• Justice Ademola and his wife in the dock.
On Tuesday 13th December, Justice Adeniyi Ademola of the Federal High Court and his wife, Olabowale, were arraigned before a High Court of the Federal Capital Territory, Abuja on an eleven count charge of conspiracy and receipt of gratification, to which they pleaded not guilty. It was a dark moment for the Nigerian judiciary and perhaps the gravest instance of the judicial dimension of the crisis of the post-colonial state. For if those whose duty is to rein in lawlessness and preserve order are being arraigned on the suspicion of being lawless, then law and order are in a free fall.
The case being before a court of law and effectively sub-judice, this columnist will not join in removing the last strand of bureaucratic rationality and authority from the Nigerian judicial system. But since this is a long-standing boil in a sensitive part of the anatomy that has to be lanced and drained of its pus, some extra-legal comments and observations are now in order.
For Justice Ademola, it is a personal, professional and historic tragedy. Scion of illustrious Yoruba royalty that has contributed sterling products to the evolution of the modern Nigerian state, it was not supposed to go this way. His grandfather, Sir Adetokunbo Ademola, was the first indigenous Chief Justice of Nigeria; a 1931 Law graduate of Selwyn College, Cambridge. His father, Justice Adenekan Ademola, was an influential and respected jurist who retired from the Court of Appeal. An uncle, Justice Gboyega Ademola, aka Gbogus, was widely celebrated for his brilliance and originality.
The founding paterfamilias was no pushover. Justice Ademola’s great grandfather, Sir Ladapo Ademola, was a consummate diplomat, statesman and master conciliator who had reigned on the Egba throne at a difficult period of transition to modernity while bringing much prestige and prosperity to the Egba people.
History has it that Sir Ladapo was one of the early modernizing and westernizing Egba elite who strove and fought for the transformation of the Egba people in their new homestead. By the first decade of the twentieth century the Egba city-state had achieved considerable success in revenues from effective taxation, urban sanitation and security before it was forcibly incorporated into the Southern Nigerian protectorate. But when the Alake throne became vacant upon the transition of Oba Gbadebo the first, the then Prince Ladapo Ademola was the unanimous choice of kingmakers.
A century down the line, the nation they struggled to create is floundering abysmally, turning and turning in a widening gyre as the falcon no longer hearken to the falconer. What will these departed avatars be thinking as they watched their scion in the dock turning away from the intense public glare in misery and humiliation even as his flustered wife clutched an i-phone to record this site of historic obloquy for posterity? It is surely a world out of joints.
And the toll mounts. Two days after her arraignment with her husband, Olabowale was quietly disengaged as the Head of Service by the Lagos State Government thus terminating a commendable career which still had about six months to run. It would have been legally incongruous and politically unwieldy for her to continue in service.
Now, consider these developments which may appear on the surface to be tangentially unrelated to the matter at hand. This past week, President Buhari submitted a budget proposal to the senate with much hype and hoopla. Two days later, the senate declined confirmation of Ibrahim Magu as the substantive chairman of the EFCC, citing security reports which indict the nation’s anti-crime boss for corruption and extortion. About the same time, a new version of what is known as Ponzi scam collapsed as a result of oversubscription.
Known as MMM, the brain behind this scam launched into a barely coherent tirade against perceived enemies of the scheme. Sergey Mavrodi, a rogue speculator who looks straight out of the Russian oligarchy nightmare of the nineties, berated the Nigerian government for not providing for the people and undermining those trying to help. The goodwill CONvoy has since relocated to Kenya.
Is this the rumoured arrival of post-state actors or some criminal grandstanding by a man habitually conditioned to cheating others? Meanwhile as this was going on, a nasty spat over allegations of sleaze and corrupt enrichment ensued between the Secretary to the Federal Government and the selfsame senate. While Malam David Babachir Lawal has dismissed the allegations against him as a charade, the senate is insisting on his dismissal. The report of the senate adhoc committee is straight out of a horror movie.
Something must be terribly amiss. These developments are critical to understanding the current forlorn plight of the nation. As we have seen, the federal budget is the grand patron of legislative and executive corruption in Nigeria. Since it is not anchored on any integrative national developmental plan, since it is not tied to specific and rigidly delineated phases, it quickly unravels into an all comers open-ended bazaar with padding, constituency scams, outright stealing and other bizarre heists as its hallmark.
There is nothing to suggest in General Buhari’s body language as the annual budget ritual proceeded in the senate that the tragic lessons of the last budgetary fiasco have been learnt or internalized by the presidency. If the truth must be told, the executive has shown a remarkable aversion for confrontation where corruption and sleaze in the upper and lower houses are concerned. Party and presidency have allowed those who are guilty of padding to remain in place while the whistle blower has been thrown out of the house and to the wilderness reserved for political orphans.
But political deception also has its steep price. An objective appraisal of the forces in contention shows that as a result of executive dithering and dilatoriness, the balance of forces might have shifted in favour of the senate in a way that is not imaginable last year. This has emboldened its leadership to move from defensive rope hugging to rapid offensive. It is an offensive pointing ultimately at the political jugular of the presidency.
When everything is in place, only an extraordinary counter offensive will rescue the Buhari presidency. The political hyenas in the senate have smelt blood and God help those who are in need of help. The swift political defenestration of the outstanding Ibrahim Magu and the determined bid to bring the Secretary of the Federal Government to heel are opening gambits on the political chessboard whose echoes will soon reverberate across the political landscape.
Can we then rightly insinuate that this is a glaring and startling case of corruption fighting back? Unfortunately, matters can no longer be cast in such grim Manichean terms. The atmosphere is demonically foggy. The government has had enough time to demonstrate that it is a knight in shining armour ready to slay the demon of corruption. But it has sown enough doubts in the mind of the populace that it is probably motivated by something else other than fighting against corruption. The past two years have demonstrated that there are no saints in the Nigerian political jungle.
So rather than fight against corruption or corruption fighting back, what we have is a war of political hegemony among different factions of the ruling class. It is a war of all against all and no holds are barred. With the PDP dead and interred and with the APC critically impaired as a change platform, the war against corruption is a mask for a deeper and more fundamental contention for the battered soul of the nation. After a brief respite, the repressed has returned. Centrifugal forces have returned to haunt Nigeria. As history has taught us, this kind of contention only ends with the mutual ruination of the contending classes and the nation as currently configured.
Tragically enough, the Nigerian multitude and suffering masses who are expected to intervene very decisively in this hegemonic war of the ruling class have been so hobbled by poverty and immiseration that they have resorted to their own Ponzi scheme to get rich quickly. In a situation of deepening misery and biblical hunger, the ordinary people will be vulnerable to economic miracle workers and religious Rasputins.
In a way, this development is good for the nation for it forces us back to the fundamental issue, which is the unresolved National Question. It has been said that history is something that hurts and that which will not ignore us however much we ignore it. Given the poverty of politics and the politicization of poverty and corruption, can this gifted but much abused country survive in its current structural configuration? Yours sincerely doubt very much.
As for the docked Justice Ademola and his wife, since the current fog has made it impossible to distinguish between saints and sinners, they are likely to be remembered as inevitable collateral damage of a civil war for the control of Nigeria in which ethics and morality are fanciful tropes fashioned as weapons of political assault.
This is not a development to be applauded by genuine patriots. In No Longer at Ease, a man trained with community funds returns only to be gobbled up by the cesspit of corruption that has turned out a prescient projection of the neo-colonial state. He was jailed. But that was not the problem. The problem was that he was the grandson of the illustrious and heroic Okonkwo.
