Philips: Rule of law becomes rule of man Wednesday, 22 January 2014 #GuardianNews Written by By Abiola Philips IN Nigeria, our political practitioners (executive, legislative and judicial) can resist everything except temptation. The dichotomy between the rule of law and the rule of man demonstrates the reliability and impartiality of the former, in contradistinction to the vagaries and vicissitudes of the latter. When we look to the rule of law, we look to a yardstick that is fixed and inviolate; when we are subject to the rule of man, we are subject to man’s frailties, foibles and failings. There are three arms of government: the Executive, the Legislature and the Judiciary. The constitution seeks to calibrate their roles and responsibilities such that they act as check and balance on each other. We are accustomed to the use and abuse of our rights and their responsibilities by the Executive and the Legislature; the Judiciary however, continued a little longer to be regarded as inoculated from aberrant behaviour. We are now reaping the harvest of our naiveté and find ourselves cruelly exposed by a judiciary increasingly demeaned. In an age in which politics and political advantage are reincarnated as matters of life and death, we are witness in the travails of Rivers State to a Nigerian judiciary increasingly ready to find solace in the whims and caprices of a political class that knows few ethical boundaries. The truth be told, we are witness in Rivers State to a slide into lawlessness that promises a descent to places from which we may not be able to recover, in time for 2015. Let us look closer at the attacks on the rule of law...from within. We have spoken of three arms of government; there are also three tiers of government in Nigeria – the federal, the state and the local. In the last couple of years, the Federal Government has been at daggers drawn with the Rivers State government. In what has become a titanic struggle to assert and to defend, the federal executive has deployed heavy artillery. The state governor has nimbly avoided most of the grenades lobbed in his direction (often delivered by a Trojan horse in the person of the state Commissioner of Police) from the centre. The governor’s adversaries range from a president intent on not brooking opposition to his second term ambitions from within his own party, to a local potential potentate biding his time in federal office, to local party members who dream of positioning themselves in places they couldn’t dream of. The governor is rightly concerned that having failed in all attempts to delegitimise him, the centre may take the opportunity of the budget cycle to simply turn off the taps, financial castration if you will. As with all such things, a veneer of legality is required and the courts are the final arbiter of what is legal and what is not. The state House of Assembly has met and passed the 2014 budget and now needs to implement it; that will require moneys due being released by the centre. A premeditated and spurious legal time bomb is likely just round the corner. The centre has descended upon the state with a fervour that would have been better expended on our socio-economic challenges, but that is spilt milk. What perturbs is the appearance of a pattern of willing engagement in judicial determinations that bear upon the political arena in Rivers State. If this is true, it does not bode well; if the overtly political class believe that they can bend the bench to their will, we lose a vital pivot in that delicate system of checks and balance the form of government we have chosen affords and requires of us. And we lose it at a time when political adversaries with elastic ethics seek every advantage they can get: do or die. An Abuja High Court sat in a matter it ought not to have, in respect of the leadership crisis within the Peoples Democratic Party in Rivers State. There is a subsisting judgment of the Supreme Court barring courts from intra-party disputes. Though it was drawn to the honourable judge’s attention that he lacked jurisdiction he was not dissuaded and assumed jurisdiction. This singular judgment opened the political floodgates, interpreted as it was by those it suited, as a licence to pursue destabilisation. The case has been appealed; it still awaits listing by the Court of Appeal. The high court judge has retired from the bench, not dishonourably. Since that infamous case, the Obiakor local government dissolution, the defection of legislators, the fisticuffs in the Rivers House of Assembly have unsurprisingly thrown up more cases before the courts. The hand of the courts more than the hand of the law is evident. The least in society were never great believers that the courts are the last hope of the common man, after all, what had the courts ever done for them? It is the dawning on the self-declared cognoscenti that the evidence is compelling of a greatly diminished judiciary that is different this time. With an election cycle certain to herald challenging times upon us already, we are all justly concerned that the courts do not readily and repeatedly allow themselves to be subsumed by our feral political class. The short-sightedness of those that pervert the course of justice lies in their failure to see the erosion of the rule of law as an existential threat to nation itself. If the Federal Government succeeds in bringing the Rivers State government to heel by denying it the lifeblood of appropriations properly due to it to meet its obligation to its constituents, it will have succeeded in effecting a coup against the 1999 Constitution by other means. If it does so with the active connivance of members of the judiciary willing to be subsumed and soiled, it will further cement the growing perception that the judiciary, if unchecked, will bring further ruination to an edifice already riddled with corruption. The courts are the only fig leaf we have left with which to mask the putrefying stench of corruption that our politicians led by the highest in the land have turned to a state of nature. If the rule of man as evidenced by the rolling tides of the Rivers State saga persists, the propensity for obeisance to the rule of law is disproportionately undermined and rendered impotent. The absence of that disposition will at some stage or the other come home to roost for all citizens of Nigeria, whether they are from Rivers State or not; whether they are supporters of Amaechi or Wike; whether the president has a second term or not; whether the PDP or the APC wins in 2015. The price we will pay for the failure of our political practitioners to rise above their myopia and unbridled ambition is as I have said an existential one. Our ability to man the barricades will be greatly enhanced by a professional judiciary able to grasp the nettle and resist the suffocating embrace of politicians whose ambitions are first and foremost personal. Rivers State is the front line in the trenches.
Posted on: Thu, 23 Jan 2014 04:53:31 +0000
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