Case can change” is a euphemism often used to describe how quickly the police could transform an innocent person to a principal suspect or, indeed, set free a hardened criminal and procure a subterfuge to explain it away – that is, if they must explain.
A lot of cases change in this way once the appropriate terms and conditions between negotiating parties are met. But there is a place where organised case changes are due and procedural, indeed, legally recognised – and that is in the courts. Legal proceedings and outcomes are often a rigmarole to laymen.
How does one understand a case begun in the Federal High Court which progresses to the Court of Appeal, finally lands in the Supreme Court only to be sent back to the court of initial jurisdiction? How does one resolve the diametrically opposed rulings between the subordinate and apex courts? Judicial processes seem more complicated than wearing a wig and gown suggests.
Even among opposing counsels, justice is often represented as a profit and loss balance sheet. A case won is simply accepted as justice served, while a case lost is interpreted and conveyed by the losing party, as a travesty. Such relativism and contextual bias have become a regular feature of legal engagements whether civil of criminal, profane or sacred. This may partially explain how and why cases that shouldn’t transcend a magistrate find their way to the Supreme Court.
Such complicated manoeuvres have also been prominent in the trial of the dissident, Mazi Nnamdi Kanu, since his arrest and repatriation from Kenya in June 2021. Kanu, whose cause has been the harbinger of civil unrest and destruction of lives and property in Southeast Nigeria has been in detention and on trial for treasonable felony and terrorism-related offences. Friday, December 15 must have been a tense moment in some parts of the country as interested parties waited for the outcome of the Supreme Court’s determination of the Federal Government’s appeal on the leader of the proscribed Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB).
The Federal Government had appealed to the Supreme Court after the Court of Appeal nullified the charges of treasonable felony and terrorism on the basis of a breach of international convention through the arrest and forceful repatriation of Kanu to Nigeria by the Nigerian government. A little backtracking may suffice for context. Kanu had been standing trial for 11-count charges of terrorism, treason, treasonable felony and illegal possession of firearms before he was granted bail. In November 2017, he jumped bail and violated other conditions of his release and fled into exile to intensify the state of anarchy he seeks to impose on a country he calls a zoo.
Since then, killings and hate murders inspired by Kanu and his associates’ incendiary broadcasts from safe havens in western capitals, willful destruction of public property and arson, targeted attacks on police stations and their armouries, lockdowns and restriction of movement have been the lot of Nigerians unfortunate to call the territory that falls within Kanu’s illusional Biafra their home. It is quite confounding therefore, how quickly the conversation shifted from the criminal and murderous tendencies instigated by Kanu – a fugitive who jumped bail – another serious and criminal offence, to the contrived and alleged violation of his rights and freedom. And while we waited for justice to be served, lawyers changed the case from treason and felony to the violation of Kanu’s rights.
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Haba! This brazen attempt to change the narrative even in the face of the crippling economic hardships imposed on the enterprising people of Nigeria’s southeast region by Kanu’s foot soldiers and death-dealing squads, flies in the face of reason and morality. It is a cocky dance on the graves of hundreds of people – civilians, soldiers and policemen summarily executed or gruesomely murdered for standing in the way of Kanu and his delusions.
But it is the work of genius – it owes its credulity to a legion of senior advocates. They changed the case through the high court to the appeal court. Fortunately, they weren’t able to steamroll the Supreme Court. While law seeks to ensure justice and equity, lawyers are masters of ambivalence whose loyalty to a client outstrips the commitment to social justice and national security. For many years since Kanu happened on the scene, the hitherto coolheaded agitation for a separate homeland championed by the Movement for the Actualisation of the Sovereign State of Biafra (MASSOB), transformed to a violent campaign.
From then on, it has been a state of blood and rivers of blood. The violation of Kanu’s rights should not and cannot obfuscate or overshadow the fact that he continuously issued threats and incited violence not only against ethnic groups that resent his vision of Biafra, but even against individuals and groups who as much as uttered a word of caution. The thousands, perhaps millions of misguided youths who have been radicalized and captured by Kanu’s war chants are no different from the hordes of Hutu militia glued to the Radio Mille Collines as the Rwandan genocide entered its practical phase in 1994.
They are merely waiting for the final whistle. The preliminary stage – jailbreaks, arson, attacks on security personnel and state institutions and curfews, are enough signal. Smoking out Kanu from hiding and bringing him before the law to answer for his willful indiscretions is no violation of rights. But depriving innocent people of their lives and livelihood and subversion of law and order as Kanu and his aides have propagated, is.
The United States never sought permission from third parties to invade Abbotbabad, Pakistan and take out Osama bin Laden in 2011, neither did she obey any international protocols in the assassination of Qassem Soleimani, an Iranian general who represented threats to American interests in 2020.
Kanu has been a clear and present danger to himself and to society. Nigeria must activate all international treaties and protocols to get foreign governments to extradite dissidents with dual nationalities seeking to further destabilise an already fragile polity. The West will never stop ringing their hangs in hypocritical reproach. But it’s our country to run!