When one recalls the famous statement of French author, poet, and statesman, Alphonse de Lamartine that “A conscience without God is like a court without a judge,” it brings to mind, not just the power and might of judges, but also the Divine nature of the office occupied by the people in whose hands task to infuse truth, fairness, and justice in the relationship between man and his society.
If you read this Lamartine quote slowly a couple of times, it will dawn on you that this French nobleman elevated judges to the status of the divine; judges, like God, are perfect and will not be found either making mistakes or doing any wrong. This is because the pronouncements of judges at the courts carry the divine weight of deciding the future from the present, determining whether life would be short and brutish or fair and equitable, and is the difference between life and death for those who before them seek refuge from their oppressors.
Our human conscience, if we squeeze further interpretations from this French jurist, is the equivalent of the court, while God and judges share the same status. As religious people, we have assumed the infallibility of God: he is the beginning and the end, the omnipotent and omnipresent, the maker of all things; he is not capable of doing wrong.
But given what we have been witnessing in Nigeria recently, it does appear Lamartine was not universally correct; it is either, unlike we had believed, God sometimes makes mistakes or there have to be some features that make the Nigerian judge remarkably distinct and thus unsuitable from this divine corollary. In Nigeria, the gods of justice have started making mistakes and to the shock and amazement of a befuddled world, are openly admitting their errors.
In deciding the governorship election of Kano State, the Nigerian Court of Appeal, the intermediate God of Justice in Nigeria, spoke with both sides of its divine mouth. In the same judgement, where it ruled that the All Progressives Congress (APC) was the winner of the election, it also stated that the New Nigeria Peoples Party (NNPP) won the election. The absurdities in this judgement are frighteningly preposterous, compelling the questioning of the “judgements” of court Judgements in Nigeria.
While the embarrassment spread like a festering sore, the Registrar of the Court of Appeal, Umar Mohammed Bangari, rose in defence of the terrible error of the gods by dismissing them as “clerical errors.”
A clerical error, as universally known, is an error on the part of an office worker, often a secretary or personal assistant. In the case of the Appeal Court judgement on the Kano Governorship election, the question to ask is, Which clerical error in a court judgement goes so widespread as to not just include typographical errors, but also contain several paragraphs of rulings in favour of the other party other than the one declared as he winner? Which clerical error includes a fine imposed against a party other than the winner in an election petition? Did the judges review the judgement before reading them in open court on judgement day?
I have come across what, in legal circles, is called a Scrivener’s error, which refers to the legal principle that a map-drafting or typographical error in a written contract may be corrected by oral evidence if the evidence is clear, convincing, and precise. The question is; are Scrivener’s errors allowed in Court Judgements? Worse still, can whole paragraphs of contradicting decisions in a court judgement be casually dismissed as a Scrivener’s error or are there things the judges – the gods at the courts – are not telling the world?
The Biblical story of Creation serves as a good example to highlight what happened at the Court of Appeal, that is if we were to further stretch the Lamartine analogy between God and judges. In the book of Genesis Chapter 1 verse 31, it was written that “… God looked over all he had made, and he saw that it was very good! And evening passed and morning came, marking the sixth day.”
What this means is that even in exercising his Divine Power of creation, God himself subjected his works to a review before declaring them to be “good enough.” But it did not appear as if the judges bothered to exercise any discretion to subject their own written works to any form of textual and contextual appraisal before delivering them as a judgement. And when a stunned world noticed the bewildering contradictions, I doubt if it was going to be enough to simply and simplistically dismiss it as mere clerical errors.
Even if what happened with the Governorship election appeal for Kano State was a clerical error, what would anyone say of the outcome of the Enugu State Governorship election petition whose outcome was known by one of the parties to the dispute long before the judgement was delivered?
You see, while the judgement delivered in the case of the Kano Governorship election looked like a poorly edited induced afterthought, the one of Enugu manifested a flagrant disregard for discretion, as one of the parties celebrated victory more than 12 hours before judgement was delivered. On the evening of November 9, 2023, a news item published on an online platform, jane-carestv.blogspot.com carried a headline, “Just in: Congratulations to the winning team, our joy is complete – Enugu Deputy Minority Leader says as Gov. Mbah, Sen Ngwu win at the Appeal Court.”
While this was still circulating, as early as 8.00 AM on November 10, 2023, the day judgement was slated to be delivered, a media aide to Governor Peter Mbah began a series of posts on the microblogging site, X (formerly Twitter), the first of which reads; “Governor Peter Ndubuisi Mbah of Enugu State prevails yet again this time at the Appeal Court. Who can pull off the Lion that it holds in between its jaws? Nobody!
Immediately after this, the same aide made another tweet, “As Peter Ndubuisi Mbah, the Executive Governor of Enugu State, prevails yet again, this time at the Appeal Court, Congratulations to the Lion.” The third tweet, made in a mix of English and Igbo was equally announcing the judgement of the court.
These facts are important because I was at the Court of Appeal on the day this judgement was delivered. I had arrived at the court as early as 7.00 AM, and although the sittings commenced around 9.00 AM on the day, judgement on the Enugu Governorship election appeal was not delivered until around 1.30 PM. It thus makes one worry about the level of confidence that could have occasioned the confidence with which the officials of the Peter Mbah administration celebrated a judgement that was eventually delivered hours ahead of the appearance and commencement of the business of the day. Could it possibly be that someone had been privy to the decision of the three-man panel of judges long before they delivered their judgement?
Curiously, the same scenario played out on the day the Enugu State Governorship Election Petitions Tribunal delivered its own judgement. Hours before the tribunal delivered its own judgement, a commissioner in the Mbah administration, Chika Ugwoke, published a flyer and caused this to be circulated on various WhatsApp groups with the message, Congratulations!!! On your victory at the Election Tribunal.” Even when a reader pointed out to him that judgement was still being read, Ugwoke did not make any attempt to withdraw the material, clearly suggesting that he was aware of the outcome.
While the “clerical error” in the Kano Governorship election judgement is indicative of a total absence of discretion on the part of many of our judges, the case of Enugu showed a dangerous disrespect and dishonour for the integrity of the courts and its judgements. The tumultuous celebrations of a judgement that was yet to be delivered can only mean that somehow, the party jubilating must have been aware of what was going to happen, and with such certainty as to trigger unhinged publications of victory in the media.
Since the Appeal Court delivered its judgement on the Enugu Governorship election appeal, I have wondered what the fate of the Nigerian justice system has become, especially given the suspicion that parties to disputes can possibly influence, and perhaps even become aware of judgements well ahead of formal pronouncement by the courts, and my feeling has been that of disappointment. The celebration of a judgement of a court in lieu of delivery not only impugns the integrity of the count involved but generally desecrates the entire justice system.
Globally, the sacred role of the courts, as captured by the National Association of Court Management (NACM), a US-based think-tank, is summarised to be; ensuring access to the court process for all who seek it, managing the business of the court in a manner that promotes efficiency, transparency and the opportunity for fair and timely disposition of the cases filed and exercising leadership among other justice-related agencies to develop strategies that join the interests of all three branches of government, recognizing that the court cannot operate in isolation, while, at the same time, maintain independence.
Given some of the ridiculous decisions of a number of Nigerian courts, most particularly in the cases of the Kano and Enugu governorship election petitions, one cannot but suspect the presence of predatory aberrations voraciously eating away the efficiency, transparency, fairness and, if you like, independence in our justice system. I do not, for instance, believe that a panel of three judges would write its judgement, subject it to reviews and end up releasing a document that contains such devastatingly conflicting decisions as was the case in Kano. I also do not believe that it was possible for a party to a dispute to know and celebrate the judgement of the court many hours before the court begins to sit. This might be tolerated if it happens just once, but when it happens twice in quick succession, it arouses preposterous feelings of bias and prejudice.
The justice system in Nigeria is not only existentially imperilled, it is at a state where colonies of voracious and deadly driver ants are eating up everything that could lead to redemption and everything must be done to reverse the downward slide, and the only way to reverse this is for each and everyone involved to return to the principles as laid down by Marcus Tullius Cicero, the Roman statesman, lawyer, scholar, philosopher, writer and Academic skeptic, who in one of his most important works, laid down the eternal principles governing law in these words:
“True law is right reason in agreement with Nature; it is of universal application, unchanging and everlasting; it summons to duty by its commands, and averts from wrong-doing by its prohibitions. And it does not lay its commands or prohibitions upon good men in vain, although neither have any effect upon the wicked. It is a sin to try and alter this law, nor is it allowable to attempt to repeal a part of it, and it is impossible to abolish it entirely. We cannot be freed from its obligations by the Senate or People, and we need not look outside ourselves for an expounder or interpreter of it. And there will not be different laws at Rome and at Athens, or different laws now and in the future, but one eternal and unchangeable law will be valid for all nations and for all times, and there will be one master and one rule, that is, God, over us all, for He is the author of this law, its promulgator, and its enforcing judge.”
Just as Lamartine did by equating the power of judges to the power of God, Cicero also pointed to God as the “promulgator of all laws and the just judge of all matters. If we fail to establish a direct relationship between justice and divinity, the revered halos that confer sanctity on our justice system will continue the ignominious loss of lustre until nothing is left except a godless society where, as Machiavelli predicted, life would be short, brutish and nasty. And when this happens, neither the beneficiaries of today’s miscarriages nor those who were robbed will live through the devastatingly crushing consequences.
Ikem Okuhu, a brand strategist and public communications expert, writes via [email protected].
