Arresting the Law.

A flea can trouble a lion more than a lion can trouble a flea. African proverb.

If there are those moments when you are happy you are not a lawyer, a judge or an authority on the fundamentals of human rights, this must be one of them. The lack of a strong legal preparation to judge the current uproar over the arrests of senior judicial officers will give citizens the freedom to express views and preferences regarding the propriety of intelligence agencies arresting judges in the manner they did this week. You could block your ears to shrills of protests from very powerful interests and the political opposition over the arrests and interrogation of senior judges, and take comfort in your uneducated personal opinion. If you open your ears and mind too early, you will be confronted with another emerging controversy over the position of the law regarding the recent attacks and killings of Shiites by mobs in a number of northern cities. In the end, you could be persuaded to pay some attention to legal issues and positions emerging from raging debates on the rule of law and the imperatives of sustaining the fight against corruption and national security.

It is now obvious that the federal government will not turn back from its determination to arrest, interrogate and prosecute very senior judges, including Supreme Court justices for suspected corruption. It's unorthodox approach to the  searches and arrests had met with  a torrent of complaints from Nigeria Bar Association(NBA) and an entire army of other lawyers and human rights activists. The National Judicial Council(NJC),the body with responsibility to sanction judicial officers and generally uphold standards has been restrained in its comments, but you would have read its conclusions on the development by now after a considerable length of time in deliberation. The political opposition found a new hook to hung its complaints that President Buhari's administration puts very little store on respect for the rule of law. The government has made efforts to engage complaints that the Department of State Security(DSS) has no business searching premises of judges suspected of corrupt acts when organizations like EFCC, ICPC, and the Police are still alive and generally around. It has engaged the public with its own complaints of being frustrated and stonewalled by the NJC; with its claims of long, detailed investigations before moving in; on its haul of millions in assorted currencies and even exotic cars, and with its promises that public opinion will applaud it when all is revealed during the trials of the judges.

Citizens with huge appetite for victories against corruption have followed the high drama with intense interest, unimpressed by arguments that boundaries of responsibilities are being breached, the judiciary is being humiliated, or that the fight against corruption has assumed a life of its own, and is likely to bring the entire house down. The tactic of making public huge amounts recovered from homes of suspected judges right down to a handful of Rupees and Gambian Dollares was clearly intended to whip up public sentiment against suspects. Judges will not be found among the top ten of the most popular professional groups in Nigeria, and this may have counted in the calculations of the media outings of the DSS and government as it battled a wealthy and well connected adversary in the leadership of the legal professional and the judiciary.

The government may have won a few battles in these opening skirmishes to pry open a notoriously closed system, and address corruption in the judiciary. It lost a few as well, as its choices of agencies involved in searches and interrogations raised more than a few eyebrows and alarmed citizens over the possibility that national security is now threatened by corruption in the judiciary. It lost a few as well, as the fabled intimacy between the top brackets of the legal profession and the media swung into action to accuse it of crass impunity, desecration of hallowed boundaries and offices, sundry illegalities and setting the nation on a course of descent into anarchy. For now, both sides are severely bruised. Government has created additional substance to support its repeated claims that the Nigerian judiciary is so corrupt that it cannot be counted as a reliable partner to support the all-important fight against corruption. The snag for the government could be that this could be limited to a moral victory, and the only one it would win. It will now have to submit its case before the very judiciary and the intimidating hostility of the top brass of the legal profession for validation. It will have to hope that it would have split the ranks of the NJC and put fears in the hearts of other senior judges, and good, fearless lawyers could be found to make cases that very senior judges should go to jail. It will have to hope that the judiciary does not close ranks as rumours of more arrests spread, and judges begin to see their image on the faces of arraigned colleagues. It will have to hope that it had crossed t's and dotted i's on the technicalities which could be used to bomb its case before it takes off.

Public opinion will influence the response of the judiciary and the senior levels of the legal profession to the trials of suspected corrupt judges, but public opinion has always been too weak to keep the justice system(or any other critical  public institution in Nigeria, either) in check. Politicians are sharply divided between those with bitter stories to tell on their experiences with judges who robbed them of victories, and those who will only whisper how they induced judges with huge amounts to hand over undeserved electoral victories. Stories of rampant corruption at all levels of the judiciary litter the entire nation. The few occasions when disciplinary action was taken against a few judges suggested that regulations dealing with discipline or maintaining standards of integrity were either ineffective, or leaders in the judiciary lacked the moral authority to sanction erring judges because they are, themselves, compromised. There is also, for fairness, the possibility that corruption on the scale it is rumored does not exist, and if it does, it is more difficult to prove than the allegation that politicians, including many who exercise power today, are largely responsible for corrupting judges. The truth, however is that most Nigerians have made up their minds that it is difficult to get justice from judges without engaging in action that corrupts you and the judge.

The trials of judges will be conducted around those delicate boundaries that challenge governance under the rule of law. A more challenging threat to the rule of law emerged a few days ago when mobs attacked and reportedly killed some Shia members congregating to celebrate a religious day in towns and cities in the north. A week earlier, Governor of Kaduna State, Malam Nasir el-Rufai had signed an Executive Order banning the unregistered umbrella body of the Shiites, Islamic Movement of Nigeria on the grounds that it engaged in illegal activities and represented a threat to national security. The members of the Shia sect had intensified their protests over the continued detention of their leader, grabbing public attention and challenging law and order agencies who chase them around the country. The attacks and killing of the Shia by members of the public in apparently spontaneous reaction to a group which insists on conduct that suggests it has no respect for laws of the land has now opened a new and dangerous dimension in the management of the laws of the land. Are attacks on Shia crimes? Are citizens now going to do the job of the state, to wit, enforce the law against Shia who break the laws of the land? Is anyone paying attention to the dangers of tolerating unbridled breaches by citizens and the certainty that while they deliver short term goals, they ultimately undermine the authority and capacity of the state to enforce the law and mediate conflicts between groups?