Opinion

By Felix Oguejiofor Abugu

TO start with, I am not a lawyer. And it’s just as well that I am not, not possessing the skills that naturally predispose persons to liking and, by extension, studying law: wiles and guiles, for instance. I have this impression that a lawyer can scarcely be moral and conscientious. I may, of course be wrong, very wrong (I have good lawyer-friends who are moral men), but I wager that in the practice of his profession, the lawyer is eternally conniving, perhaps even grasping, always looking to leverage a loophole in a piece of legislation to secure a reprieve for his or her client, even if that client is a confirmed murderer. In other words, it is all about the fee, not justice or the overall good of society.

But as a man with enough education to read, write and understand written and spoken words, I consider myself competent enough to raise valid questions about certain decisions by trained lawyers (the bar and bench) based on certain provisions of the law that are just too obvious, too unambiguous to lend themselves to any further interpretation by anyone.

I think the British deliberately made law and its language arcane. Because the colonial legal system was designed entirely for the sole purpose of exploiting and subjugating the natives to protect British interests, it was packed with all manner of unjust provisions and technicalities that only the British legal officers could interpret. Even after they joined the tiny tribe of ‘learned’ men, Nigerians or the Blacks were only too eager to show themselves off as different breeds from their mostly poor and uneducated brethren and, therefore, were either unwilling or unable to make the law serve the cause of justice by, first, making it less arcane.

That is why more than 60 years after colonialism, our body of laws is still largely colonial in nature, while the British from whom we copied our legal system have since moved forward. In fact, it was not until 1989 that ‘wandering’, a decidedly colonial law, was abolished from the Nigerian statue books under the Minor Offences (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act No 29 of 1989. Till tomorrow, the law still requires citizens to get police permission before embarking on a demonstration while such a demonstration even when permitted can be stopped altogether by a court order often frivolously obtained by the government from ‘friendly’ judges.

But, the truth is that there isn’t much arcane about law. Indeed, much of what is called law and feted by the legal community as though man were made for law not the other way round, is, in point of fact, the application of common sense in any effort to resolve a conflict between parties. That may explain why, as we read in the media recently,  a non-lawyer in Kenya (which also operates the British Jurisprudence as we do in Nigeria), who won all of his 26 cases in court before he was finally apprehended and paraded, was able to do so. I guess he must have largely applied common sense, morality and good conscience in arguing his cases in the courts, with the result that he won all 26 of them.

In reality, without this common sense perspective to it, law simply becomes destructive, especially in these parts. Shorn of its moral foundations, law becomes a threat to the progress and well-being of society. Even lawyers are now beginning to argue that morality, in the battle to achieve harmonious existence in society and attain human happiness, is superior to legality.

To further illuminate this argument, permit me to share an incisive analysis of Nigeria’s recent victory in the $11bn P&ID case in the UK, posted anonymously on social media by obviously a lawyer.

He or she wrote: “It is important to note that the reason for Nigeria’s victory is premised on the realization by the UK court that the P&ID deal was obtained, in the first place, through fraud, consisting of bribes given to top Nigerian government officials.

“The judge, therefore, ruled the deal null and void as it was against the UK’s public policy.

“Some people may wager that it may have been tough, if not impossible to win this case in the Nigerian judicial system due to its recent penchant for resorting to hard-to-comprehend technicalities of the law rather than the substance, ethics, morality, and common sense of the issues at stake.

“So many cases come to mind, especially in the political realm. It makes sense to emulate the moral basis of the UK court judgment.

“A good judgment should always make common sense. The law should never be an ass that every smart criminal can ride.”

I am told that the Nigerian legal system thrives on both evidence and technicalities. It should bother us that the system has a preference for the latter, if our recent experiences are any guide. For, there certainly is more injustice than justice hidden in technicalities. When you raise this issue with lawyers, they tend always to argue that law is not morality. A question like ‘isn’t affirming the electoral victory of a certificate forger’ a bad example to the younger generation of Nigerians’  is a moral question that lawyers are wont to take a dim view of.  And yet, there is no legal system without moral and ethical foundations.

Now, to return to the questions I set out to ask…

One has read or heard some otherwise highly-regarded opinion molders say that Peter Obi of the Labour Party (LP) and Atiku Abubakar of the PDP lost in the Presidential Election Petitions Court (PEPC) and the Supreme Court because their lawyers were incompetent. And I ask, really? What exactly were they supposed to do that they did not do, to win their arguments before Hon. Justices of the PEPC and Supreme Court, who seemed only too much in a hurry to dismiss such arguments?

Which brings one to one’s layman’s questions and observations: *The Constitution says that there are 36 States of the federation AND Abuja, the FCT. The same constitution clearly states that to win the presidency, a candidate must have scored not less than 25 per cent of the total valid votes cast in at least 24 States of the federation AND Abuja. Was it the fault of Obi/Atiku’s lawyers that PEPC and Supreme Court Justices decided, for obvious political expedience, to ditch that particular provision in the nation’s Grundnorm?

*The Electoral Act 2022 provided for electronic transmission of votes from polling units (Pus) to the collation centres, a reason the nation spent billions in hard currency to procure Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS). When the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) failed to use BVAs in the transmission of presidential election results, against the provision of the electoral Act and its own promises made by its Chairman to the world, were  Obi/Atiku’s lawyers who clearly provided evidence of that infraction against the law by INEC responsible for the PEPC and Supreme Court’s declarations that INEC was under no obligation to transmit results electronically?

*The 10 or so key witnesses of the Labour Party (LP) whose statements were disqualified on the grounds that the witnesses  were Labour Party stakeholders, how was Obi’s lawyers’ incompetence responsible for PEPC and the Supreme Court Justices unabashedly rejecting likely helpful testimonies of a set of Nigerian voters on the grounds that they were associated with the Labour Party (LP) and that their testimonies would be in favour of the Labour Party, one of the parties in the dispute? What has one’s membership of a political party contesting the supposed victory of another party’s candidate got to do with the evidence one has to help one’s party prove that its candidate was robbed? What provision of the Electoral Act says a man cannot give evidence in defence of his party’s interests?

*If there is evidence that a candidate submitted a forged certificate as his basic qualification to run for say president; if there is, indeed, a swathe of evidence that a candidate in an election is not at all what he claims to be, that he is an outright fraud, is it because Obi/Atiku’s lawyers’ incompetence that Justices of the Appeal and Supreme Courts of Nigeria would rather keep the criminal in power than use the evidence against him, simply because the evidence, which came while the case was still on, came ‘late’; that is, did not come at the time the rules said such evidence must be produced to be valid? Whatever happened to the learned Justices’ latitude of discretion?

*That inane expression of confusion by a Supreme Court Justice over the admissibility  of a court-deposed evidence and one whose origin was a subject of doubt from the very beginning, was it because Atiku’s lawyers submitted those two documents for the Supreme Court to choose one?

One recalls the statement made by former Governor of Rivers State and immediate past Minister of Transportation, Rt. Hon. Chibuike Amaechi as a guest lecturer at TheNiche newspaper annual lecture held on Thursday this week at the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs (NIIA), Victoria Island, Lagos. Forever speaking without caring whose ox is gored, Amaechi who spoke on “Why we stride and flip: Leadership and the Nigerian condition”, accused Nigerians – both leaders and the led – of lacking in love of country. There aren’t here among Nigerians the inner glow and conviction that often manifest elsewhere in effusive expressions of love of country and actions to that effect, Amaechi agonised. And true to his pessimism, not many were eager to raise their hands when he asked, “Who is proud to be a Nigerian?”

That must be the reason – this lack of nationalistic feelings in us- why Appeal and Supreme Court Justices in democratic Nigeria, men with enough education, experience and supposed wisdom to last them 10 lifetimes, would look all of us in the eye and declare, against all available pieces of damning evidence, that a man who didn’t go to school actually went to school; that a man who himself admitted to submitting an error-filled certificate actually had a clean one; that a court-deposed evidence of certificate forgery against a sitting president was useless; that a man who claimed to have attended and graduated from a school that never existed until four years after his ‘graduation’ actually graduated from that same school and that a man cannot be said to have been indicted for drug trafficking when only his bank account, not him as a person, was fined for that offence!

That, without a doubt, must be why a set of people, positioned by their education, training, professional and moral role, exposure and experience as society’s  pillar against evil and the shenanigans of criminal gangs looking to hide under political leadership to impose their ruinous criminal tendencies upon sane humanity, would so effortlessly mortgage the country to the highest bidder on the altar of sinful greed and personal aggrandizement.

So, are you proud to be a Nigerian at this point in time? When Southern and Middle-Belt leaders rose from a meeting in Abuja on Friday (October 28) calling for the restructuring of the country into a true federal state, against the backdrop of the Supreme Court ruling the day before affirming Bola Tinubu’s declaration by INEC as president, the Amaechi question at TheNiche lecture re-echoed in my head and, with it, the answer to it: obviously no one is proud to be a Nigerian at this point in time and as currently constituted and run.

T

October 29, 2023 @ 14:11 GMT|

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