The Oje in Goje’s Nolle -By Festus Adedayo

Nigeria gets curious and curiouser by the day like the verses of an eerie poem. Everything, even the air we breathe in, is tinged with strangeness. It is one day, one curious phenomenon. So when the Federal High Court sitting in Jos last week discharged former Governor of Gombe State, Danjuma Goje, of corruption charges, it just piled up on the huge debris of curiosity that has become our lot as Nigerians.

Goje’s discharge by the court was predicated on a Nolle prosequi application for withdrawal of the two pending charges against him by the Attorney General of the Federation (AGF). In 2011, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) had filed 21-count charges against Goje on allegation that he and the former Executive Chairman of the State Universal Basic Education Board, Aliyu El-Nafati and S. M. Dokoro had allegedly stolen N5billion state money. Nineteen of those charges were struck out by the court which maintained that Goje had case to answer on the two charges left, to wit counts 8 and 9. The court ruled that the defendant should open its case on May 8, 2019. On June 7, however, the office of the AGF took over the matter against the governor. And now, it filed a Nolle.

By the portent of section 128 of the Administration of Criminal Justice Act 2015, with particular emphasis on its sub section 1, the AGF is vested with prosecutorial powers equal to that of a mandarin to withdraw and discontinue cases in any law court in Nigeria at his whims, other than in a court-martial. This power is not subject to questioning; he does not have to explain how he arrives at that critical juncture of withdrawal or what was going on in his mind at that particular time. The withdrawal does not even have to conform to logic or the mood of the time. This was apparently the legal justification for the discontinuance of trial of the former governor.

Nolle is one of the inherited corpuses of our justice system which factors in issues of nation and national security into prosecutorial matters. The autochthonous owners of Nolle apparently factored it into their laws so as to protect the interest of the nation at critical intersections where it is threatened, especially by dissembling interests that are contrary to the state. In this Goje case, the question to ask is whether the discontinuance of the alleged fraud case linked to Goje is in the interest of the Nigerian state or whether the matter of who occupies the seat of the Senate President is that of the Nigerian state. The answer is that, getting Goje to stand down and installing someone else are a political party’s interest and the interest of some narrow-minded power blocs.

Mama Sophie Oluwole – God bless her soul – taught me in the African Philosophy class decades ago that the causality in the ancient Yoruba wise saying which says that there is an inherent connect between the witch who cried yesterday and the child that died today is not a fluke. Positivist school disagreed with this causality theory. They said that causality has to have a mathematical certainty and scientific explanation for it to be convincing. For us in Africa, there is no mathematical certainty or scientific clarity to causality. We extend this logic by saying that smoke necessarily follows the fire. It is all about the cognitive of what we perceive; if you like, the optics.

For Nigerians, the causal trajectory of this Goje Nolle is not only suggestive, it is visible and we can perceive it. Being a man who apparently understands the geography of the underbelly of this administration inside out, Goje threw his hat into the Senate Presidency ring and fought the battle with all his might, even when it became obvious that he could lose the battle. He stuck to his guns, becoming the issue in the race. He was subsequently brought before President Muhammadu Buhari, where their meeting was advertised to the world. Almost immediately, Goje stepped down from the race and every other thing began to fall in place. Now, the AGF has secured the discontinuance of the case, even when the court had earlier said he had case to answer in the erstwhile two charges.

The questions to ask are, yes, the philosophy underpinning Nolle demands that the AGF discloses no reason for the discontinuance of a case to anybody, but does the Buhari government which claims to wear a white apparel not feel that it is dishonourable for it to swap whatever honour it claims to have with an embrace of a man who, even in the face of the law, wasn’t blameless? Can the Buhari government claim to still be honourable after this swim in the sewer? The dirty deal of this Nolle should make anyone want to puke; it can only be explained by the joke – Oje – that Nigeria herself has become and why we have to laugh at this latest drama from runners of government who themselves know that Nigeria is a theatre, perhaps of the absurd, of Albert Camus hue. Let us move to the next Oje, please.