Why Nigerian Judges Are Corrupt   

Published on August 30, 2010 by TheNEWS   ·   3 Comments

Mustapha Akanbi Foundation, a non-governmental organisation founded by Justice Mustapha Akanbi, former president of the Court of Appeal and former chairman, Independent Corrupt Practices Commission, on Wednesday 21 July assembled some of the finest minds in the bar and the bench for a one-day symposium in Abuja with the theme, “Courts and Management of Election Petitions: Challenges, Prospects and Solutions”. Akanbi spoke to OLUOKUN AYORINDE on why the symposium was organised, the handling of election petition cases by Tribunals and the problem with the Nigerian judiciary. He also proffered suggestions on how the Election Petitions Tribunals can be made to function more effectively. Photos: FEMI IPAYE

Why do you think it is necessary to organise a symposium on the management of election petitions at this particular time?
I think the reason is obvious. We did an election in 2007 and up till now, election petitions are still being heard in the courts, appeals are still being heard at the Court of Appeal level and we are in 2010. The next election is 2011. Those who were declared winners––like a governor––he has been in office since 2007, there is a petition against him, that petition will be heard in 2011. By that time he would have spent the four, or three out of four, years. If eventually the election is voided, then we go back to square one; there will be another election or a re-run. I think it is a bad situation, it never occurred in the past going by my own experience. And I felt something must be wrong somewhere. So, I felt I owe it as a duty to myself and to this country that we should talk; we should brainstorm on it––what are the reasons just as you are asking me. Some attribute it to corruption, some attribute it to laziness on the part of the adjudicator, some believe that there is abuse of office or misuse of office, some also have the feeling that jurisdictional problem is also there. We have to find the remedy so that we can finish elections in good time, the petitions can be heard in good time and concluded so as not to defeat the end of justice. A man who is not qualified to be there remains there, a man who is qualified to be there has been denied the opportunity to at least, know his fate. That’s why we held the symposium.

From the symposium and from your own personal findings, what would you attribute the delay in the conclusion of election petitions to?
You know nobody will come out to say I received bribes, that is why I didn’t do it. But we have been able to point out to them that a few judges have been removed as a result of corruption. Justice Opene, Justice Ade from the Court of Appeal were removed for misconduct for either making an order they ought not to make and what have you. All these points were reiterated at the symposium. We were speaking to ourselves. If you watched, majority of those who spoke were judges, lawyers and then, the people whose lives would be affected as a result of these delays. What’s more, you know if a man like Justice Esho has to say that judges are corrupt, that they have become billionaires as a result of election cases, I don’t think he was given to cheap talk or flippancy. So, we all know. What we are trying to tell ourselves is why are these things happening? Nigeria is not the only country that will hold elections, but in the other jurisdictions it is not so. But your guess is as good as mine.

Some retired judges like you have even been mentioned as facilitators of these bribes to the Tribunals because they act as go-between the Tribunals and givers of the bribes?
When you said go-between, I have a bit of a problem there, which I said in a paper. I remember the former Chief Justice of Nigeria, Idris Kutigi said something like that which was reported in the papers, but he did not name those who are the go-between. And I said it in my paper that if I were still with the ICPC, I would have gone to the CJN and asked him to name the person. The EFCC is there, they could go and find out from him. But Nigeria being a very wonderful country, they did not say anything. So, we are all left to guess; no report has been made and if you guess and you guess wrongly, you will be in trouble.

You were once a member of the National Judicial Commission, NJC, a body in charge of matters like this. There have been allegations that even when you sacked judges for corruption you don’t go the whole hog of ensuring their prosecution?
It is not within the province of NJC to prosecute. There is always division of labour. The NJC, if it receives a complaint against a judge, the Chairman will now write through the head of the particular court a letter to the judge complained against and ask him to comment through the head. When we get the comment, the NJC will now study both the complaint and the reply. If there is substance in it, it will set up a panel of three or so invariably. They will now go and investigate. They will get the core evidence against the man accused––if there are witnesses against him––and at the end of the day they will write their report and make recommendations they consider necessary. When they make their recommendations, if we are satisfied that the recommendations appropriately take care of the situation, we will approve it. If we want a more serious punishment, we can vary it based on the evidence adduced. That is where the NJC stops at that particular problem. I remember the case of a judge who went to fight at a petrol station in Plateau State. He got somebody bundled into the boot of the car and we thought that was unbecoming of a judge. I think the recommendation made was like he should be demoted, but at the end of the day, the NJC said he should be sacked and he was dismissed. That’s the NJC.
What is important is that the EFCC, particularly the ICPC, should be responsible when it comes to the issue of prosecuting a judge who has been found wanting. It is their responsibility to look into it. I remember the cases of thee judges who were dismissed. It was referred to the ICPC, it is their responsibility. For instance, The Daily Trust wrote that the courts are the biggest collector of bribes and that report came from a survey carried out by the EFCC, the Bureau of Statistics with the support of the UNODC––United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. For them to say so, the EFCC should be asked if that is the case, how many judges have they prosecuted, how many have they arrested? It means they are in possession of facts which they should take up. The ICPC should also be asked. It is not enough for them to say that they have the perception index – you are the one that is supposed to catch the judges who are taking these bribes, so if you have this report, how many have you prosecuted, how many have you arrested? I know that Farida Waziri has been saying that the courts have not been helpful. When I was there, I was saying that too. For instance, we were to investigate a president of the Senate, we were to investigate the speaker of the House, but all of a sudden, they went to court and the court stopped us from investigating. And I believed that they have no power to do that because we have the power of the police; you don’t stop investigation, there are decisions to that effect. But if Farida is still talking about that, it only means that the courts themselves have not studied the underpinning philosophy of the war against corruption.

Some people have also attributed the problems bedeviling the Nigerian judiciary to the quality of personnel being appointed to the bench
I was a member of the NJC, so I participated in the appointment of people to the bench. And I say it without fear of contradiction, I have had to oppose appointments on the basis that I know Mr. So, So and So is corrupt. But I am sorry to say, part of why we held the symposium is to alert the judiciary that what is happening today was not happening before. Now, judges are very well paid, some of them are earning unbelievable gratuities. I am on a pension of N173,000.00 a month. There are judges earning N970,000.00 as pension every month; those who retired after us. I retired in January 1999, 11 years ago or so. Even for my gratuity, they first gave me just over N1 million. I had to fight it before they gave me about N2mn. Today, judges are retiring and they are getting N10mn, N20mn, N30mn, so they have no cause to be corrupt. They are being well paid. This quality that you spoke about, I told Justice Sowemimo, the former CJN when he was retiring that this exercise of removing judges as the Buhari/ Idiagbon administration did was not the answer. The answer is, go to the source––appoint the right person, the right calibre of people into the judiciary so that there will be no need to remove them eventually. But today, tribalism has been brought into appointment of judges. If you appoint somebody as the head of a court now, the first thing he will want to do is to put people from his area, not only on the bench but even among the other staff. That’s why I always say that we need proper education, a new orientation infused with feelings of patriotism, feelings of God’s consciousness and integrity because at the moment, we are appointing chief judges, chief justices just based on seniority

Not based on the integrity of the appointees?
It is just seniority – when the person there is going, you know the next man. And those who can move round and talk, they know how to talk their way into these things. We have problems with education; Nigerians must be re-educated, they must cry out when they see something bad. Like you heard the Chairman of the symposium say, I wouldn’t have been on the bench but for my father. I wanted to be a top class lawyer and by the time I resigned from Ministry of Justice and went into practice in Kano, they would hardly bring somebody from Lagos to come and do a case. For the five years we had Kano as our headquarters. Abdullahi Ibrahim joined me, he was in Kaduna, in charge of the chambers. Sadiq, a former speaker in Kwara House of Assembly, was heading Ilorin. We were to establish the Lagos chamber before pressure was mounted on me, not only by my colleagues but by the expatriate judges, to come to the bench. And when I told my father, he said, ‘High Court, not Magistrate, what are you looking for? Money? You better go and take it.’ He said: ‘Forget about me and your mother, if it is what you will give us.’ But today, for every one appointment opening, you have about five, six people coming to your house begging, ‘please, help me.’ At one time I stood for somebody I didn’t know, because I looked at the records and I opposed the candidate they brought, who was even better known to me, family wise, to make sure that fellow was appointed. I looked at his records, I looked at his performance, he was honest, he was doing a good job, he qualified before the other person, and he did more cases. Again, you see, what is painful is that Nigerians will tell you that they want justice. The same people who come to you are those who will be responsible for bringing some of the bad eggs. For instance, a governor may insist that this is the man he wants, but instead of telling him that this one is not good, they will agree. I remember Sir Adetokunbo Ademola, when some recommendations were made, he took it to [Gen. Yakubu] Gowon. It is common knowledge, Gowon is still alive. Gowon wanted somebody appointed, but Sir Adetokunbo told him that, ‘When you want to appoint your colonels, promote them and all that, I don’t interfere, so why are you insisting on him? I can’t appoint him.’ Then, Gowon soft-pedaled. You know Gowon is a gentleman, so Sir Adetokunbo had his way. Sir Adetokunbo later took the file of the man Gowon was supporting to him after he had made the appointment and said: ‘You can read about your man.’ After he had read it, he found that the man was not alright. But now, I don’t know the relationship between the CJN and the President. Normally, the Head of State or the President would not dabble into judicial matters unless you make yourself open. When I was with the ICPC, if the President said anything about what we were doing, I would go to him and say, ‘Your Excellency, don’t dabble into judiciary matters.’ And President Olusegun Obasanjo, because of the respect he has for me, listened. Whatever anybody may say, even when I left office, about three times my advice was sought and I don’t know him rejecting any, and I didn’t know him before I became the chairman of ICPC. He got to know me through my reputation and up till today, I will say there will never be any President who will say Sir to me again as Obasanjo was saying. So, it depends on the leadership of the Judiciary. If the leader is not corrupt, if the leader is a man of strong character, if he is bold and has courage of conviction to do what is right, things will be alright. The people who will be brought in will be the right persons. At the NJC level––because you may want to ask what is the NJC doing––we work by consensus. But I know a particular case––I don’t want to embarrass the member––when somebody was to be appointed, he had already gone through, but as they were about concluding, I said I have a question. I said the honourable member should speak about the person who is about to be appointed, to tell everybody what he told me in private in my house. The member was shocked. He said, ‘My Lord, that is not important.’ I said, I want you to say it. If he is good, he will be appointed; if he is not good, then people will know. He said, ‘We are not speaking about his competence.’ I said, It is not competence, just say it. He could not say it. So, I told others that, Since he cannot say it, I don’t think his candidate is appointable. And he was never appointed. Again, people who will be appointed into the NJC must be men of character, men who are bold, who will be fearless, who will not cheat, people who can look at the chairman’s face. After all, the chairman is a case of primus inter pares, he is just first among equals, there is nothing he could do. Like me then, I was retired, so what was he going to do to me?

But would you say the present leadership, based on your observations, possesses these qualities that you talk about?
I would expect some of them who I have known, who have passed through various vicissitudes of life, to be able to say no. Now, the man who gave the keynote address at our symposium, Justice Aderemi, he is a man well brought up, decent background, he is a nephew of Justice Ganiyu Agbaje, a retired Supreme Court Judge, he can say no because he knows that if he ought to say no and he didn’t say so, some of us can call him to question.

But from what you have been saying, those kinds of men are few in our present day judiciary
That is the problem. But you see, that is why people like Esho are becoming frustrated and again raising the issue of: suppose the Chief Judge is corrupt, who judges him? And he is now advocating for the establishment of Judicial Performance Commission or something like that. Now, that is why I spoke of education––all of us have to be re-educated. The mind has to be re-branded first, has to be re-orientated because we are descending the slippery slope already. You know, the two boys who did the master of ceremony at the symposium are my children––one has a doctorate degree in law, the other has a doctorate degree in law––and I try to encourage them not to look at what is going on in the society; they should look inwards, look back at the home. Are we failures? We are not. You know Abdullahi who spoke at the symposium was emphasising character because we worked together. Abdullahi did not tell the whole story about our work in Kano –– they brought a Kano man to supersede him when he was senior to that man. I told him: Abdullahi, you have to leave the job as I left. We are not hungry. And he went to establish his chambers. He has produced so many SANs today.

As somebody who has been involved in the fight against corruption, what is your impression of the performance of the key anti-graft agencies. You just talked about the EFCC…
I am not accusing EFCC of anything. What I am saying is that if they are part of a report that says courts are the biggest takers of bribes, if they have evidence on which they based their perception, have they taken action to bring those judges to book or have they been compromised or have they been begged not to do this? Because you need courage––courage cold as steel––to fight corruption. Apart from the courage, you must be prepared to sacrifice––self sacrifice, untainted by jealousy and ambition––to be able to do that work effectively. Because as soon as matters get to you, you will be amazed at the number of people who will start coming to you not to do this, because of that. In our NGO, one boy we gave money to go and pay to the bank, he didn’t pay. I have handed him over to the police. The mother wept, the wife wept, but the N65,000.00 we gave him, he didn’t go to the bank, he forged the stamp on the teller. You did that to an ex-ICPC Chairman, ex-judge? I handed him over to the police in Ilorin, because if we are fighting corruption, we must set example. To your question on the fight against corruption, when I was there, I didn’t have the problem of any pressure, and I won’t even succumb to it and some people know that. I know of a governor who told a friend of mine that ‘this your man cannot be penetrated’. This my friend, we grew up together in Accra, he knows me very well, he said: ‘Justice Akanbi is like that from his youth. When we started, we arrested a chairman, and people were saying we had not caught the big fish. But as time went on, we started pouncing on people like S.M Afolabi, Akwanga––they were ministers, permanent secretary, Wabara, Matazu and so on. I know of a professor of law, he visited me and my colleagues who after leaving me, was telling some people that, ‘Can you imagine Justice Akanbi ordering the arrest of a colleague, a judge?’ He didn’t know that my boy was around there. Matilda was a judge, Ahura was a judge, a Sharia court judge, all of them, even the guys in Akwa Ibom, but we arrested them for corruption. I don’t know what has happened to those cases, but since I left ICPC, I never stepped there again.

But Wabara and others were recently freed by the Appeal Court?
We never took anybody to court without seeking legal opinion, sometimes from outside. We have a team of lawyers. So, our own was, when there was a prima facie case, we took them to court. But what the courts do is their problem. We are not the judge, our own is to investigate and take them to court. If they see the judge and they are allowed to go or the judge said there is no case against them, who am I to say no? When I was a judge, nobody would do that to me. I was not the trial judge but I knew the mere arrest of that person was even something. Unfortunately, in Nigeria we celebrate the corrupt. I learnt that somebody who was accused of corruption, the day he arrived in his hometown, everybody was carrying placards, crying hallelujah and so on. So, I don’t know what is happening in ICPC. I don’t know if the tempo which we set is being followed.

What do you think of this practice of arraigning people in court on hundreds of charges for stealing billions of naira and when they appear in court for the first time the case just appears to be bogged down; no progress whatsoever, as it is happening in the cases of some of the former governors being prosecuted?
Well, my experience as a state counsel, the way we were trained is, if you find out that a man has committed many offences, you select about five concrete ones which you can prove as quickly as possible. But if the whole essence is to say this man has committed this number of offences, only to leave it there, then you have a problem.

We are going into another general election in which we will unarguably have many petitions. What would be your recommendations so that we will not repeat the same mistakes?
I know that the National Assembly has been trying to amend the law in the course of the other exercise of the amendment of the constitution. One of the reasons that there was a complaint that a time for deciding the cases should not be fixed is based on some of the decided cases in the past––the case of C.C Onoh and the rest of them. But I want to say that if the Constitution said the cases must be concluded at a fixed time, that decision will be respected. That’s one. Then, number two, judges who are going to sit over election cases must be highly competent and disciplined judges. Judges who are prepared to work; you know some of them feel that ‘you can’t kill me and all that’. When I was doing an election probe in 1986 in Nsukka, it was during the fasting period, I was fasting. I remember we sat at nine, we would break at two to enable me say my prayers. By 4 O’clock, I would go back. By seven, we will break. By eight, I would be back and I sat till 4.30am. The earliest time I closed was about two, three in the morning. The VC would be tired, he would be sleepy. I had people like Chima Ubani, Femi Falana, they were there. They all felt I was stretching them unnecessarily. When I was doing a probe, also in Port Harcourt, it was the same thing. One of the Senior Advocates even said he was going to report me to my wife; that I wanted to kill myself. Today, I tell my staff that when I was in government, for all assignments, I worked like a slave. You must have a sense of commitment. The judges, first of all must be knowledgeable. If you are not knowledgeable, one SAN will come and he will start talking and you will just be listening. You, as the judge must control the litigation. You’d say, ‘Look, some of the submissions you are making are so basic and elementary.’ He would even cite the case of prove beyond reasonable doubt, but you should let him know that you are not a student––every student of law knows that––please, get into another thing. By the time you control them effectively, they will speed up the case. Some of them will bring up issues to deliberately stretch the time of the litigation because they have agreed with their client that the more you can stretch the case, the longer they will remain on the seat. When I was a counsel, I made my case forcefully before a judge, and I worked for it. When I was a judge, I stayed and I worked and I was ever alert. So, if I found that you were delaying, I would say, ‘Have you read the case of so, so and so? If you have read it, tell me the facts.’ If you say ‘I am sorry, I have not read it,’ I will set a time for you: go and read it, and come back. I will call another case. But these things are not taught in the classrooms, but most of the judges we have now did not meet people like Sir Adetokunbo, Fatai Williams, people like Sowemimo, Elias. Then we later had people like Babalakin, Bello, who would not allow you to be rambling all about in their court. So, a judge must be able to control his court and must bear it in mind that this matter is an election petition, therefore, I must give it priority of attention. But you need extra effort to be able to do that.
Then, number three, you don’t lay yourself open to abuse. So, eventually it depends on the quality and the character of the judges. Judges must be ready to work. When I was working, the way I worked, people thought I was overstretching myself, but I thank God that I was able to do that. And then, that was when we had men who would look at your performance to recommend you. Now, they have brought nepotism into the matter. Any of them who gets there now, immediately you are appointed the head, you have to go and bring your townsman to be even in the registry. Even the registries are corrupt. In fact, what we hear, we can’t say.

Talking about how cases get prolonged, what is your impression of the way the Sokoto State gubernatorial matter is being handled, going from Court of Appeal to Supreme Court and so on. And now the judgment has been ‘arrested’ by the Apex court, or is that not the right word?
You have used the right word. At the symposium, I spoke about the decision of the Supreme Court in which four Justices said they had jurisdiction and only one of them said they had no jurisdiction––the dissenting voice of Justice Mahmud Mohammed and I commended him. I know them, I know all the judges who sat, I know their ability, I know their capacity. There is no constitutional provision for a Chief Justice to stop the Court of Appeal, even without reference to the President of the Court. I don’t want to go beyond that. They said the matter is subjudice, that word came up. If I had intervened, I would have said it’s not subjudice on that pronouncement by the four judges. But because of the Sokoto case, some people are quarrelling with me seriously now. But I fear God, not man. That’s why I said what I have just said now. But we have not heard the end of the story.

Tags:  former president of the Court of Appeal, Independent Corrupt Practices Commission, Justice Mustapha Akanbi, Mustapha Akanbi Foundation