By Emeka Umeagbalasi

In order to keep this heart-breaking saga fresh in the minds of Nigerians so as to ensure that justice is done at the end, we wrote the National Judicial Council, NJC through its Deputy Chairman, on March 11, 2011 to acknowledge the receipt of two letters dated March 2, 2011, and forwarded to us by the Council, and to insist on our earlier call for the matters not to be swept under the carpet. The two letters were for the information of International Society for Civil Liberties and the Rule of Law, under our leadership, regarding letters sent to the duo of the Chief Justice of Nigeria and President of the Court of Appeal, by the council, requesting for their comments over the said allegations contained in various open sources, such as audio, audio-visual and written media, on which basis our letter to the council, dated February 24, 2011, was predicated upon.

As a matter of true speaking, it gladdens our heart to note and appreciate the swift response given to our letter and its adoption by the Distinguished Council as the lead-petition worthy of investigation. It would have amounted to disservice to the nation and corporate inaction on our part, if we had remained silent or toed the line of ethnocentrism or manifest bias, as other sister bodies have patently done, while these earth-shaking judicial deviancies persisted.

Salami, PCA and Katsina-Alu, CJN

It must be pointed out that one of the banes retarding Nigeria’s development in contemporary times is ethnocentrism and parochial interests.

Today, the substantial section of the Nigerian media and other public galleries have continued to be flooded with grossly biased and ethnically motivated commentaries over these sad developments at the top level of the Judiciary of Nigeria, and the most worrying part is that the hitherto revered leading civil society organizations in Nigeria are now the leading ethnic-inspired advocates, particularly with respect to the issues in contention.

If these world-class groups could single out one of the two parties in the damaging saga, for demonization, and the other for canonization, despite the weighty criminal complaints against them, then our society is speedily losing its grip of our God-given liberators to hellish kingdom. For instance, to people like Tobi Soniyi (please see This Day of Sunday, March 13, 2011, at page 98 & 99), ‘the allegations against the PCA are very watery, but those against the CJN are very weighty.’

This is a clear case of being judgmental and vested interests, which is the very cancer destroying our growth as a nation. If our judiciary, once rated as best and the rescuer of Nigeria’s democracy could be allowed to be battered and corrupted by pollutant viruses in political kaftans and judicial wigs and gowns, then Nigeria and Nigerians are doomed.

Our love for the Nigerian judiciary is total, and this explains why we struck, not minding whose ox was or is gored. Our unequivocal position remains that 1. Nigerian judiciary must be rescued from apparent brink of damnation and freed from the bondage of political termites, and Their Lordships, The Termites. 2. The CJN and the PCA must be thoroughly investigated over their alleged unethical roles in the Sokoto, Ekiti and Osun States’ Gubernatorial Matters. 3. They must not be persecuted in the process of their being investigated, but must be given fair hearings. 4. All unsolicited, provocative, distractive and ethnically and parochially motivated publications and commentaries, tended to sweep the issues under the carpet or destroy the substance of same should be ignored or done away with by both the Probe Committee and the NJC. 5.

At the end of the investigations, which must be thorough, if the defendants are not found wanting, they should be publicly exonerated, and their grounds of exoneration made public, but if the contrary is the case, that is to say if they, or either of the two, are (is) found involved, they (he) should be made to face the hash music of our laws and their professional code of conducts.

We also wrote the five-person probe committee led by Justice Umaru Abdullahi, the retired PCA. In the said letter, they were reminded to leave no stone unturned in unraveling the truth contained in the weighty allegations, and the need to see their task as a national assignment meant to save the all-important Judiciary of Nigeria from further precipitation was clearly emphasized. The noble Committee’s work must be concluded within the two months given to it. It is quite amusing reading in the media lately the sudden self-glorification by some big-time civil society groups with respect to which of the petitions forwarded to the NJC the respected Council is investigating.

In a clear attempt to intimidate and dwarf us, the media, courtesy of the said world-class groups, is now awash with self-glorified stories that tend to blacken us media-wise, and give honour to those the honour was not meant for in this respect.

It is correct to say that petitions seeking for the head of the CJN alone, leaving out the PCA, were presented to the NJC by many, if not most of the big-time comrade-groups. They were also wrongly rooted, having been addressed to “a judge in his/her own case”. But ours was the opposite of the forgoing, which was why it was adopted by the NJC. This is, simply, to put the records straight. We sincerely commend the Vanguard’s Law & Human Rights for its unbiased approach to this issue and urge it to follow this honourable path till the end.