Without intending it, those who, like a hunter’s hound, went after Dele Farotimi, for the authorship of ‘Nigeria’s Criminal Justice System’ gave the book the widest publicity that its publishers probably did not imagine. The way and manner in which the author was hounded and detained in prison, and the narratives that followed it, suggested that the book contained ‘satanic verses’. And, that made it an instant market success.
Soon after narratives about what Farotimi wrote in the book went viral, some Nigerians went into the archives to exhume newspaper and magazine covers that had published reports that justified Dele’s narratives about the judiciary. There was the cover page of The News of 30 August 1999 bearing an exclusive report titled ‘Crooks On The Bench’ with a rider “An Expose On The Rot In The Judiciary’. The second was a cover page of The Guardian of 17 August 2017 bearing a report titled “Nigeria Police, Judges Highest Bribe-Takers, Says UN Agency’. Farotimi’s book was published 25 years after the exclusive report by The News and seven years after the report in The Guardian which came from the United Nations Office on Drug and Crime (UNODC).
But, while the dust raised by Dele’s book was yet to settle, the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offenses Commission (ICPC) dropped the bombshell. On December 20, it published the sixth phase of its Constituency and Executive Projects Tracking Initiative (CEPTI) and the 2024 Ethics and Integrity Compliance Scorecard (EICS). In that report, ICPC listed the Supreme Court of Nigeria and the Legal Aid Council, among several government ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs) that failed its integrity and ethics test. The Supreme Court got a generous negative mention in Farotimi’s rattling small book.
The rest on the lower rungs of the ICPC report include the Nigeria Press Council (NPC), National Hajj Commission of Nigeria (NAHCON), Federal Civil Service Commission (FCSC), Council of Nigerian Mining Engineers and Geoscientists (COMEG), and Institute of Chartered Chemists of Nigeria (ICCON), Federal Teaching Hospital (FTH), Gombe; National Obstetrics Fistula Centre, Ningi, Bauchi State; Institute of Archaeology and Museum Studies, Jos; Federal University of Agriculture, Umudike, Abia State; Federal College of Forestry Mechanization (FCFM), Mando, Kaduna State; Obafemi Awolowo University (OAU), Ile-Ife, Osun State; and Federal Polytechnic, Ede, Osun State, and University of Ibadan, Oyo State.
The outcome of the ICPC integrity test should bother Nigerians much more than Farotimi’s narratives. This is because while Dele’s book contained accounts arising from his personal experience in the course of the exercise of his profession as a lawyer, now, retired, the ICPC report is an institutional report coming from an agency of the same government. While personal experiences, as reflected in Dele’s book, may contain his personal biases and as such may not be scientific, the ICPC report is not likely to contain such biases and coul be scientific. However, that would depend on the survey methodology adopted by the Commission in the research. Either way, the report casts a huge perception issue on the Supreme Court and to a large extent, gives a measure of credibility to Dele Farotimi’s experiences. In that way, the ICPC report simply tells those who had picked up cudgels and aimed for Dele’s dread-locked head that they are wrong to condemn his personal experience.
As English philosopher and political economist, John Stuart Mill, said “There are many truths of which the full meaning cannot be realized until personal experience has brought it home.” In this regard, the ICPC report brings home the truth about Dele’s experience of the Supreme Court. You can also put it the other way and say Dele’s experiences as captured in his book brought home the truth in the ICPC report. And, that is why it is imprudent and nasty to fault anyone’s personal experience of reality. Dele, in his book, did not set out to make a generalised or objective narrative about the experience of Nigeria’s criminal justice system by the majority of Nigerians. He was specific about the fact that it was about his personal experience. So, how would any reasonable being fault that? How would anyone tell a hunter, who had gone hunting alone, that his claim that an antelope he shot at escaped with a bullet wound, was not true?
This is the same with the flawed sense of patriotism that Nigerians exhibit whenever a Nigerian lampoons Nigeria’s national operating system from Europe or America. For instance, David Adeleke (Davido) and Kemi Badenoch spoke about their experience of Nigeria from the USA and England. Nigerians tore them apart. However, none of those who disagreed with David and Kemi, just to show that they love Nigeria more, took any steps to tell the sweet Nigerian story as they have experienced it. All there is to it is to condemn David and Kemi, much in the same manner that Dele was condemned, for telling their experiences of the Nigerian reality.
Meanwhile, the experiences narrated by Dele in his book (I heard much more as a judiciary reporter), alongside what David and Kemi said about Nigeria, are not different from the things Nigerians say about their country every day both in and out of their workplaces. Behind doors, Nigerians complain of a very weak judiciary. They accuse judges of being appendages of political actors. They accuse election petitions tribunal judges of working for the ruling party. They accuse the Police of all sorts of malfeasance. The only time Nigerians tend to like the Nigeria Police is when their lives are endangered and the police respond smartly and effectively too. They always lampoon the operating system of their country, reviewing what the government ought to have achieved but for ineffective leadership and stealing by public officeholders. However, it seems that the crime Nigerians commit is to openly and freely talk about the systemic flaws in their country while abroad. That, in itself, suggests that they are not free to criticise their country while in Nigeria.
Sadly, those who think that Dele was wrong to have written his experience in his book, or that David and Kemi were unpatriotic to have spoken about Nigeria the way they did, fail to notice that people elsewhere do not need to read ‘Nigeria’s Criminal Justice System’ to know that the justice system in Nigeria is deplorable neither do they need to listen to David and Kemi to get a glimpse of the poverty of the Nigerian reality. The true picture of Nigeria is on the global map. Everyone knows it. Nigeria’s political leaders advertise it every time, everywhere. I mean, David Cameron did not need to read Dele’s book or listen to David and Kemi to conclude in 2016 that Nigeria is “fantastically corrupt.” Donald Trump did not read Dele or listen to David and Kemi in 2018 when he declared that African countries, Nigeria inclusive, are shitholes. If since independence till date, Nigeria’s national operating system had been managed effectively to deliver a better country with better living standards, Trump would not have said of Africans (Nigerians) “Once they had seen the United States, they never go back to their huts in Africa.”