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By Ahmed Shehu
Rule of law entails that individuals and organisations no matter how highly placed and how sacred, obey the law, and obedience to the law can more effectively be ascertained by how these institutions and individuals treat the pronouncements that come from courts and judicial officers.
Any nation that degrades to the point where pronouncements by the judiciary are treated with levity or outright disdain, has lost its claims to democracy and rule of law, and when there is an absence of rule of law, nations hang on the edges of anarchy.
The essence of the judiciary is to provide the people, no matter how lowly placed on the rungs of the society or how much suspected to have committed a crime by the system, with a solid hope of seeking redress and proving their innocence. Part of the dangers of disobeying court orders is that you leave the people with an option to resort to self-help and distrust the potency of judicial intervention.
I am not one of those who admire Godwin Emefiele, the suspended governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN). If I had any admiration for him, it would be for that gentleman who rose from the ranks in the private sector to build and stabilize one of the biggest financial institutions in Africa, the Zenith Bank.
But, as the governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, I have my reservations about his style, even though I am not a finance specialist and lacks the expertise to appreciate the peculiar circumstances under which he worked. All I know is that under him, our foreign exchange became a pathetic comedy, where our Naira became some low value piece of paper and inflation hit the rooftop.
I was also a victim of his badly applied, but apparently well-conceived Naira swap and cashless policies. But, my personal reservations about him and the fact that I am a victim of his monetary policies would not make me look the other way, while our entire institution is brought to ridicule in an apparent bid to get even with him.
The Department of State Services (DSS), a creation of the law, has consistently shown itself to be above the laws of Nigeria, and taken ridiculous steps to undermine the judiciary. Court after court have given orders concerning Emefiele’s unjust incarceration, and at every turn, the DSS finds a way to disobey the order. The agency has left no one in doubt of their immunity from the laws of the land. But, a reading of the laws establishing the agency gives it no immunity, and of course, couldn’t have given it such immunity.
If as a security agency it enjoys immunity from pronouncements of the court, then, it portends danger for the very existence of the agency, because all any Commander-in-Chief might need is to give an order, and everyone he hated would be clamped in their detention and the keys would be submitted to his table. As such, we wouldn’t be far from the Hobbesian state, where life is “solitary, brutish and short.” Democracies do not permit any authority to be beyond the reach of the law.
By re-arresting Emefiele within the court premises after a judge had given an unambiguous order that the bank chief should be kept in the custody of the Correctional Centre, pending the perfection of the N20 million bail he was granted, the DSS is letting the world know that the Nigerian judiciary is no better than a comedy theatre, where people come for entertainment rather than the serious business of seeking judicial interpretation and intervention.
The DSS, if it had the slightest regard for rule of law would have let Emefiele go to the Correctional Centre, and if they had any compelling reason to rearrest him, sought the authorisation of the court to do so. But with the brazen disregard for a court’s order and the commando style in which they took a man, freed by the courts back into custody, they have affirmed that the Nigerian judiciary is useless and their pronouncements are as impuissant as the rants of some roadside minstrels.
How the judiciary responds to this apparent slap on its face by Nigeria’s Secret Service will go a long way in determining how Nigerians and the world regard the Nigerian judiciary. Would they sit back and watch their authorities constantly degraded and the temple of justice spat upon? Only time will tell.
…Shehu, a public affairs analyst, writes from Abuja
