Opinion: Letter to the Attorney-General of the Federation

Honourable Minister,

If you read the open letter that I wrote to CJN Mahmud Mohammed in this column last week, you will immediately recognize that, in a slightly different formulation, the question that is the first part of the title of this open letter to you is the same question that I posed to the CJN at the very end of this column last week. As a matter of fact, permit me to quote the question in the exact formulation in which I directed it to the CJN last week: “To take the cases of Dasuki and Saraki as the most (in)famous of all the cases in the law courts right now, will these cases still be undecided a year, two, three or four years from now, your lordship?” Why am I directing basically the same question to YOU?

Honourable Minister, you and CJN Mohammed are the most important judicial officers in the land; consequently, what will happen one way or another in the resolution of the war on corruption in our law courts will depend on what you and the sitting CJN do or don’t do. Right now, it does not appear that both of you see eye to eye and are willing to cooperate to ensure that justice is done in the high profile corruption cases. As I said in my letter to the CJN last week, his lordship has recently been making statements of displeasure at what he considers interference with the independence of the judiciary and the rule of the law, statements that were clearly directed at you and President Buhari. This probably arose from the fact that your good self and the President have also been making statements expressing great concern that some highly influential forces in the Bar and the Bench are hell-bent to sabotage the government’s prosecution of alleged looters in our law courts. Indeed, as I am sure you are well aware, there is now a clear division in the bar of public opinion between commentators and pundits who side with you and the President and those who take the side of the CJN.This development is at the heart of the reason why I am writing this open letter to you in the same manner in which I wrote that open letter to the CJN last week, indeed addressing the same basic question to both of you. Before taking up this central issue, permit me to make a comment that might startle you and many of those reading this piece.

Honourable Minister, President Buhari is not a lawyer, he is not a member of the legal profession. You are. Apart from his political experience as a ruler – military and now civilian – the President’sreal profession, his true vocation is that of a soldier. The kind of “war” he was professionally trained for is military warfare, not legal skirmishes and battles. This is why when as a military ruler he launched a “war” on corruption, the tactics, the means that he used were militaristic.

Parenthetically, let me observe here that for the most part they were fairly effective and most Nigerians at the time greatly applauded both the tactics and the results. But even then, with all his popularity at the time, Buhari had opponents that deeply resented his use of those militaristic tactics and means to wage his “war” on corruption. It is precisely this kind of commentators and pundits that arecurrently rising up in arms against the President, now that he is an elected, civilian president who has taken off his military fatigues and donned his babariga. Absolutely without any evidence for their claims, some of these pundits have gone as far as to see a creeping move toward totalitarian destruction of the rule of law in the President’s justified anger at the obstacles being mounted against the successful prosecution of alleged looters in the law courts. On his part, the President has been completely indifferent to such charges – as well he should since, in my opinion, they are completely baseless if not indeed mischievous and cynically opportunistic. At any rate, this is where YOU, Honourable Minister, come in, as both the Attorney General of the Federation and the President’s chief legal adviser.

Here, I must be completely frank with you, Honourable Minister, inexpressing my disappointment at the fact that if the President himself has not cared to give clear explanations for his disdain, his anger with forces intent on sabotaging the war against corruption in our law courts, why have YOU been silent, why haven’t you explained carefully to the nation and the world what exactly is going on? More specifically, why haven’t you taken issue with the near total disregard for the Administration of Criminal Justice Act, 2015 (ACJA) by most of the magistrates and judges presiding over the trials of the alleged looters? You are the chief law officer of the land, Honourable Minister; it should be of great concern to YOU of all people that the effective law of the land in the administration of criminal justice is being massively disregarded in the law courts trying the alleged looters. Permit me to give a short illustration of what I am saying here.

Clause 306 and clause 396 of ACJA are pretty clear and unambiguous in the manner in which they have effectively done away with the use of frivolous and obfuscatory injunctions and stay of proceedings to unduly prolong the trials of the alleged looters. Indeed, taken as a whole and applied as required by law, ACJA has reduced the length of the trial of any and all criminal cases in our country to less than one year, inclusive of appeals all the way to the high court. [Let us note here, for the benefit of the cynical journalistic defenders of the human and legal rights of the looters, that this time span is consistent with standard practice in most countries of the world] Already, we are in the tenth month of the life of Buhari’s administration and NONE of the cases in court is anywhere close to resolution one way or another.

This the basis of my question to you and the CJN: a year, two years, three or four years from now, will the legal battles over Dasukigate still be in the courts, given the fact that if the provisions of ACJA were being applied some of these cases would be near resolution by now? And so I repeat, Honourable Minister: why the hell have you been so silent, so unimaginably indecisive in the face of the widespread disregard for ACJA in the law courts?

As I am not unaware or unmindful of the tone of this open letter, let me explain its cause to you, Honourable Minister. Moreover, this is something that every person reading this piece should carefully consider: even if ACJA was being faithfully and diligently applied in the law courts, the backlog of cases going back to more than a decade and half is so vast that many cases would still be around years from now. Add to this the fact that the anti-graft agencies are uncovering new cases every day and dragging new defendants to the courts all the time. For a judiciary that is already overwhelmingly predisposed to prolongations and deferments of cases, this is like a bonanza, a perfect alibi. All they have to say is, can’t you see that we are helpless before the sheer weight of the multitude of cases piling up to the high heavens? And indeed, the magistrates, the judges and the born-again fundamentalist defenders of the legal and human rights of looters have precisely been saying this, shouting it to the rooftops of our national public opinion edifice.

However, what remains buried beneath this cacophony is the extraordinary fact that a recommendation actually exists in the recent legal history of our country that a special anti-corruption tribunal beset up exclusively to try the sort of prosecutions that the anti-graft agencies are taking to the regular law courts almost on a daily basis now. What does this mean?

As I have pointed out before on the pages of this column, in the Jonathan National Conference of 2014 (JNC 2014), the Committee on Law, Judiciary, Human Rights and Legal Reforms headed by Justice Adesola George Oguntade, a retired Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, made a recommendation that only a special tribunal separate from the regular law courts could successfully meet the legal, administrative, human and moral challenges that corruption poses both to our judiciary and our country. Let it be known that the recommendation had the unanimous support of all the members of the committee. I draw your attention, Honourable Minister, as well as the attention of everyone reading this piece to the fact that Olisa Agbakoba, SAN, President of the Nigerian Bar Association, 2006-2008, a highly respected senior advocate and generally regarded as a progressive and enlightened legal luminary among our most influential lawyers, was a member of that committee that made this unanimous recommendation.

I mention this fact because Olisa Agbakoba is saying completely different things today about what is happening or not happening in the law courts in the trials of the looters. I think, indeed, I suggest that the question should be put to Agbakoba now whether or not he is still in favour of the urgent need to set up this special anti-corruption tribunal. But far beyond the individual case of Mr. Agbakoba, Honourable Minister, YOU also have to let the nation know where YOU stand on the matter of this recommendation. For let this be clearly understood: if it is not implemented, not even full and vigorous implementation of ACJA can ensure that a year, two years, three or four years from now many cases will not still be lingering in the law courts.

I end on a positive, hopeful note, Honourable Minister. Six months from now, in a future issue of this column, I will write you an open letter again, confident that things will be much different then. For me, three crucial things are at stake in the current war against corruption in our law courts. First: the stolen loot MUST be recovered and what is recovered must be transformed into economic and social dividends that will bring significant relief to the hardship and suffering of the vast majority of the looted and the downtrodden of our society. Secondly, the guilty must be punished in accordance with scale of their crimes. When the Russian writer, Fyodor Dostoevsky, wrote his famous novel, Crime and Punishment, the crime went with the punishment and vice versa; for if the crime is dissociated from the punishment, the society will lag for a long, long time in a state of moral and spiritual darkness. Thirdly, our judiciary needs deep and wide-ranging reforms; the historic occasion of the ongoing legal battles against the alleged looters in our law courts provides a unique foundational moment for these reforms. You and CJN Mohammed have a large, collaborative role to play in this reform agenda.

Yours in the service of the nation and its looted majority,
___________________________

Op–ed pieces and contributions are the opinions of the writers only and do not represent the opinions of Y!/YNaija

Biodun Jeyifo can be reached via [email protected]

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