By Rotimi Fasan
HISTORY was made Thursday last week when Justice Aloma Mukhtar assumed duty as Nigeria’s Chief Justice of the Federation.

She is the first woman to reach that height. An earlier contender to that position and wife of Chief Bola Ige, the slain Attorney General of the Federation and Minister of Justice, Justice Atinuke Ige, suddenly died in the course of fighting to bring the killers of her husband to justice.

Given the statutory age of retirement for judges, Justice Ige didn’t seem poised for the position any more before death came calling. There has been a rapid turnover of justices of the Supreme Court in recent years. Many judges get to the Supreme Court in the last few years of their stay on the bench and the very few lucky to make it to the position of Chief Justice function in that capacity for an average of two years before retirement.

Aloysius Katsina-Alu and Dahiru Mustadapher, the last two men to hold that position, moved rather very fast through the office. It’s therefore lucky that the woman who for long was best placed to make it to the rank wasn’t barred by age. At 68, though, Justice Mukhtar has just about two years to spend in office.

This is surely a milestone in Nigeria’s legal history and Nigerian women are naturally happy about it. More so that Justice Mukhtar is from Kano, one of the most conservative states in Nigeria’s conservative North West region.

She had much earlier made history as the first female lawyer from the North. Her appointment should serve as a sign of hope for Nigerian women, especially women from up the Niger River who suffer greater discrimination, for both cultural and religious factors, than their Southern sisters. Like a typical judge, Justice Mukhtar is reserved; she is hardly heard or seen in the press and enjoys the high regard of her peers.

She has come a long way and it can be hoped that her long but steady rise up the ladder would help in the transformation of the bench, especially in curbing corruption in the country’s courts. She said this much in her confirmation appearance at the Senate. Hers is a major task and she deserves all the support that can come her way.

This is wishing Justice Mukhtar a splendid time as Nigeria’s number one judicial officer. Perhaps, things are shaping up for women generally for just as Justice Aloma Mukhtar was making history in Nigeria, women in Saudi Arabia were equally doing the same thing as two of them have, for the first time ever, been selected to participate in the London Olympic which begins in a week’s time.

History of a different kind was also recorded last week with the appointment of Mrs. Patience Jonathan, wife of the President, as one of 17 Permanent Secretaries by Governor of Bayelsa State, the president’s home state, Seriake Dickson. According to reports from Bayelsa State, Mrs. Jonathan has been so appointed because of her long stay in the civil service of Rivers State from where her services have been transferred to her husband’s state.

Well, this must be surely a first in Nigeria’s history as I cannot recall a similar situation in which the wife of a serving head of state of the country is given some official civil service appointment in this manner. Certainly, not in this age when every politician’s wife, from the president down to local government chairmen, is also a First Lady with a separate office and staff have I heard of an appointment of this nature.

And Mrs. Jonathan surely doesn’t look ready to give up her First Ladyship- not with the sense of importance she seems to carry herself as wife of the President or the reported ‘swag’ she’s keen on retaining as part of the perk of her position as First Lady.

We may then need to ask if this appointment is not a self-serving act by Mr. Dickson, a fawning gesture of gratitude to a President he no doubt sees as a benefactor. More importantly, is this a paid appointment for which Mrs. Jonathan is expected to work or a ceremonial one for which she would neither work nor be paid?

Or is the Governor trying to keep ‘something’ for Mrs. Jonathan pending her return from Abuja? Let’s just hope Nigerians won’t be treated to some future scandal that the President’s wife was on the payroll of Bayelsa State government at a time she was supposed to be serving in Abuja as first lady which is even not a statutory position.

Whatever it is, this is surely a dubious first for both Mr. Dickson and Mrs. Jonathan. There are more important things for this new governor of an oil-rich state of impoverished people to do than making idle announcements like this on a useless appointment.

There is poverty all over the land, people are dying daily from avoidable causes, a lot of which are connected to mass poverty in the land but governors of our oil-rich states appear bent on frittering away the resources of their people as if they are unending.

After years of fighting for special consideration as oil-producing states, elected and appointed politicians from these states have been stealing from their own people in a manner that seems to compound the poverty of the region.

The people have simply fought to replace one set of plunderers believed to be outside the region with their own children whose claims to the collective oil wealth of the region they think nobody should question them about.

The worst part of it is that they loot their people’s treasury to spend lavishly in and develop other parts of the world- parts far more developed than the blighted Delta region.

It’s the same outsiders that Niger-Deltans thought they had to fight who now have the difficult task of fighting to keep the wealth of the region back there. James Ibori is today in a British jail where he pleaded guilty to a money-laundering charge, but he had his ardent supporters here in Nigeria. Many of these believe what he took was his patrimony as a child of the Delta.

The ordinary people of the region are now so poor that they are utterly careless of danger. They scoop oil from tankers that fall on terrible roads and get instantly roasted to their death as happened in Rivers State last week.

The sense of insecurity in the country is made worse by mass killings that government has no answer to in the North and other parts of the country. Not even senators and reps members are spared. Everybody is expendable fodder. As the cloud of doom gathers and widens across the land nobody knows what tomorrow holds for Nigerians.