The court is not Father Christmas

 

By Indang Alibi . . .

There are two sayings often uttered, accompanied by a smile of mischievous wisdom, by judges and lawyers in Nigeria which profoundly reinforce my humble suspicion, more appropriately, disdain and doubt, of the law court in our country as a fit and proper place to go to seek redress for an injury done you.

What are the two sayings that have so shaken my faith in the judiciary? The first says that, “The law court is not Father Christmas. It cannot give to you what you have not asked for’’. In simple language, it is saying that the court cannot give you the justice you rightly deserve if you are not wise enough to properly know your rights or if you are not smart enough and not rich enough to hire a good lawyer to help you ask for the kind of prayers/ reliefs your case deserves.

This is not entirely so strange because over the years, some of us have come to realize that with the kind of philosophy that undergird justice and the way some critical actors in the law courts in Nigeria carry out their mandate, the law courts cannot be expected to be Father Christmas at all. As a matter of fact, they operate more like Father Satan. They more often than not give to you what you do not deserve at all. While you expect them to send you to paradise, they order that you should go to hell fire which is not a good place to go to at all. What they give their patrons is legal justice which is as far removed from light as darkness.

Closely related to the above is another saying that goes thus: “Justice does not belong to the indolent. It belongs to the diligent’’. I find this saying as repugnant as the first popular one because litigants are being told in plain English that if the justice of a case belongs rightly to you and you are either too sloppy or too ignorant to ask, seek and knock for it, no judge can follow the prompting of his conscience and give it to you. I find this distasteful because I have always naively believed that being a judge is more of a calling than a mere job. A judge is supposed to play God and if in actual fact he faithfully does so, he is required to give (natural) justice to a man who deserves it even if he does not know how to pursue it. This is what brings peace, harmony and progress to a society for justice is so fundamental to the peace and stability of any society as attested to by the moral and political reformer Uthman Dan Fodio who is quoted to have said that “a society may endure unbelief but no society can endure injustice”.

The practice of law in Nigeria has become, in my eyes and in the eyes of some simple folks like me, no more than some kind of bizarre game/drama which lawyers in the bar and lawyers on the bench act in for the benefit of their kind and for the watching pleasure of some members of the public and surely, for the anguished pleasure of the accused and the accuser. That is why I love the elegant way the present Education Minister, Adamu Adamu, once put it that what we are practising in Nigeria today is not rule of law but rule of lawyers.

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The so-called servants/ priests (but to me actors) in the temple of justice speak plenty English mixed liberally with Latin and Greek. They seem to be very adept in their playacting roles and know their lines very well and follow their cues even better. They will rise up, say something incomprehensible to the seekers of justice and sit down. When cued, they stand up again, bow and say some more incomprehensive thing which causes laughter or consternation among them. After a while, this circus of standing and curtseying, of sitting and rising at the prompting of a man or woman in a white wig, is brought to an end and everybody gathered for the show is required to say, “As the court pleases”, even when the man in the wig says what is extremely displeasing because it is against natural justice, fairness and equity.

And they say this is the place and process of delivering and obtaining justice. How can they possibly say so when even the man whose fate is being determined may not know what exactly has been said and decided about his guilt or innocence? Sometimes, bewildered accused persons have been known to ask what the judge has said with regard to their fate because all along they have not understood a word of what the tribe of lawyers is saying to themselves. The sad thing is that this drama is so serious because sometimes it is a matter of life and death. Yet, it is treated in such a near comical manner devoid of the solemnity such a matter deserves.

The number three saying that does not give me confidence about the judiciary is the one that asserts that the judiciary is the last hope of the common man. Is it? Today, especially with regard to election petitions, the tier of the judiciary that gives a semblance of justice is the Supreme Court. This being the case, of what ‘last hope’ is the judiciary to a poor gentleman common man who rides on the goodwill of his people to victory but is denied the fruit of his victory by a combination of forces of bad umpiring by some unscrupulous INEC officials, bad electoral rules by his country, bad lawyering by his counsel and bad judgment by compromised judges only for him to, ultimately, get justice at the apex court or even denied same by that court? What of some unfortunate litigants, especially those denied electoral victory whose cases terminated at the Appeal Court and who therefore had no chance to reach the Supreme Court?

The number four saying goes as follows: “I have faith in the Nigerian judiciary”. Really? This declaration of faith is usually made by governors whose mandate has been threatened by either the Election Petitions Tribunal or the Appeal Court and who, to my mind, seek to bribe the Supreme Court for a favourable judgment. For I tell myself that if a man truly has faith in the law courts, he does not need to proclaim it. You just wait for their verdict. For me this type of saying is a form of pure bribe. It is like saying thus: “Many are saying they have lost faith in the judiciary but me I am expecting a favourable verdict so I will not criticize you. I will not say something nasty about you so that it does not jeopardise my chances of getting justice.”

As far as I am concerned the real test of the Nigerian judiciary will come in the Kogi governorship case when the legal fireworks begin in the next few weeks. How able will the courts be in sieving the moral, commonsensical, fairness, justice and even constitutional issues from the naked politics that has caused the conundrum in that unfortunate state?

 

 
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