Falana indicts judges, lawyers over Buhari’s anti-graft war

…Your perpetual injunctions injurious to anti-corruption crusade

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NIGERIA: HUMAN rights lawyer, Femi Falana, has identified some judges and lawyers as the clog in the anti-corruption wheel of President Muhammadu Buhari.

Falana said that those in this category are members of the Bench who are quick in granting frivolous perpetual injunctions and the Bar who file such injunctions to slow the dispensation of justice.

The human rights lawyer, a one-time Chairman of the West African Bar Association, made these known at the special congress and public lecture organised by the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) of Olabisi Onabanjo University, Ago-Iwoye, Ogun State.

To redress the worrisome situation, Falana, who spoke on the topic entitled “The limits of anti-corruption law,”

demanded a review of the nation’s criminal justice system to ensure more effective dispensation of justice, particularly in tackling corruption.

He stated that the country’s neo-colonialist nature of capitalism had led to a situation where a set of wealthy Nigerians “are bigger than the nation’s laws.”
“The criminal justice system has been hijacked by the corrupt and looters of the public treasury and their lawyers,” the human rights lawyer said, adding: “It is only in Nigeria that an accused will ask his trial to be suspended.”
He stressed: “Many of the governors who faced corruption charges, their lawyers had asked for their trials to be suspended, and judges granted this.  How would a lawyer also plead with a judge that a criminal should not be arrested?
“Someone who stole millions of naira getting perpetual injunction not to be arrested and prosecuted!  Lawyers must allow cases to go on.”

According to him, there is nothing concrete on ground to show equality before the law in the country, stressing that the wealthy and influential Nigerians get lighter punishments as against ordinary citizens who get stiffer sanctions.
“In Edo State, someone was sentenced to three years imprisonment for stealing bush meat, another one who stole handset in Osun State was also sentenced to seven years imprisonment,” Falana, who is a Senior Advocate of Nigeria, said, stressing further: “But corrupt public officials prefer to be remanded in Economic and Financial Crimes Commission’s custody or being remanded in Kuje Prisons.”
He further said: “Let me tell you, EFCC cells have beddings and mosquito nets, and I have been detained in Kuje Prisons twice; it is one of the best prisons in the country. Why didn’t they take them to Kirikiri or Ikoyi or Ijebu Ode Prisons?”
“And whoever have been detained in police cells would know that they sleep on bare floor, and a bucket put at a corner to serve as container for their faeces,” the lawyer told his listeners.
Falana lamented that with the way cases of corruption were being handled by the EFCC currently and given the frequent injunctions being granted, the government might not get more than five convictions.
The SAN maintained that the government must tackle the root causes of corruption, as it had continued to fester due to the “predatory neo-colonial capitalist system” in the country, “which does not benefit the people.”
Falana, who stressed that government must carry the people along in its activities and empower them, maintained that “there is a group of progressive lawyers in the mould of the late Chief Gani Fawehinmi, who will make sure that looters of the treasury returned the stolen funds for the development of the country.”

He also stated that the nation is losing over N7 billion annually to oil thieves, because , according to him, the value declared at the departure point in Nigeria was discovered to be different from the countries it was being exported to because their countries laws demand disclosure of the quantity of oil being brought in.”
Falana supported his point by saying that some lawyers had gotten the figures from the concerned countries.

The respected lawyer also bemoaned that the nation’s value system had be corrupted, while challenging everyone to support the Buhari administration in fighting corruption, even as he charged ASUU to also join in the anti-graft war.

In his own remark, the President of ASUU, Isa Fagge, said that the nation’s universities had deviated from their original role of carrying out research and making their findings available to the society.

Fagge maintained that corruption continues to thrive in the country because no one had been brought to justice accordingly.