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Dotun Oyeniyi
 Author, Economist and Practicing Attorney
London, England

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A functional judicial system will have to be potent enough to have subpoenaed Babangida to trial, it would be able to find the faceless murderer who killed Bola Ige and would have finished with Bamaiyi trial within a mere eighteen months.  This is the kind of judicial system that we deserve and should call for; otherwise we will continue to make a caricatural mockery of the word justice as we presently appear to be doing.

 

FREEDOM FOR LT-COLONEL ISHAYA BAMAIYI: MUCH ADO ABOUT NIGERIA JUDICIAL SYSTEM
 by Dotun Oyeniyi
 

No.  I am not making a mistake.  I mean Lieutenant-Colonel Ishaya Bamaiyi and not Lieutenant-General Ishaya Bamaiyi.  This is because I sincerely think that Nigeria should extend the attempted ‘decimalisation’ of the Naira, propounded by the CBN governor, Charles Soludo to our military ranks.  Soludo, we would recall, attempted to slash the value of the naira by one-tenth or so, so that if you had N1000 in the bank, it becomes N100, this according to him was because the naira is overvalued.  That novel proposition has now been rested on the presidency’s instruction.

Following that proposition, I have ruminated a thousand and one times on the necessity to also ‘decimalise’ our military ranks.  We have got too many Generals, Colonels, Majors other self-awarded ranks, wantonly granted for all reasons but professionalism and heroism.  Apart from those I like to call the last of the truly professional Generals – Obasanjo, Yar’Adua, Danjuma and those who served with them, others from Muhamadu Buhari and his ilk in1983 to Abdulsalam Abubakar and those who served with him in 1999  should have their ranks reviewed and amended accordingly.  They are highly likely to have attained their ranks on a platter of politics and connections. I wish the Presidency could set up a military ranks review committee that will unearth the process of promotions during those dark eras between Jan 1 1983 and May 29 1999.  Whether the presidency does this or not, from the bottom of my own heart, I only know of ‘Colonel’ Ibrahim Babangida, ‘Lt.-Col’ Jeremiah Useni, ‘Lt.-Col’ Oladipo Diya, ‘Lt.-Col’ Ishaya Bamaiyi, ‘Captain’ Buba Marwa and ‘Warrant Officer’ Hamza Al-Mustapha among others.  To blind ourselves to their brutish past and appalling iniquities and continue to refer to them as Generals, Colonels and Majors is just a needless flattering of their arrogant egos.

But I am somehow jumping the gun; for the purpose of this article is not the review of military ranks but the fallout of Bamaiyi’s recent release from prison. By way of recapitulation, at about 10 am on the 23 November of 1999, ‘Lt Col’ Ishaya Bamaiyi took the first step in what turned out to be a long march through prison as he and two others were disgorged from the bowel of a Black Maria to face a two-count charge of attempted murder of Alex Ibru, the Guardian publisher, at the GRA Ikeja Magistrates Courts.

It was a 360-degree turnaround in fortune for Bamaiyi who as chief of army staff just seven months before, was one of the most powerful men in Nigeria.  His last recorded image in my memory was captured on May 29 1999 at the Eagle Square in Abuja during the hand over of government to Chief Olusegun Obasanjo.  On that day, he was dressed in a ceremonial military uniform, his shoulder laden with fully stocked epaulette and his chest brimming with an astonishing array of medals.  His look unmistakably that of a man revelling in the sense and exercise of power. 

A few weeks ago, the same Bamaiyi re-emerged from behind the iron bars of Kiri-Kiri maximum prison after a nine-year spell, discharged and acquitted of the charges against him, courtesy of another erudite judgment from Hon Justice Olubunmi Oyewole.  The prison experience appeared to have transformed him.  He wore a darker skin like one that just underwent cosmetic makeup in readiness for an elderly person’s role in a Nollywood movie.  His sober look and calm countenance appeared to unveil a new and refined Bamaiyi, weaned of that contemptuous arrogance that he seemed to carry about with him while still a uniformed personnel.   

I have not the slightest of sympathy for him because he and his colleagues had no pity for the poor Nigerian masses while they held the nation with absolute subjugation.  Only God and possibly ‘Lt. Col’ Bamaiyi himself can tell how many innocent citizens were detained, beaten or harassed on his order throughout the period of his military career.  Inspite of this, I am still furious at our judicial system, a system that will take a whopping nine whole years to give justice to an accused.  It is irrelevant whether the accused is a former chief of army staff or an unknown ‘mai-suya’ from a tiny corner of Maiduguri.  Neither should it be of importance whether the accused is a billionaire businessman nor a street hawker in Lagos traffic.  Our judicial system should not only deliver justice to whoever was concerned, it must also do so swiftly. Nine years is too long by all yardsticks for an accused to be locked away in prison before getting justice.  It is one-seventh of the life expectancy of a well-to-do Nigerian like Bamaiyi.

More often than not, Nigerians like to acquiesce in happenings without probing why things went wrong and what we can do to make them better.   Since the release of Bamaiyi, I have patiently waited for any condemnation of a system that took nine years to deliver justice, alas, none was coming. I could sense the general feeling of disgust, even hatred that the people have for Bamaiyi and his peers that rode roughshod over us as if we were all morons.  Notwithstanding, we can teach Bamaiyi and his peers some lessons in civility and humanity by condemning any injustice directed at them.   

The advanced nations do not just sweep issues under the carpet, they hold public enquiries and set up committees to review any discernible lapses in their own systems and by so doing, forestall future reoccurrences.   That is one characteristic that distinguish human society from animals’.  Our judicial system is in a serious need of and long overdue for an exhaustive review and reform.  A system that can keep Bamaiyi in prison for nine years will probably keep you, me and other anonymous citizens in prison indefinitely.

It is the incoherent nature of our judicial system that allowed Senator Arthur Nzeribe and his faceless ABN to thwart the June 12 1993 presidential elections by obtaining, against all rational judicial practices, judgment from Bassey Ikpeme from a Benin High Court at midnight. The fallout of that conspiratorial judicial leverage for the annulment of June 12 elections is too well known than to be repeated here

There is an urgent need to further strengthen the independence of our judiciary and also give our judges more potent powers.  At the moment, our judges are like toothless bulldogs as most of their orders still need to be sanctioned by superior orders from others in the presidency before the police IG will direct his ‘boys’ on enforcement.

It is this seeming powerlessness of the judiciary that allowed even Bamaiyi and his co accused to be partly responsible for their elongated trial as they employed all conceivable tactics to clog the progress of the wheel of justice at their trial.  In a well-ordered judicial system, the trial judge would have descended, like a ton of bricks, on an accused and any legal representatives that conspired to slow down the wheel of justice like Bamaiyi and his co accused did with impunity.

Throughout human history, murder has been dealt with, with all seriousness because it is the most heinous of all crimes, only recently being pushed to a second place in the order of bestiality by terrorism. Can we ever forget how the trial of this crime, committed this time against the chief law officer of Nigeria, Attorney General Bola Ige, was turned into an equivalent of a trial at the Kootu Ashipa (Yoruba television drama, now rested, that showcased some antediluvian judicial practices) in which an accused will make a confession today, retract it tomorrow; identify a suspect today all to disown him tomorrow and one judge will take over the case today and decline to continue tomorrow. 

Did we ever ask ourselves why Ige’s trial was enmeshed in so much flagrant anomalies?  No, we didn’t.  Typical of us, we swept everything under the carpet as if nothing amiss had happened, whereas almost everything that transpired at Ige´s murder trial only exhibited, albeit to the whole world, a systemic malformation in our judicial system.

The same thing happened to the knotty trial of Dele Giwa´s murder            .  The principal suspect in that murder is the state encapsulated person of ‘Colonel’ Ibrahim Babangida.  For well over two decades that Chief Gani Fawehinmi had doggedly followed this case, this principal suspect has not for a mere one minute stood before any court in the land to attempt clearing his name. Why?  It is below the dignity of a retired ‘Colonel’, a president for eight years, a former chairman of African Union and a consummate political dribbler to stand before a mere judge to defend himself.  And what can our judicial system do to bring Babangida to trial?  Technically nothing.  Another clear example of a systemic lapse in our judicial process. 

I believe that any reasonable man accused of a crime as serious as murder will be eager to have his days in the open court to clear his name, not so for ‘Colonel’ Babangida whose utterances, countenance and bearing, not only on the Dele Giwa’s issue but also on other contentious issues like the annulment of June 12 elections and the prodigalisation of the  $22 billion oil windfall, are a mixture of arrogance, invincibility, mystification and superhumanity.  Even those elected leaders who ruled great nations like the US and UK do sometimes come to trial after leaving office let alone a ‘Colonel’ who forcefully  imposed his rule over a helpless nation and left that nation, haplessly in a combustible crisis as he scampered away from office to his hilltop mansion in Minna.

A functional judicial system will have to be potent enough to have subpoenaed Babangida to trial, it would be able to find the faceless murderer who killed Bola Ige and would have finished with Bamaiyi trial within a mere eighteen months.  This is the kind of judicial system that we deserve and should call for; otherwise we will continue to make a caricatural mockery of the word justice as we presently appear to be doing.  

 

 

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