Something new always comes out of Nigeria. For a country that has turned ethical brinksmanship and flirtation with suicide into higher art, the current mass arrest and detention of judges from the uppermost echelons of the judiciary must be all in a day’s work. But the international world is aghast. There is no comparative experience in the history of the civilized world.
How can things turn to this sorry and sad pass in a country that has produced some of the most prodigiously endowed lawyers of the past century, a country that often farms out its judicial excellence to other countries? Where else in the world are judges, including Supreme Court justices, subjected to this kind of public humiliation and opprobrium? Is this the country of Sapara-Williams and that long line of legal avatars stretching back to the mid-nineteenth century?
Often, the international community sees farther than the local community. It sees what we don’t see and knows what we don’t know. It knows when a country is on the brink of anomie and when it has crossed the threshold of legal and judicial sanity and radical anarchy beckons. Like a wise elder, it knows how and where the tree would fall and the earth shaking nature of the impact when youths are engaged in tree-felling.
But let us get legal niceties out of the way. The nocturnal visitation to the sacred domains of their Lordships may be regrettable but so far there has been no legal authority to challenge the powers of the DSS to arrest anybody threatening or undermining national security in all its ramifications. The interpretation of these ramifications, be it political sabotage, economic adversity, spiritual aggression, armed intimidation and even judicial terrorism in aid of the electoral subversion of the will of the nation as expressed by the electorate, is the sole responsibility of the security agencies.
To be sure, it could not have been the intendment of the framers of the constitution that the law would one day go after its most sacred protectors in such a shabby manner. Nobody could have imagined a situation in which state functionaries would hurl top judges and lawyers into detention on the suspicion of engaging in manifest and manifold acts of illegality bordering on state subversion.
If the international community is alarmed by the state assault on the judiciary, many Nigerians are also traumatized by the astonishing revelations and the scale of judicial sleaze. Many citizens are horrified by the outlandish nature of judicial thievery and the in your face nature of the acquisitions. No constitution could have foreseen this judicial obscenity from the leading lights of the bench. By aiding the law to abet social disorder, our lordships have thrown up an intriguing dimension of social justice as part of the National Question. This is institutional suicide by any other name.
But since it is merely an accessory after the notorious fact, the judiciary will not go down alone. In every human society, the ruling law is the law of the ruling class. The law is expected to uphold and valorize social order as seen and as conceptualized by the ruling class for the benefit of the entire society. But when and where the law and its enforcing agents act in a way that undermines and subverts social order, it is an invitation to social anomie which often compels a drastic retribution from forces acting—or thinking they are acting—on behalf of the old status quo.
Like gluttonous rodents set upon a sugarcane plantation, the Nigerian judiciary is too far gone to save or redeem itself through internal reform. In the past thirty years or so, every attempt to reform the judiciary either through external intervention or internal purge has been spurned or treated with abrasive contempt or met with outright stonewalling.
The confrontation with Buhari’s Law and Order administration is inevitable. For law to thrive there must be order. For order to be sustained there must be law. It may well turn out that by stepping in with force and drama, the Buhari government may yet save the Nigerian judiciary from itself or from more ruinous consequences.
The law loses its badge of authority and force of legitimacy when nobody believes in it, when the public holds every judicial pronouncement in contempt and when its leading lights are subject of public ridicule and open disdain. It will take radical surgery within the context of revolutionary stirring in the society to redeem both legal system and public order.
But in a situation where essentially conservative social forces are locked in contention, it may be naïve and simplistic to expect a radical emancipation of the nation from the clutches of a medieval social order as the immediate outcome. Despite his heroic probity and open abhorrence for injustice, there is no evidence that General Buhari fancies a structured and programmatic approach to the crisis of the Nigerian state and its judiciary.
Indeed it may well be that what is playing out is a convergence of private animosity and public misgiving. General Buhari himself has been a serial victim of judicial delinquency and is known to have the memory of an elephant. If his private anger and indignation are allowed to shape public developments, if his personal sentiments and preferences are allowed to determine the fate of the judiciary, the outcome may not be as altruistic and patriotic as one might be led to expect.
Having learnt to lower one’s sights about the ideological and political direction of the Buhari administration, having learnt not to raise the bar of hope higher than the limits and limitations of its principal actors, perhaps the most scientific way to look at the judicial palaver is to see it as the dialectical interplay of hostile and antagonistic forces which may result in the mutual ruination of contending forces. The judiciary cannot hope to win this, but neither will anybody trying to rework the nation away from the modernist template of a true nation-state.
As usual with a country at the mercy of bitterly centrifugal forces, Nigerians have been split down the line over this one as well. Class, ethnic and regional solidarities have rent the elite asunder while the masses are braying for blood. Where you expect solidarity along the lines of superior national interest, you have what can only be described as competing tribalismsor the ethnicizationof equity with justice viewed from the prism of primordial interest.
For example, those who watched quietly when top judges were receiving humongous gratification for perverting the course of justice and for delivering judgement in conflict with common sense are now charging the government with highhandedness and a descent into tyranny; those who kept quiet when Jonathan stoutly and stubbornly refused to reinstate Justice Ayo Salami based on the recommendation of the NJC have now found their voice, screaming from the rooftop that General Buhari has turned the nation into a Banana Republic.Some banana indeed.
What can one say about a country in which the political elite find it difficult to unite behind a common cause or coalesce behind a pan-Nigerian conception of justice based on equity and fair play for all? What does the future portend for such a country with an irredeemably fractured ruling class?
The Nigerian judiciary has had it coming for a long time. Something was bound to give eventually. Like an old nemesis, it has taken the return of General Buhari to earn it divine retribution. But by a tragic irony, the unravelling of the law may also trigger the second comeuppance of the man from Daura himself, if the counter-accusations coming from the judicial council are to be believed. History is a cruel task master indeed.
At the end of Buhari’s first tenure, the Nigerian political class was so bitterly divided and so badly polarized by what appeared to be the lopsided nature of justice meted out to the political offenders of the Second Republic and what was widely considered to be the religious, regional and primordial prejudices of the Buhari administration that a section of the political elite were openly mooting the idea of secession. Two civil war heroes from the west gave interviews where they canvassed a con-federal arrangement for the federation.
After Buhari’s ouster, his successor and former Chief of Army Staff, Ibrahim Babangida, was forced to shop for willing and compliant judges to reverse most of the draconian convictions of the military tribunals in order to placate some sections of the political class. It was from that moment on that majoritysectors of the judiciary became willing tools of the executive as long as the price is right.
Thirty years after his dethronement, Buhari has come back to confront the Aegean stable with the same contradictions and his own personal failings obviously in place. The nation is back to unfinished business. If General Buhari continues to leave his political flanks exposed just as he did the first time around, if an important segment of the political class feels badly bruised and alienated by the looming confrontation, if he is unable to summon the Nigerian masses to his ensign, the outcome may not be different.
General Buhari should count himself lucky. It is very rare and unusual for history to set the same exam for the same historical personage thirty years apart and in seemingly dissimilar circumstances. If he flunks it this time around, it is all but certain that neither the general nor the country will have a third chance doing the same thing and repeating the same error all over again. Nigeria is suffering from failure fatigue. That is the surest symptom of social disorder.