By Chinelo Obogo
Abdul Mahmud is a constitutional lawyer, poet and columnist. He is a former President of the National Association of Nigerian Students (NANS) from 1990 to 1991, during which he was detained under Decree 2 at the Kirikiri Prison by the General Ibrahim Babangida regime and later by the General Sani Abacha regime. In this interview, he spoke on various issues. Excerpts:
President Muhammadu Buhari has consistently blamed lawyers for “supporting corrupt people”. He implies that anyone accused of a crime should not be defended by a lawyer. What is your view?
The allegation that lawyers are supporting corrupt people proceeds from a narrow conception of the role of lawyers and a poor understanding of the adversarial nature of our judicial system. The accusation is too general as it seeks to soil the integrity of lawyers like me who dedicate considerable aspects of their everyday practice to the development of law, expansion of the frontiers of rights, freedom and justice in our country.
There is the right to fair hearing- and the right of all accused persons charged before a competent criminal court to legal practitioners of their choice, that are often viewed by jurists, practitioners of the law and citizens as the cornerstones of the administration of justice system. These rights are protected by section 36 of the Constitution, as amended.
I am not sure if the President holds the view that lawyers should not defend their clients, even if these clients are accused of murder. If he does, I can only but suggest to him to take a careful look again at section 36(5)(c) of the constitution, which provides that ‘every person who is charged with a criminal offence shall be entitled to defend himself in person or by legal practitioners of his own choice” for him to understand and appreciate the role of the lawyer in our adversarial legal system.
I can’t see how lawyers support corrupt persons by the mere fact that they exercise those substantive and procedural rights the law grants to them and their clients by defending corrupt persons who have been charged to court. Lawyers merely perform their duties as protectors and guardians of the law by offering representations to accused persons or litigants generally.
The problem I see here is the refusal of the governors of the state to do what is required of them by law, so the tendency is for them to seek cavalier ways of reinforcing their powers without recourse to the law. It is the responsibility of those who govern to initiate reforms where there are problems with the justice systems. We have a failing investigatory culture in our country and we see the failure in the way the Police handle the simplest of complaints.
The EFCC expects lawyers to always nod their heads like the Agama lizard at some of their poorly prepared charges, but the law-in-action wouldn’t allow that. Not even in the most dreaded totalitarian state like North Korea. Every lawyer knows what he or she is up against when confronted with a well prepared criminal case, well drafted criminal charge, in court. If the EFCC investigates its corruption cases very well, assigns these cases to lawyers who are grounded in the nuances of criminal trials, it won’t have cause to embark on the cheap blackmail of all lawyers. Assigning corruption cases that are basically criminal cases to lawyers who build their legal reputation on Human Rights Law practice is suicidal. Human rights trials are basically founded on documentary evidence, which means that lawyers who are grounded in this aspect of legal practice lack the everyday experience of evidential drama of examinations and cross-examinations- the hallmarks of criminal trials. What the EFCC basically does by its practice of assigning cases to non-criminal trial lawyers is to ask an undergraduate student of law to produce a doctoral thesis for it, to put it in the most graphic sense as an aid to understanding the point I am making here.
We have seen many instances where courts of coordinate jurisdictions give conflicting judgments on the same issues. Recent examples are the Ogah v Ikpeazu case, Sheriff v Makarfi case. Does this signify an underlying problem with the judiciary?
There’s a conscious desire on the part of our politicians to turn our judiciary into a strange but unfamiliar place. When the judiciary is caught in the orbit of strangeness, strange things begin to happen. The Ugah v Ikpeazu and Sheriff v Makarfi cases are examples of this strangeness. The question is: why is our judiciary susceptible to strangeness, or why is it not immune to strangeness? Judges and lawyers provide a certain life to our courts.
When the courts aren’t strengthened by iron-cast laws, state principles and policies, good practice directions, they are exposed to the strange wills and interests of very strange people.
The issue of restructuring has been on the front burner for some time. The conception that many have about restructuring is the return to federating units and the states controlling their own resources. What are the underlying issues that should be considered when restructuring? With the current situation, can total restructuring work, or is the talk of restructuring a mere rhetoric?
The issue of restructuring has always been with us. As President of the National Association of Nigerian Students (NANS), 26 years ago, we engaged it as students’ leaders and activists as a subject that revolved around the national question, or when is the nation? Then, we were concerned about the destruction the military was wreaking in our country- the destruction of state governance institutions, erosion of our national sovereignty, the personalization of power, the nature of the commanding heights of our economy, ethnic nationalities relations, etc- and we posed the agenda for the return of our country to civil democratic rule. What was the response of the governors of our nation-state? They detained us, banned NANS, PMB being the first instigator of the ban and IBB ingloriously followed him a few years later. So, you can see that the struggle for restructuring isn’t new, it didn’t begin yesterday.
No matter how our country is viewed today, our country isn’t working; our country has regressed beyond the point that it was in January 1966: our institutions of state are dysfunctional, state governance crisis acute in states that cannot pay salaries to their workers, the internally generated revenues have dropped to the point that they offer little respite to these states or to governors who have long privatized the treasuries of these states, the nation-state cannot protect itself against the bad boys within, talk less of protecting itself against well-organized terror groups and herdsmen marauding about in the countryside.
We cannot dismiss restructuring on the basis of a non-argument, because one is opposed to restructuring for the sake of opposing what a section of our country or what a certain demography proposes.
Do you agree with those who say the Nigerian state is on the decline? And has PMB helped to worsen it?
Nation-states aren’t natural creation, so they are subject to decline, engendered by the artificialities of relations within the nation-states or by some natural disasters. We know how the Soviet Union declined; we know how the refusal to address the nationalities question accelerated the decline of the union. We have also seen and have continued to experience the challenges which confront countries like South Sudan with similar experiences as ours and how separation can work to achieve different results. There’s so much we can learn from these experiences in order to focus and sharpen the way we interrogate our own problems.
This is where I find PMB’s position on the agitation of IPOB intransigent and problematic. I don’t think he has been properly briefed on this issue. Given the opportunity, I will advise PMB to allow the IPOB agitation to run its course within our recognizable constitutional framework. Separatist agenda cannot come to a resolution without a plebiscite or referendum.