Nigeria’s Nocturnal Hunters -By Kene Obiezu

In October 2016, while men slept, a couple of Nigerian judges were roused from their sleep, and their houses turned turtle by   operatives of the Department of State Security in perhaps the gravest assault visited on judicial officers in the country since independence in 1960.

The men who fell upon the sleeping and sleepy judges like a pack of jackals were supposedly scavenging for evidence of corruption. At the break of day, when the sacrilegious attacks were examined in the light of the day, discerning Nigerians knowingly nodded their heads. There had been no coincidence or mistake. It was all carefully planned – scenes out of a presidential script from which Mr. Muhammadu Buhari had slammed the legal profession and the judiciary as complicit in breeding the termites of corruption that were chewing the wooden edifice that Nigeria is to a pulp. An Igbo adage holds that when a woman makes tasteless soup, she blames a shortage of ingredients. With everything that has happened in the country since then, it is no rocket science to deduce that Mr. Muhammadu Buhari preemptively placed the blame for what has turned out to be the gross failure of his administration at the long-battered doors of the Nigerian judiciary.

In 2019, as the general elections hovered on the horizons, the immediate past   Chief Justice of Nigeria, Mr. Walter Onnoghen, found himself in the midst of a rattlingly rude awakening. In his case, he was not roused at night and humiliated. His traducers were tenacious and audacious enough to act in the light of day. Proceeding under the full glare of the midday sun, with a charge sheet as suspect   as the allegations on it were spurious, the vehicle of intimidation, and eventual disposition, was an acquiescent Code of Conduct Tribunal, whose kangaroo kinetics and gymnastics rivaled even those of physics and Olympic greats.

It will be foolhardy to completely exonerate the judiciary from some of Nigeria`s most pressing problems. So many judges have been complicit in corruption, and complacent in checking its rampage. So many judges are products of their deadened consciences and victims of a thoroughly compromised system. For so many judges, when lawyers and litigants stand before them, the scales of avarice covering their eyes do not allow them to tell the thief from the trampled in Nigeria`s extremely treacherous terrain of corruption.

So, it happened again that in October 2021, the home of Justice Mary Ukaego Odili, Nigeria`s second most senior judicial officer was subjected to a five-hour siege by state actors, who wielding a search warrant, insisted on searching the house. They were presumably scouting for evidence of corruption with which to indict her husband, Mr. Peter Odili, a former two-time governor of Rivers state.

As news of the siege broke across an alarmed country, the different security agencies sweated to scramble away any blame from their doorsteps. An elaborate blame game has since ensued but the facts must not be lost to the poorly written fiction of misguided state actors.

While it is true that some Nigerian judges have not only turned the temples of justice where they minister to sanctuaries  for the thieving corrupt, but have also extended the cover of their houses to shelter their benefactors given that Nigeria`s law dreads the homes of government officials, those who go out to trample precious pearls while pretending to chase away dangerous predators must be told in no uncertain terms that the rat race that threatens Nigeria`s most sacred spaces must cease at once.

Despite the wild wishes of those for whom the rule of law is an inconvenient irritant, Nigeria is not under a military rule. Neither is it a police state. Luckily for Nigerians, and lucklessly for those who would rather rule Nigeria with iron fists, Nigeria is a democracy, and in spite of its many shortcomings, the law prescribes conducts in every situation for everyone, beyond which it prescribes sanctions.

It is why the legal profession exists. It is why the judiciary exists. It is why the courts exist to check the excesses of those inebriated by power. In spite of the achingly annoying ponderousness of the judicial process in Nigeria, it beats the   machinations of those who would rather sit in their expansive and expensively appointed living rooms and determine who remains free and who is put in chains.

As Nigeria increasingly charges into tempestuously muddied waters, transparency and accountability remain absolutely critical, especially on the part of state actors.

Nigerians do not want a government that unleashes jackals on Nigerians at night. Nigeria has been mired in darkness for far too long. The country deserves to spend at least a day in the sun without the haunting howls of prowling jackals.

In a country where large families are slaughtered in their sleep by criminals, who is to tell who moves about at night when Nigerians sleep? Nigerians, beware, jackals are prowling!

Kene Obiezu

keneobiezu@gmail.com