EDITORIAL: 753 duplexes forfeiture: Invigorating Nigeria’s justice system

For those oblivious of the massive scale of corruption in Nigeria, it appeared in bold canvass in the 753 duplexes and other apartments in an Abuja estate, which a final forfeiture order was given on by the court on 2 December. The recovery is an empirical proof of how far the country has been ruined by greedy and kleptomaniac public office holders in successive administrations.

Similar assets may also be strewn across the landscapes of Lagos and other major cities in the country and abroad. The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) that unravelled this heist, has not officially disclosed the identity of the culprit. But a statement it issued left a trail for Nigerians to make educated guesses of who the “former top brass of the administration” that it referenced might be.

The estate measures 150,500 square metres and is situated on Plot 109 Cadastral Zone, Lokogoma District, Abuja. “This is the single largest asset recovery by the EFCC,” the anti-graft body emphasised. It was made possible by the ruling of Justice Jude Onwuegbuzie of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) High Court, Abuja. By all accounts, it is a landmark judicial achievement, which should serve as an alarm bell to the behemoth that threatens the country.

More Justices in the mould of Onwuegbuzie are needed as a critical mass on the Bench. Decidedly, the ruling points to judicial activism that is badly needed to deal with graft cases within our system of justice delivery. Without it, the fight will not go far. The court ruling is remarkable as it was preceded by a special appeal by the EFCC chairman, Ola Olukoyede, to the judiciary for partnership in October, at the 6th EFCC and National Judicial Institute (NIJ) Capacity Building Workshop for Judges and Justices.

The Chief Justice of Nigeria, Kudirat Kekere-Ekun, was there. Judges handling corruption cases across the country were admonished to exercise more caution in granting restraining orders. These are weapons in the hands of powerful suspects to stifle, if not permanently kill cases against them, especially through perpetual injunctions. Olukoyede bemoaned that this had barred the agency from moving into 15 states. The coast now appears to be clear!

However, the seeming impropriety of the non-disclosure of the owner of the 753 duplexes bears repeating here. This should not be a recurring decimal in anti-corruption cases. It had happened before in the case of the 301 houses that the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission (ICPC) recovered from two civil servants in 2021. One of them owned 241 of the houses, while the other owned the remaining 60. These were directors in the public service, whose monthly salaries were about N256,000 each. Such veiling should be withdrawn as part of the need for “naming to shame,” which is essential to the fight against corruption.

Having been recovered, how the duplexes will be sold off is going to be the next big concern. Some former EFCC bosses did not live above board in this regard in the past, which cost them their jobs. Therefore, nothing short of transparency and accountability are expected in dealing with this matter at the next stage. Real estate has become a notorious conduit through which illicit funds are laundered here, as exemplified in the hotels, luxury apartment skyscrapers, shopping malls and events centres that are rapidly springing up in all our cities. The EFCC searchlight should be beamed on this sector to scrutinise the increasing investments going on there, while ascertaining the legitimacy of their ownership.

The Supreme Court judgment that dismissed the vexatious suit of 16 state governors against the legality of the EFCC and Nigeria Financial Intelligence Unit (NFIU), filed by the Federal Government, is as tectonic in impact as the Onwuegbuzie ruling. PREMIUM TIMES expects, going forward, the commission to exhume and maximally prosecute the corruption cases of some of the ex-governors, dating back to the 2007 cohort.

It is reassuring that the apex court brushed aside the baseless legal argument that only state assemblies had the powers to investigate state treasuries, and not the EFCC. A strong judiciary is the most single important factor in the crusade against corruption. Regrettably, the biggest barrier is the endemic corruption on the Bench. Several National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) and United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) reports confirm this. Judicial officers don’t like to hear it when those outside the judicial realm point this out. But when retired justices and senior lawyers do so, they become silent.

Nigerians never knew the billionaire judges that the late Justice Kayode Esho repeatedly spoke about, who always took advantage of Election Petition Tribunal duties to desecrate the temple of justice. A former President of the Court of Appeal, Ayo Salami, lost his job for resisting his court being corrupted from the highest judicial echelon. Even as he departed, he kept reiterating that some retired senior judges intimidate and bribe serving justices under the guise of carrying out legal consultancy.

More recently, Justice Muhammad Shuaibu, presiding judge of the Court of Appeal, Sokoto Division, reiterated the fact that: “Part of the problem in the fight against graft in the country are judges.” This was at the North-Western Attorney-General’s Anti-corruption Forum. But Justice Musa Dattijo, at his Supreme Court valedictory session in 2023, was more direct: “It has been in the public space that court officials and judges are easily bribed by litigants to … obtain favourable judgments.” For a figure to hold on to, an ICPC report stated that N9.4 billion exchanged hands between judges and lawyers from 1918 to 2020.

But no corrupt judge has been successfully prosecuted or convicted despite copious damning reports of the National Judicial Council (NJC) against judges, to the effect that they either demanded or received bribes, with payments from litigants and lawyers having cases before their courts traced to their bank accounts. Incredibly, such cases are dismissed.

This drives home the observation of Professor Itse Sagay (SAN) that “Judges defend the corrupt ones among them just to expel any idea of corruption,” which he believes to be the greatest danger to the effort to curb the vice in the judiciary. Sagay was the Chairman of Presidential Advisory Committee Against Corruption under the Muhammadu Buhari administration.

Without corrupt judges and lawyers being jailed, Nigeria will continue to sustain the current one-step-forward and two-steps-backward in its anti-graft campaign. “Corruption in a judge’s seat does not go unpunished,” Richard Pilgeri warns.

Therefore, our judicial pendulum must not swing towards legalism, as is often the case, but to justice and equity. Impropriety in the Bench, often massaged by some, with the jaded argument that the judges are product of the society, serves no good purpose. There is no perfect society.

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In the United States of America, for instance, judges there too get enmeshed in graft. So do their public officers and, worse still, the corporate world, in billions of dollars cases. A Justice Department tally showed that 19,634 public corruption convictions were secured at states and federal levels in 10 years, in a media report published in 2022.

In the Operation Graylord bribery case, 92 officials, 17 judges, 48 lawyers, among others, were indicted. Bernard Ebbers of Worldcom, the US second biggest telecom at a time, exaggerated the value of his stock at $11 billion, which led to the loss of $100 billion by shareholders in their investments. He received a 25-year jail term for this. And the Libor rate forex exchange rigging of 2015 that roiled JP Morgan, Barclays Bank, Citibank and others, forced US and British regulators to slam about $6 billion fines against them.

So, the US and other Western societies are also ravaged by corruption. But their judiciaries make the difference to underscore the fact that “Without a legal system free from impropriety, nothing works.”

For Olukoyede of EFCC and his ICPC counterpart, more cracking of these high profile cases are expected henceforth. EFCC should exert its independence by continuing with the cases of former governors in President Bola Tinubu’s cabinet and in the Senate, whose trials have seemingly been halted. Tinubu offended public sensibilities with those appointments.

That Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, appeared in court last week, over graft charges, is instructive. And so is the storm that Donald Trump’s cabinet nominees are going through now. Yet, the difference between these foreign cases and those in Nigeria, are justice systems that have both the will and teeth to enforce their mandates, which is the desired disposition the latter has now hopefully found.