Justice In The Crypt By Olatunji Ololade | Nairalaw

Chthonian vigour becomes the fetish of the legal profession. Or
whatever is left of it.

The logic and rigour of the Rule of Law incinerate in the
searing crust of venal rites. No thanks to the corrupt lawyer and
jurist.

The synthesis of their articulated and unarticulated sinful
lusts is of enormous consequence. Justice now subsists as monetised
and politicised privilege.

The gross and barbaric proliferates within the judiciary and the
legal profession because men and women with the character of the
dung-beetle and the carabid are deified as gems and cultural
touchstones.

While the corruptible jurist presides as minister of judicial
decay, the venal lawyer, flaunting the finesse of the carabid,
splashes and wades in the judicial bath of dissolution.

Integrity is exorcised. Duplicity is internalised. The system
dissembles because it has been compromised and bonded to a leash of
cash, by unrepentant occults.

If the laws could speak for themselves, they would complain of
the lawyers in the first place, argues Edward Wood aka Lord
Halifax.

And speaking to the nub of the legal profession’s deathly rally,
French dramatist and writer, Jean Giraudoux, states, that, “There’s
no better way of exercising the imagination than the study of law.
No poet ever interpreted nature as freely as a lawyer interprets
the truth.”

The corrupt lawyer would misappropriate the first sentence of
his paragraph and pay no heed to the second part. Perhaps because
he is a creature of forgettable parts. Call it selective adoption
or adaptation. I would call it the insolence of intelligence; the
blooming of brawn and perverse intellect.

The malady persists where a supposedly brilliant, connected,
legal luminary wields his passion and intellect, as the political
goon or assassin would, a machete and gun, at a price.

Many a poor, ordinary client, who hires an ‘unconnected’ lawyer
in pursuit of justice often suffers the treatment of the adulterous
widow, who hires her lover cum husband’s murderer to protect her
from the ire of vengeful in-laws.

This is perhaps an extreme take on the value of the lawyer to
the justice system as there are a few good lawyers, who have
committed their professional lives to equity and justice. These
people are not the target of this article, but the maleficent band,
masquerading as truth-seekers and legal activists.

Just recently, the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) reportedly
issued a query to Aliyu Umar (SAN), the prosecutor of the suspended
Chief Justice of Nigeria (CJN), Justice Walter Onnoghen, in the
ongoing trial of the latter, at the Code of Conduct Tribunal (CCT),
for taking up the brief.

The NBA, in the February 12, 2019 query accuses Umar of
professional misconduct for accepting the brief and the query has
triggered discord along the north-south divide following an alleged
secret move to de-robe and delist Umar as a lawyer because the NBA
demanded a copy of his Call to Bar certificate.

Some lawyers are of the opinion that the NBA issued the query in
response to a petition filed against Umar. How convenient? To the
litany of arguments and counter-arguments trailing the NBA’s
combative disposition to the Federal Government’s prosecution of
the former CJN, I find a worthy retort in prominent lawyer and
human rights activist, Femi Falana (SAN)’s take on the nation’s
legal system.

In an interview with The Punch’s Gbenro Adeoye, published on
October 22, 2016, Falana says: “For ideological reasons, I have
always had enemies in the legal profession. I am not bothered
because some of the NBA leaders are not defending judges but
themselves. When I was working with the late Comrade Alao
Aka-Bashorun, who is rated as the best NBA president so far, the
NBA did not address press conferences to declare a state of
emergency, whatever that means. If judges were harassed or lawyers
were detained, the NBA leaders would meet the Attorney-General or
President of a country to find out the basis of any arrest.

“Aka-Bashorun did that in Nigeria, Togo and Ghana. In 1987,
Aka-Bashorun mobilised 270 lawyers to defend the late Gani
Fawehinmi. He was fighting a very corrupt military junta. When the
same military dictators later charged some of us with treasonable
felony, the NBA also defended us.

“At that time, the NBA never mobilised 90 lawyers to defend any
lawyer charged with corrupt practices…The human rights committees
of the NBA were mobilised to challenge the violation of the human
rights of the Nigerian people.

“I am only asking the NBA to return to the glorious era of
defending popular causes. But I cannot be part of the NBA if it
goes around assembling scores of lawyers to appear for other
lawyers when they are charged with bribing judges. If you organise
a press conference to issue threats over the arrest of judges
accused of corruption, you simply parade the NBA as a
pro-corruption society.”

Although Falana’s take on NBA’s complicity was issued in
response to a separate incident, it no doubt suffices against the
volley of expletives and righteous vituperation issued by the NBA
and certain self-appointed judicial activists, in condemnation of
Onnoghen’s trial.

For the records, Onnoghen was suspended by President Muhammadu
Buhari for failing to declare his assets, estimated at $3 million
in domiciliary accounts, in full, before assuming office as CJN.
Buhari issued the penalty, guided by the order of the Code of
Conduct Tribunal of January 23.

Responding to the charges, Onnoghen said he forgot to declare
the assets, describing the non-declaration of his domiciliary
accounts as a mistake. Uglier details unfurl in the wake of his
prosecution.

Given the facts of the case, it is mind-boggling that so-called
senior lawyers, mostly Senior Advocates of Nigeria (SANs), would
feverishly defend Onnoghen. In tune with their character, they
belted a ludicrous aria, projecting shrilly and disconcertingly, a
vulgar melody, chock-full of hatred and ethnic bigotries. They spun
tiresome yarns to dull the ugliness of Onnoghen’s misdemeanour.

In truth, their frantic struggle is to keep the skeletons in
their closets safely tucked from the prying eyes of the government
and the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), especially
lawyers who may be found complicit making unjustifiable deposits in
the CJN’s problematic accounts.

At a round-table with the government, concerned lawyers made
outrageous demands, including the reversal of Onnoghen’s suspension
and letting him go scot-free with the money in his frozen bank
accounts.

This is what happens when duty and ethics get drenched in the
fount of errant lusts, and repute drowns in torrents of money that
extinguishes brilliance like a muck-sodden ember.

By their concerted effort to scuttle Onnoghen’s prosecution to
the curious query issued to Onnoghen’s prosecutor, Nigeria’s
so-called legal giants commit to unprecedented ridicule.

They would never query a colleague for exploiting legal
loopholes to free an established looter or mass murderer. They
would rather wield their query, like a sword, on Onnoghen’s
prosecutor.

Nigeria is in dire need of true ethical natives, heroes of the
judiciary and legal profession, on whose watch, justice may
experience a spirited rebirth.

At the moment, justice subsists as wild privilege; it suffers
savage extraction from the womb without the possibility of rebirth.
Think of it as a forgotten corpse in the judicial tomb.

Its varnished vault, like Paglia’s cave art, is a hymn to
daemonic darkness.