Corrupt judges should be prosecuted

CORRUPTION in the judiciary, especially on the Bench, engaged the attention of the Chief Justice of Nigeria, Mahmud Mohammed, at a recent event during which he revealed that 64 judges “were disciplined as appropriate,” between 2009 and 2014. No doubt, the affected jurists were sacked by the National Judicial Council, in what has become a routine purge of corrupt elements from the temple of justice. Judicial corruption will not be curbed until the principle that the accused ought not to enjoy any benefit from any corrupt activity is applied to those on the Bench.

The CJN, who has maintained a tough stance against graft in the judiciary since he took over from Mariam Aloma-Mukhtar, spoke through a Supreme Court Justice, John Fabiyi, who represented him at a seminar organised by the Nigerian Bar Association, in Abuja. He rightly admonished the lawyers against unethical practices, stressing that a corrupt Bar invariably begets a corrupt Bench.

 “It is important to highlight that the Bench is a product of the Bar and unless we work in synergy to ensure that only fit and proper persons remain in our midst, it will be impossible to expect a different Bench when its origin remains the same,” he said.

For 64 judges to be found unworthy out of the 1,020 judges in the superior courts of record, within just five years, shows the abysmal depth of the rot in Nigeria’s justice delivery system. But this is so because the bad eggs on the Bench are always given a slap on the wrist by way of retirement each time they are caught. Such questionable characters thereafter go home to enjoy their illegally acquired wealth; a practice that deepens, rather than eviscerates the vice from our system.

In other jurisdictions like the United States and Britain, “corruption in a judge’s seat does not go unpunished,” says Richard Pilger, the prosecutor in the case against a US judge, Thomas Spargo, who attempted extortion and bribery of $10,000 in New York. He was jailed 27 months. Pilger had told the presiding judge that “without a legal system free of impropriety, nothing works.” 

A similar fate befell Abel Corral Limas, a former District Judge in Texas, who received a 72-month jail term for taking a bribe. He was also ordered to return $6.77 million as restitution, and additional $257,300 forfeiture, being proceeds from the crime.

It is by following these examples that Nigeria can meaningfully deal with the corruption epidemic. To this end, the state governors, the President and the anti-graft bodies should act on the NJC reports on unfit judges, especially when linked to corruption, by putting them on trial. Their removal from office is simply not enough. The judiciary could be helped to rediscover itself when a maximum penal clampdown is visited on the bad eggs in the legal profession. This is how institutions are built.

A tradition of judicial integrity must be developed. Despite repeated warnings from successive CJNs that judges should desist from recklessly granting interlocutory injunctions, and the havoc done to the dispensation of justice by the misuse of their discretionary powers, the judiciary is still stuck in that morass.

 Others have been implicated in financial scandals that soiled their robes and desecrated the Bench. A judiciary drained by graft is alien to justice delivery and efficiency. That is the message inherent in Aloma-Mukhtar’s outcry that she inherited 139 petitions against judges, out of which “only 33 of the petitions were considered worthy of attention,” when she bowed out of office late last year. Fresh 198 petitions were filed during her 28 months in office, for which “15 are awaiting responses from judges” as of November 2014, while “only 21 were slated for consideration.”

Under Aloma-Mukhtar as the chair of NJC, some judges were fired. Many had been removed for soiling their hands at Election Petitions Tribunals stretching back to 2003, just as lawyers shop for favourable judgements. But none has been prosecuted. Impunity on the bench must end. For the campaign to succeed, the NJC must tackle the corrosive influence of retired senior jurists on the Bench. 

A former President of the Court of Appeal, Ayo Salami, says they should be made to “leave the despicable role of bribing or intimidating judges.” What a shame!

Government should ensure there is transparency in our judicial process. As the CJN rightly observed, both the Bench and the Bar share in the country’s judicial infamy. For instance, 14 lawyers were involved in the escape of 197 convicted drug barons from serving their jail terms between 2005 and 2006. Justice Gilbert Obayan, whose committee investigated the matter, stated, “All the cases in this jail racketeering were handled by the same set of counsel and prosecutors.”

The NBA should be interested in an issue like this that bordered on criminality, involving its members. Its leadership must, therefore, take seriously the CJN advice of “expunging from its ranks, those whose conduct may be unfit, improper and dishonest.”