
complicit in its own defenestration,
indicating deeper issues with that
branch of government's
integrity.“When legitimate questions
of judicial integrity can be raised at
this level, it becomes rather idle to
focus on access to appointments as
a panacea because even the
appointment process would be
corruptible and probably corrupted.
In the public's perception, this is
largely what the current situation is
with judicial appointments in
Nigeria. Many believe—and there
seems to be evidence to support the
claim—that appointments have
become a joint enterprise of
politicians and judicial insiders.
When BOSAN complains that its
members deserve a say, citizens sneer
that BOSAN's members want to
wiggle their way into this duopoly
with no altruistic goals in mind.
These are by far the biggest causes
of the attrition, retention, and
replacement crises on the Supreme
Court.
As is evident from this breakdown,
appointment or replacement does
not necessarily rank among them.
Indeed, in the face of these, the
problem that Chief Justice Ariwoola
complains of cannot be altered even
if we were to triple the establishment
size of the court from 21 to 63 or,
even worse, implement the entirely
unfortunate and unworkable idea of
decentralizing the Supreme Court
to each geopolitical zone of the
country as some have advocated. In
these circumstances too, legislating
for justices to serve until the day after
eternity, as Afe Babalola SAN has
suggested, would be a very bad idea
indeed.
It is nevertheless important not to
totally ignore the advocacy by
BOSAN to look to the ranks of its
members for appointments to the
Supreme Court. Former CJN,
Mohammed Lawal Uwais, has
explained that he instituted the policy
of confining Supreme Court
preferment to serving Justices of
Appeal because "there is the issue of
integrity. If you have been a judge at
the High Court or Court of Appeal
before coming to the Supreme
Court, you would have done cases
where whether you are a corrupt
person would have been
discovered."
It should be recalled that the Chief
Justice governs preferment to the
privilege of SAN. If he says that he is
unable to trust the integrity of the
persons whom they choose to prefer
to the rank, then it is hardly a
response to the crisis of appointment
in the Supreme Court to suggest that
the answer lies in choosing from the
ranks of persons whose integrity
can’t be guaranteed. What is
required in the face of this claim is
not to insist on preferring people to
the Supreme Court from these ranks
but to first reform the system of
preferment in order to guarantee the
rank of SAN as a quality mark of
unquestionable integrity and
excellence, which it can hardly be
said to be presently. In the end, it is
necessary to admit that there is no
magic bullet to address or resolve
the crises that the new CJN has
called attention to.
Rather, it requires a
multidimensional approach
beginning with an internal reform
of the operations and management
of the Supreme Court itself to
improve wellbeing among its
personnel, both judicial and nonjudicial.
Caseloads in the court will
need to be governed much better
through appropriate filtration
devices. This will require a
combination of both legislation and
reform of the rules and doctrines of
the court. Standards of judicial ethics
at all levels will need improving. If
these are done, then attention to
appointments could be part of the
package. Absent these reforms as a
package, a focus only on
appointments will not be part of the
solution. Rather, it will only deepen
the problem.
*A lawyer and a teacher,
Odinkalu can be reached at
chidi.odinkalu@tufts.edu
US security alerts vs the parable of the cunning tortoise
By DAHIRU LAWAL
WHEN on Sunday, October 23, 2022,
the United States of America issued a
“security alert” over what it described as the
“risk of terror attacks in Nigeria, especially in
the Federal Capital Territory,” one thing was
clearly obvious, it was a flagrant disregard for
diplomatic etiquette. Certainly, there are basic
guidelines, fundamental norms, practices of
protocol and administrative requirements for
issuing such intel on a sovereign space - if at
all - in such a way that will facilitate robust
diplomatic ties between mutually connected
and friendly nations without deliberately
undermining a government and its people, but
America’s overzealous attempt at perpetrating
its messianic image through media agenda
setting, laced with the kind of scaremongering
and information warfare, that wires a
population to think and act only within the
contextual framework of what it’s message
portends - crises and mayhem - was surely not
within any tolerable diplomatic line of action
for any nation to condone no matter its size.
Nothwtsanding its initial whistling, when
about two days after, the US issued another
“updated” alert on account of “heightened risk
of terrorist attacks in Abuja,” and even said it
was evacuating its citizens, with similar
warnings to Americans in Equatorial Guinea,
Chad and South Africa, almost at about the
same time, causing Britain, Germany, Australia
and Canada to follow its lead, America’s motif
for doing so became suspicious. This is
especially so because in the wake of that update
followed a fake news which was immediately
debunked by PRNigeria’s fact check that
American soldiers arrested a terrorist in an
Abuja estate.
As a budding communicator, through a
content analysis of the substance of both alerts,
I could deduce a lack of actionable
intelligence, vague predictions and watery
confidence. I mean, if such intel actually exists,
since it is using media channels of its host
country whose audience are at least 90 percent
consumers of the information, it is only fair
that the message names the group planning
the attack, the mode of the attack and even a
timeframe. But when the basic who, why, when,
what, where and how remains unanswered
substantially, all a discerning mind could only
see is a script at play which serves as a means
to an end, but to what end?
Seeing through this requires a deeper
analytic sense, one that demands seeing past
the infallible posturing of an acclaimed world
power to the plainness of the message which is
lacking in substance or evidence – typical of
cheats and tricks in folkloric tales. This only
reminds me of some of the main elements and
themes found in African folktales about the
cunning tortoise - a slow, crafty and wise
creature that uses his wisdom to outsmart
others. One of such tales which was created
and recreated over years from generation to
generation told the story once upon a time
when tortoise went to the market place. There
he saw the wares on display. He had no money
on him to buy his needs. He thought up a plan
of taking away, the wares without paying a
dime. His plan was to dig a tunnel from his
house to the market place so that he would
threaten the market when it is in full session.
He employed rabbit to dig the tunnel. One
day he went to the market place through the
tunnel as he played a drum and threatened to
kill whoever waited to meet him. The threat
sent fear through the spines of all the animals
at the market place. They all ran away leaving
their wares. Tortoise went out of the tunnel and
carted all the wares to his house through the
tunnel. He went home and ate as much as he
wanted while other animals lamented of their
losses. Eventually, the cunny tortoise was
caught red-handed when his victims also
devised a trick in ambushing him.
As citizens of a great African nation, just like
the animals in this folktale, if we continue to
remain susceptible to all the drumbeat we hear,
the measurabilty of our vulnerability to
captivity will remain eternal. Like the tortoise,
America is the most realist nation on earth, it
approaches the reality of international politics
from an egoistic nature and disregard for
central authority in pursuit of its foreign policy
If we continue to remain
susceptible to all the drumbeat
we hear, the measurabilty of our
vulnerability to captivity will
remain eternal
goals but its greatest undoing remains its
inability to observe the tip of the axe while
chipping the wood. For instance, at about the
same period it was issuing alerts on African
soils, the husband of its House Speaker Nancy
Pelosi was attacked and severely beaten with a
hammer by an assailant who broke into the
couple’s San Francisco home.
In May 2022 mass shooting at an
elementary school in Uvalde, Texas and
another one in Laguna Woods, California
targeting congregants of a church that serves
the Taiwanese community were all horrible
attacks that could have been averted through
intel security alerts and “citizen evacuation.”
All these carries chilling echoes of the January
6, 2021 US Capitol insurrection and other
violent attacks that happens daily in the United
States. It then beggars belief how convinient it
is for a country with a fixture of firearms death
in its daily life aggregating to nearly 1.5
million being killed between 1968 and 2017 -
higher than the number of soldiers killed in
every US conflict since the American War for
Independence in 1775 - to promote themselves
as custodians of actionable intelligence on
African soils, far away from home where the
security incidents is ongoing with nearly 53
people killed each day by a firearm.
But then, such use of information warfare
for foreign influence operations only feed fat
on our gullibility as a people which in turn not
only scares away potental investors but
threaten even local endeavors for economic
prosperity, with schools closing down and
flights changing destination routes from Abuja
- very apt and timely for the nairas continous
fall against the greenback in the parallel
market one might think. Yet, just about two
weeks after following the US lead, the UK
government on Monday updated its travel
advisory on Nigeria that it “no longer advises
against all but essential travel to the Federal
Capital Territory, including the city of Abuja.”
This is simply a case of repeat broadcast -
the use of media channels for influence
operations towards foreign policy goal through
a preceedence. In the past, there had been
similar reports orchestrated by some interests
which nevertheless featured prominently on
front pages of national dailies. One such was
the front pages of the Vanguard and other
ewspapers in May 2014 which claimed that
the “US Marines Located Abducted Chibok
Girls and arrested Boko Haram
Commanders,” with pictures that later turned
out to be false.
Continues online:www.vanguardngr..com
•Dahiru, a social commentator, wrotefrom
Abuja via mdlawal001@gmail.com
C
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