Mr President Sir; State of the Nation’s report

By Bolaji O. Akinyemi

Mr President, Sir!

Farotimi has become a necessary “evil”, the nightmare of the night season we found ourselves. Nemesis of the elite class as it appears!

Sir, you must have heard from Alhaja Abibatu Mogaji, at one time or the other in your days of growing up, “Aja rahun rahun ni pa ikun” meaning that “the underated dog often wins in hunting games.”

I need not bother you with Farotimi’s issue, for there are other pressing political issues, such as the transmutation of the 10th Joint National Assembly into the 11th Assembly by the President and Commander in Chief of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. It was a joke taking too far! The bastardisation of our democracy before the world. Whatever your intention was, was wrongly served by that utterance.

“Se a o ni kan idin ninu iyo” sure we aren’t set to stumble on maggots in the salt of our democracy?

Farotimi has become the “unpleasant odour” oozing out of our deodorised corruption. The fame of unsolicited proof of a defamation pending before our court of Justice.

Sir, the latest addition to the voices in agreement to the rot in the judiciary and endorsement of how bad it is with our Judiciary came from one who fought from the inside!

Justice Amina Augie, CON, Former Justice of the Supreme Court of Nigeria, on a panel in a video that has gone viral, she recounted her experience with war against corruption in the judiciary. I hope it is not finger pointing or an indictment of us, for your Lagos, my Lagos and our Lagos was the peak of how bad it was for her in her career and how bold and daring the judiciary cabal in Lagos were!
Her narration here:

“Get here, put these things right, next station,
the next September, I moved the case for another division.
I was presiding, back and forth. Then I ended up in Lagos.
In all those other divisions, because you know,
well Nigerians are very, very good at assessing their bosses.
You know, they have, if you’re going to work this way,
they want to do it, if you want to go straight, they
go straight with you as long as they know that you’re straight!
If you want to go like this, (crooked or underway, gesticulating with her right hand), once they see that you want to go
like that, they will even go, you may do it one yard,
they will do 10 miles, depending on you.
But once they want to do, when you,
they know you have to do it, they would.
So my reputation would precede me, I would say.
So everybody would behave themselves once up there,
because the first people I dealt with are those in my office.
You mess up, I deal with you!
That’s when they realized, oh, if she can touch her personal staff,
OK, everybody behaved.”.

In all other divisions, the “Margret Thatcher” in her was honoured and respected, but it wasn’t so in Lagos! Read her account of our State of excellence:

“Then I got to Lagos.
After a few months of trying to put the place together,
they sent me a message that they should tell me,
that if I think that I can come and touch them here, I’m joking,
they will show me that they are, anyway,
they sent me a message threatening me about some months after I got there.
And I kept telling the story of how I looked at myself that year,
first day of Ramadan of 2013.
And I’m like, they’re threatening me.
And you know, I was like, what do I do?
What, you know, when you’re so used to people obeying
and doing that, then somebody decides to take you on.
I mean, you could imagine how I was thrown in my chair, what do I do?
Fortunately, the presiding Judge at the PCA,
Honorable Justice Bulkachuwa, was in town.
And she left a message that I was the only one who could see her.
So I went to see her and directed the whole,
what you call it, I was having with her.
And the threat they had given me, I called the people,
I took the registrar, DCR who told her exactly what was going to happen.
And what I’m trying is that after I spoke to her and all that,
I went back to my chambers.
*One thing they don’t tell you about civil services, as long as it is not in writing, nobody is going to do anything about anything*.
*And we don’t report*.
*Nobody wants to be the one to bell the cart,
*to actually put things in writing to complain*,
*I guess this, that or the other”*.

Our perils stream from two jinxes, of a people, who doesn’t like to report public servants and political appointees in writing to authority nor like to read what is written about the authority in the public for consideration and necessary action!

The Hon. Justice broke the jinx!

“I went back to my chambers, I asked for all the staff, my staff,
and how, I mean, you’d like,
who and who in what department, how long have you been there?
The registry, where they sent me this message, that
was how, I discovered that about 20,
something, of them had been in the registry for 36 years!
Do you know what, to be in registry for 36 years,
they’re changing Jeeps, they’re changing everything,
because when we are talking of the judiciary,
everybody looks at the judges, they look at the judicial officers,
they forget the staff that runs the whole place,
that the lawyers have to file papers,
that the papers have to come to the table,
everything has to be done before we come to sit in court.
So they blame the court, they blame the judges,
they blame everybody without looking at the staff that have to run the place to put things together
before those files are put there”.
So I had a system where, can you imagine a young lawyer
who had met a young registry staff,
in the registry where you file your papers?
36 years later, they are SANs,
they have become big men, and these people are still seated there!
So when they want a case to go on,
they know how to do it.
If you don’t want a case to go on,
they will just hide the file,
or the papers are not there.
Now we are overworked.
I go into court, you have a course list of about,
how many cases to do?
When they tell you, what about it?
My Lord, I have an application, where is it?
It’s not in the file.
Why is it not in the file?
Bailiffs have not served, or if they have served.
Oh, we can’t find it.
What do we do?
We are overworked.
It’ is a case of, take an adjournment.
An adjournment can take you another two years!
And what has happened?
One of your lawyers on the other side
has bribed the staff there to remove the process
so that you will get that matter done.
Anyway, to cut a long story short,
I now attached all of it on notes.
SOS, that my registry had as at that time, collapsed.
This is what has happened.
They’ve been working there.
They don’t have any digital sense.
This is the situation, 23 people have worked for 36 years
in that place!
20 people for 34 years, 20, from all of them,
about 100 and something had been working there for
between 20 and 34 years in the registry!
So I sent out this, I wrote this thing, I touched everything,
and wrote. The PCA acted on it.
And before you knew it, 16 of them had been, you know, moved
from Lagos to Yola, to Ilorin, to Gombe, to wherever.
They were now thrown out.
So I later saw the head of Admin and asked him,
how did you know the 16 people that you removed?
He said, we’ve always known them.
We’ve always known their ring leaders,
but they had Godfathers.
You couldn’t have reported it.
But since you had now put it in writing like that,
they had something to act on.
They had something to act on, and we know them
so they now threw them all out!
Now, these 16, all of them had Godfathers.
I guess what happened, somebody talked today about women.
I was presiding in Lagos.
Justice Bulkachuwa, was the president
of the Court of Appeal (PCA), Justice Aloma Mukthar was CJN!

Their Godfathers were now rendered, what’s the word, impotent!
It was the what?
Oh.
Admin’s like, who was going to combat?
They moved.
You know what they called moved?
And all of them, they have Godfathers,
so called Godfathers, yeah?
Justice Agui, me to go and meet her?
So that is how what they call, “Magana yakare”,
the end of it, before you know it,
everybody had followed in line!
How did you know the 16, they knew them.
And they said they also knew the ring leaders,
And that yes, those who were being misled
found their way back.
And a year later, come and see all this report
by some I mean, I see all of them in my house,
bus load that came for Naming ceremony. I said, huh!
I remember telling the friend, a year ago,
they said they wanted to kill me.
He said, what do you you mean they wanted to kill you,
you’re the one who came here to destabilize
all their business and everything.
And then after some time, when they discovered that,
well, if they can’t kill you, they might as well join you
to do things.
So we are a wonderful people.
Any of you who has ever had to work with staff
that are hard-working, they know what to do and everything,
it all comes from leadership.
It all comes from, let us do the right thing.
It comes from standing up. When they look at you
and know we have to do the right thing.
And be able to report it, to be able to take the civil
service rules and act upon it.
But if I and my registrar decided to start making money,
bail money, like I told somebody, today
your registrar comes to you and say, Amina, how now?
What does that mean?
They are already telling you that me and you
are in that business, but if I respect myself,
how dare you come to me to talk like that?
Anyway, the bottom line, like all of us
are going to say, for reforms to happen,
we need to have a paradigm shift.
We need to be able to train our people.
And I still keep talking about the judicial justice sector.
We need to have specialized schools.
Judicial colleges, just like you have TV colleges.
We need to have people that from secondary school, you
know, like you have Lab technology, you have all those things
that we are going to go to the judicial sector.
We are going to be trained in whichever way
it is to be able to do that.
For now, too many Godfathers put in people
that don’t fit into the place we are having.
We have round pegs in square holes!
And then I also want to tell you, and then I round up
on that sector.
I was on that panel, the first panel that removed Chris Ngige
and put Peter Obi.
That’s the first time in the history of this country
that the panel acted and removed the governor.
No, no, no, that’s not the story.
The thing is that before then, politicians
didn’t really know the power that the courts had.
Until that case came up, and then after that, come and see floodgate of cases!
And then what do we have?
Politicians are very strategic people.
They are very smart. You start looking at a young person.
Let me not say girl now.
But a young person, you have your people now.
The next thing is how do we put them as judges
into all this, not just at the high court,
but move them up, move them.
We have to have our people that we can call to go.
This is where the whole thing started.
This is how we have judicial officers
that don’t have the passion for the job.
They are not trained for the job.
To be a judge takes a particular mindset.
It’s not anybody that can do that job.
And don’t forget that I said,
I can’t talk like this if I was still in service.
Because I think, where will you even see me?
Where will you even see me to say that, oh,
I would, the honorable minister, Mr Bagudu, is here.
I mean, he was my governor of Kebbi.
I was just, I had not yet been sworn in.
I went for Dr. Zee’s, his wife’s medical outreach,
which I had been attending for years.
So I hadn’t been sworn in.
I showed up at the event here in Abuja before you knew it,
petitions that I’m going to be sworn in as justice of the Supreme
Court.
I’m already with what was PDP did or something.
Next, you know, that was, you know, baptism of fire!
That told me that after that, you can’t even see me anywhere!
Then you have SANs.
To be an SAN in this country,
you need to have a certain number of cases
at the High Court, Court of Appeal and Supreme Court.
So cases that shouldn’t even be in the system have now
piled up and the courts are overworked because these people
want to be SANs and need to have these case.
So even if their clients can’t pay,
the SAN is ready to pay all the way up there!
As long as I have the required number of cases,
so we do have problems.
We need a justice sector reform as badly
as any other sector.
And I rest my case there.
Thank you.”

Two things to take away from the video for me are; one, the effectiveness of reporting. For according to her nothing gets done except it is reported in black and white. The second was her reference to the first time a Governor was removed by the Judiciary and another was installed. Chris Ngige was removed and Peter Obi was crowned in his stead. Like her, this is not my story. But it is important to note that the Ngige/Obi saga was the turning point of political smartness that invaded the Judiciary for political gain!

Sir, learning from the retired Hon. Justice Amina Augie, it has become important that I report to you in black and white what our experience was on the way to making ChristMaX happen on the Plateau. Recognizing that the Nigeria Christian Pilgrims Commission is the agency of the Presidency for the welfare of Christians in the country, we wrote to the Executive Secretary of the Commission on the all important need for your presence to be felt among the children who became orphans as a result of last year’s attack!

Sir, fear was the communication from among our people in the South when they heard our resolution to spend Christmas with our brethren on the Plateau! Palpable fear was the response of our brethren we wanted to go there for. We were discouraged, with many vowing never to spend Christmas in their homeland again!

This became a reason enough to reach out to security agencies. We reached out to all security agencies of your administration. Let me furnish you with the update of our engagements. Letters were written to all, after the first visit to follow up, as the courtesy of the profession demands, the ethics of correspondence are lost on us. Only the office of the IGP has responded to us and had referred us to the office of the Commissioner of Police, Plateau State, with whom we are currently engaging. A second visit was made and this is the report filed by our officer in charge of contact; the Office of the First Lady remains incommunicable. The DSS is also incommunicable. Further updates; Defence HQ has requested we give them another week, but after another week there was no information concerning our safety if we stick to the plan to make your children and grandchildren on the IDP camp happy at ChristMaX!

The office of the Bishop at NCPC is the most pathetic, he was told that the attention of the ES has been drawn to the letter, but is yet to give a response, due to official engagements outside the office premises but assurances have been given for feedback. I also briefed the staff of the need for the bishop’s involvement in the event”. The Bishop of course has been very busy with the programme of the pilgrims for this end of the year. You will agree with me Sir. That leading Nigerian Christians on pilgrimage at the time that Israel is at war with most of her Neighbours required security arrangements to ensure the safety of Nigerians at the middle East. If only to make it impossible for Israel to site Bokkos as an example again at the UN incase anything happens. But God forbid. Nothing will happen.

Sir, the impact of your good work in security I first felt on my trip to Ilase Ijesa, the spot where the forest aliens used to toment Ijesaland has been cleared. An Air force base and military barracks are within the vicinity. The military barracks I learnt is the gift of General Lagbaja. I hope the Barracks will be named after him.

Sir, I traveled to Abuja, then, to Jos by road, except for the Nasarawa strip. There hasn’t been much improvement on the condition of the road. But the same can’t be said concerning security. Travelling by road is safer than the way you met it!

Sir, this ChristMaX mission trip to Bokkos is made in absolute confidence in the ability of God to protect, a test of course of the responsibility of my Commander In Chief to surpass his immediate predecessor. Sir, we arrived at Bokkos safely and hope to stay safe. Take this to be a report in black and white from a citizen to his President.