Where’s Lady Justice’s blindfold?

As a little growing primary school boy many, many years ago I used to be fascinated endlessly by the statue of Lady Justice with her eyes blindfolded and she bearing in one outstretched hand a sword  and in the other, the scales of justice.  Looking at the figure, I was always reminded of the pictorial illustration of Jesus Christ, an iconic image which was found everywhere – in books, churchyards, painted on the stained-windows of cathedrals and churches and cast in stone in holy sites especially parsonages. Is there any relationship, intrinsic or extrinsic, between the imagery of Christ and this svelte lady? Though déshabillé, Lady Justice still wears an expressionless and dead-pan mien which curiously unsettles. Why is she always in front of courts of law? Why? Why? These and many other similar questions had concentrated and agitated my callow mind as it had searched relentlessly for answers. As I grew older and was exposed to more education and enlightenment at school and in the larger society, I came to realise the symbolic signification of the female figure cast in stone which always adorns the frontage of a court of law in Nigeria and elsewhere.

Lady Justice (Latin: lustitia) is an allegorical personification of the moral force in judicial systems.  Why is she blindfolded?  The notion or belief is that a court of law commences a trial of a dispute with no prior knowledge of it and in complete impartiality, hence, the blindfold over Lady Justice’s eyes.  The blindfold, is, thus, designed to symbolise that justice should be rendered “without passion or prejudice” to ensure a result which is fair. Perhaps, it should be stressed also that Lady Justice originated from the personification of justice in Ancient Roman art known as Lustitia or Justitia, who is equivalent to the Greek Dike.  However, we are constrained to wonder whether there is any connection between her enforced blindness and Gloucester’s self-inflicted blindness in King Lear, for having made wrong choices all his life when he had sight, he decided to gouge out his eyes, crying: “I stumbled when I saw!”

The impersonality and impartiality of Justice derive from her “blindness” to societal biases and prejudices such as gender, sex, education, status or station, class, rank or title, position, skin colour, creed, language, ideology and age. Wole Soyinka once famously declared in The Man Died that “Justice is the first condition of humanity”.  And Peter Tosh, Jamaica’s immortal reggae maestro threnodies: “Everyone is crying out for peace, yeah, none is crying out for justice… I don’t want no peace, equal rights and justice.…” The consensus is that, in the absence of justice, you can only have the peace of the graveyard.  Nigeria cannot afford that kind of peace, the sepulchral hush of a hecatomb, the deathly quiet of the necropolis. In the wake of the 2023 general elections, the country has been so far embroiled in a sepulchral peace, a peace analogous to the calm between two storms. In the lead-up to the elections, everyone had known that the elections were going to be the most consequential in the chequered history of Nigeria. We had witnessed all the brickbats, the ethnic baiting and profiling and even the malicious muckraking and mudslinging, sometimes verging on character assassination of the main gladiators and their supporters. During the electioneering campaigns, the name-calling and the vituperative effusions could pass for hate speech. The hustings were a zero-sum game, as the political actors reached for scorched-earth tactics to do-in and out-gun one another. It was ‘Election as the Final Solution’.  And the result has shown that it has signalled the virtual demise of all illusion as far as the namby-pamby panegyrics of “unity in diversity” are concerned.  There are no more fig leaves behind which to hide now and the gloves are off and the blood-stained canvas is strewn with chunks of flesh…. The undying advice of the former Strongman of Ibadan politics, the late fire-eating contrarian, Lamidi Adedibu, rings out deafeningly from the grave: “If you don’t want to be told about those who dated your mother before your father married her, then don’t join politics!”  By its very nature, politics is a white-heat coliseum within which contrasting and countervailing temples clash and collide and gods of clay are pummelled and pulverised to dross and slags of fissured antiques like ozymandias. In politics, all soiled and sullied laundry is brought out of the closet for airing before voyeuristic onlookers.  Ask Michael Henchard of The Mayor of Casterbridge.

The elections have come and gone but we are still stuck with their unsavoury aftermath, namely: post-election litigation. Expectedly, opinion is divided as to the credibility and transparency of the elections, especially the presidential poll of 25th February. 2023.  Whilst the ruling APC insists that it was free, fair and credible, the opposition parties, notably the PDP and the Labour Party claim that it wasn’t in the slightest, citing in the process a lot of irregularities, voter suppression, ballot box snatching, arson, and violence committed by thugs and louts on the Election Day across the length and breadth of the country, especially Lagos, Rivers State and Kano.  Social media is awash with amateur video clips and memes allegedly showing evidence of the clear violation of the rules of electoral engagement. But more worryingly, the INEC much-vaunted Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) and INEC Results Viewing Portal (IReV) curiously failed to function in the heat of action. Whereas it was possible to electronically transmit and upload results of the National Assembly elections, those of the presidential poll proved recalcitrant and wouldn’t work. Lord, who has so bewitched us?  Small wonder, whilst the INEC has consistently tried to absolve itself of blame or charges of foul-play and the deliberate violation of its own rules and regulations governing the conduct of elections, opposition politicians and Nigerians generally have insisted that the INEC was in cahoots with the ruling party to swindle the collective will and, by implication, disenfranchise the electorate. What is democracy after all? Democracy (Greek: “demos”, meaning “people”; and “kratos”, meaning “power”), thus, means people power, particularly participatory democracy which Nigeria claims to be practising.  If the popular element is discretely “deleted” from it, what name does the charade then carry? Again, if democracy is the government of the people, for the people and by the people, it therefore behoves the relevant authorities to pay heed to the patriotic and democratic agitations of the people in regard to the contested integrity of the polls. Was the presidential election free, fair and credible?  Did the INEC follow due process; abide by its own rules and guidelines regarding the electronic transmission of election results? Did it violate, deliberately or otherwise, some provisions of the 2022 Electoral Act (as amended)? How about the electability of the candidates involved? These and other questions are begging for answers and are now before our judges.  The APC and its mandarins and hierarchs have urged the aggrieved parties to “go to court”, recognising the power of the legal process to deliver not just judgement but justice. But that is the snog; the catch in the whole brouhaha. People, Nigerians and the bemused world generally, are asking: can Nigeria’s judiciary be trusted to do right by the litigants? Is it above board and irreproachable? Can it rise beyond and above the so-called “Nigerian Factor”? People, long used to the low-trust Nigerian social environment point to what in law is known as precedent: They recall controversial rulings of the apex court such as those that empowered Governor Hope  Uzodinma of Imo State, the Senate President Ahmad Lawan and Godswill Akpabio, all of them egregious instantiations of the miscarriage of justice!  Even lawyers, including senior advocates of Nigeria (SANs), have openly lamented what they all regard as the poor performance of Nigerian judicial officers, especially the Bench. Given the hit-and-miss situation in our legal system today, we are forced to reminisce over and recall with nostalgia what easily passes for the Golden Era of Nigeria’s judiciary.  Who could forget the likes of Bola Ige, Samuel Akintola, Adeyemo Alakija, Arthur Prest, Audu Maikori, Babafemi Badejo, Bayo Ojo, Bode Thomas, Dennis Osadebay, Udo Udoma, Rotimi Williams, Jaja Wachuku, Obafemi Awolowo, Bola Ajibola, Akinola Aguda, Mustapha Akanbi, and others?  How about the fiery Gani Fawehinmi?  Or T.O.S. Benson, lawyer and politician? Time was when Nigerian legal luminaries used to hold their own among the cognoscenti of global jurists and justices, so much so that Nigerian judges and lawyers used to go to other countries to draft their legal instruments and even hold court there. We remember fondly the likes of Justice Emmanuel Oluwasegun Fagbenle, the Chief Justice of the Gambia, the recently passed Bola Ajibola, Commissioner on the Eritrea – Ethiopia Boundary Commission and Judge of the International Court of Justice, Stella Anukam, Justice of the African Court on Human and People Rights, Justice Coker, M.O. Ajegbo and Justice Chike Idigbo and Justice Charles Onyeama, father of Geoffrey Onyeama, the current minister of foreign affairs, as well as Teslim Elias, President of the ICJ (1982-1985).

What’s more, Nigerians reminisce over many generations of Nigerian youth who had chosen to pursue law as a profession on account of the quasi-Abrahamic gravitas and the Biblical solemnity of the pronouncements and epoch-making rulings of Nigerian justices in years gone by.  There exist up till today several families completely made up of lawyers, from great-grand-father, grandfather through father to son/daughter. They all read law either here in Nigeria or/and London or any other elite UK university for that matter. It’s a matter of family tradition, period!

Besides the clergy and medicine, law was the most prestigious and respectable profession people, especially blue-blooded ones, pursued and practised, since the Middle Ages. Today, sadly, it’s no better than a mass market where barbarians haggle over stale meat. Even Lady Justice herself has been stripped naked and her iconic Blindfold stolen! Cry the beloved country! Many factors account for her deplorable circumstances and desperate state, chief among which is the institutional weaponisation of poverty of the Bench. In a first-of-its kind protest letter in the 58-year history of the Supreme Court, the justices had chronicled the operational challenges that had almost crippled the efficient adjudication of cases in the court, citing such issues as accommodation, vehicles, electricity tariff, supply of diesel, internet services to their houses and chambers and epileptic electricity supply to the court. They had accused the CJN at the time, Tanko Muhammad, of self-aggrandisement and corruption. Their protest letter read in part: “We must not abandon our responsibility to call your Lordship to order in the face of these sad developments that threaten our survival as an institution. We have done our utmost best to send a wake-up call to your Lordship. A stitch in time saves nine.” What easier way do you demystify a profession such as law and who could do a better job of it than our ruling elite? Was anyone shocked when the NBA itself went downhill via its fractionalisation along ethno-religious lines?  Regarding the current state of legal affairs in our country, Nigerian poet of the people, Niyi Osundare, in his viral poem entitled: “My Lord, Tell Me where to Keep Your Bribe”, sings:

    My Lord

Tell me where to keep your bribe

The “last hope of the common man”

Has become the last bastion of the criminally rich

A terrible plague bestrides the land

Besieged by rapacious judges and venal lawyers

    Behind the antiquated wig

And the slavish glove

The penguin gown and the obfuscating jargon

Is a rot and riot whose stench is choking the land

• – – – – – – –

And Election Petition Tribunals

Ah, bless those goldmines and bottomless booties!

Scoundrel vote-riggers romp to electoral victory

All hail our buyable Bench and conniving Bar.

The poet bemoans our “Temple of Justice” which he says is eaten up by “termites of graft”.  In today’s Nigeria, the electorate does not elect its leaders any longer; the courts do (Judiocracy).  We as a people, as a nation of sentient beings corralled into a geographical space by neo-military fiat, are at a crossroads. To be or not to be, as they say, is the crucial question. Whither Nigeria? Since all else has failed, Nigeria’s only remaining hope is the judiciary.    If as it is being alleged everywhere that the blindfold of Lady Justice has gone missing or stolen, she is now forced to look eyeball to eyeball at the litigants.  The question again is, can she resist the lure of lucre?  Can she deliver justice bedazzled as she is with fabulous inducements? What risks do Nigeria and its beleaguered denizens run in the event of a calamitous miscarriage of justice in this case? Can Nigeria survive its outcome? History beckons, destiny waits and the clock is ticking, portentously.  Shall we pray!

• business a.m. commits to publishing a diversity of views, opinions and comments. It, therefore, welcomes your reaction to this and any of our articles via email: comment@businessamlive.com