What irks our elder brother and former teacher, Itse Sagay, so grievously these days? A day hardly passes without the former Law teacher releasing a fearsome bazooka at some luckless foes or enemies of the people. The fear in cowering circles is that the elegant and patrician looking Warri nobleman may unleash a grenade in what his bemused principal famously described as the other room one of these days thinking that the enemy is hiding under the duvet.

Not since the days of Gani Fawehinmi has Nigeria seen another feisty legal gladiator taking on all comers and crouching to deliver a lethal sucker punch. Gani took no hostages. No one was spared the sharp thrust of his nettling tongue, not even his Ondo kinsmen. It will be recalled that when Chief Alex Akinyele made some derogatory remarks about him, Gani came back like old Smoking Joe. “It shows the kind of fools Babangida would make minister”, he thundered. Exeunt the PR maharaja with his Ondo native multi-colored muffler in smoke.

With his permanent disobliging frown and moody brio, Sagay was a star Law lecturer at the then University of Ife and tantalisingly charismatic to boot. He went on to distinguish himself as an iconic professor and Dean of Law at the University of Benin crowning it all with a silk and distinguished practice. He has been able to combine all this with notable human rights advocacy as well as consistent progressive politics.

After decades of being spitefully ignored by evil governance in Nigeria, Sagay’s time finally came when President Buhari tapped him to chair the important PACAC. The Warri legal warrior immediately swung into action slaying legal fools after legal fools. No one could question his patriotic fervour even if you question the wisdom of committing his considerable political and social capital to the quixotic venture of seeking revolutionary justice in a non-revolutionary conjuncture.

Sagay’s legal carpet-bombing has brought him on a collision course with former students and colleagues alike who could not understand why he could not understand that the legal system could not be lifted clean off its material base and social provenance. In other words, the western legal system inherited by Nigerian can never be deployed as an instrument of fighting social oppression. It is actually there to protect entrenched privileges while throwing the occasional morsel of meat in the direction of radical whippersnappers.
Snooper hopes the chicken is not coming home to roost for his beloved former teacher. A phoney revolution can also consume its own children. After slamming the senate for daring to summon him, Sagay seemed to have drawn the considerable ire of the ranking grandees of the ruling APC who cautioned the legal titan not to make more enemies for his principal who is seeking an amicable resolution of the executive versus senate imbroglio from a position of weakness. Not to be outpointed by mealy-mouthed and meal-mouthing politicians, Sagay retorted with a withering dismissal of the APC echelons, harshly reminding them that he was not serving at their pleasure.

With the whole anti-corruption war suffering from deep structural flaws and lack of an integrative intellectual scaffolding, with the EFCC reeling from drastic reversals in the law court and with the presidency back heeling from frontal confrontation with the senate, Professor Itse Sagay may well be an endangered species. In a haunting premonition, the political compromise which he detests so much may see him quietly eased off or promoted to irrelevance.

That would be a national tragedy. Despite his choleric candour which rubs many the wrong way, despite his hectic hectoring which often comes close to psychological bullying, Sagay represents the best foot forward of the Buhari administration. Perhaps he should talk less and grant fewer interviews. That office requires an intellectual mystique and a protective aura which reassures everybody that justice is being done. The problem is that in old age, Sagay does not want to be seen as being used to rubberstamp or justify an elaborate chicanery, a ritual of deliberately aborted justice. Unfortunately his options are few and far between.