The Hullabaloo Of ‘All Eyes On The Judiciary’

 By Sola Ebiseni

The powers that be in the country seem enamoured of an unimaginable propensity to create problems where none ought to exist or act on impulse to unwittingly add to and magnify a problem in finding solutions thereto. It all has to do with the paternalistic psychology of l’etait cest moi (I am the state) attributed to Louis XIV of France on April 13, 1665, before the Parliament of Paris in his perception and exercise of absolute state powers.

It is such idols that propelled such an off-the-cuff monumental declaration of the removal of fuel subsidy, obviously without rumination or genuine consultations resulting in debilitating socioeconomic problems the nation is not likely to be relieved of soon. It was with the same disdain for the citizens and their representatives that an unprovoked war was declared virtually on our soil before seeking the concurrence of parliament.

It is amusing how an innocuous WhatsApp group called “All Eyes on the Judiciary” has now acquired national importance and animated discourse throughout the land because of the overzealousness of the Advertising Regulatory Council of Nigeria, a creation of the Advertising Regulatory Council of Nigeria Act, AARCON, 2022, which itself is of doubtful validity in view of the fact that advertising is a residual matter under the Constitution of which the states have exclusive legislative competence. 

The law is not the same and indeed overshot its competence compared with the Advertising Practitioners Council of Nigeria, APCON, Act, which it purportedly repealed and replaced. As reported in the media, the Director-General of ARCON, Dr. Olalekan Fadolapo, ordered the removal of the “All Eyes on the Judiciary” billboards nationwide, alleging that “sponsors of the billboard are blackmailing the Presidential Election Petition Tribunal, PEPT,” and ordered that “all ads, wherever they were placed, should be brought down immediately and violators sanctioned”.

To the DG: “The advertisement is controversial and capable of instigating public unrest and breaching public peace. The advertisement is considered blackmail against the Nigerian Judiciary, the Presidential Election Petition Tribunal, and particularly the Honourable Justices of the Tribunal, who are expected to discharge their judicial functions without fear or favour over a matter that is currently jus pendis. A matter being jus pendis and awaiting judicial pronouncement. The advertisement is controversial and capable of instigating public unrest and breaching public peace”. 

It is doubtful if the DG ARCON and those he claims to represent are fully aware of the responsibility of government and all its organs to society. If, as it is commonly expressed, the judiciary is the last hope of the proverbial common man, the class of whom is constituted by the overwhelming majority of the citizenry, does it not stand to reason that all hopes, thoughts, eyes, and attention ought to be on the judiciary? A government, properly so called, ought not only to be delighted at such mass awareness but should encourage it deliberately. In other words, what a big deal it is that all eyes are on the judiciary to warrant a hullabaloo over such an all-time truism.

One is still at sea about how a statement saying that all eyes are on the judiciary without more is considered capable of instigating public unrest and breaching public peace. If one may remind the powers that be, what did they make of their first Democracy Day speech on June 12, exactly 15 days after inauguration? That “it has become imperative to state here that the unnecessary, illegal orders used to truncate or abridge democracy will no longer be tolerated”. 

How more can the judiciary be threatened than the words of he, as we have now realised, the embodiment of the state and its leviathan powers, whom his party lords saw and fled; who declared his opponents to be snatched, grabbed, and ran away with; before whom the parliament turned back, ECOWAS skipped like rams and Niger like lambs? It is he who feels called upon to determine orders of court that are ‘unnecessary, illegal, and intolerable”.

Let us also remind them that in the course of the hearing of the Presidential Election Petitions earlier and almost at the Court of Appeal Abuja, some men dressed in funny attire sang war songs with placards of offensive inscriptions in the defence of the presidential candidate of the APC, whose declaration as president was and is still being queried. On this page, on July 4, 2023, under the title: “This Time Tomorrow”, we have written about the ugly and provocative spectacle in the following words:

“Clowns everywhere now show themselves for political patronage. Each day as we approach the Court of Appeal in Abuja for the hearing of the Presidential Election Petition, one is treated to a comic spectacle of palace jesters donning some egungun attire and bearing placards on which they hardly could read the inscriptions. In what appeared to be a direct message to my Lords, one of the placards read: ‘5 persons cannot change the decision of 200 million Nigerians’. The tragedy is not in the fact that such a spectacle of the absurd is allowed virtually at the door of the judiciary but that some political actors, in a democracy, would allow such absurdity to be perpetrated in their names”. 

It is thus hypocritical that these war drums beaten to the faces of their Lordships as they approach the temple of justice daily were not considered incendiary enough for the drummers and their macabre dance orchestra to be disbanded and arrested for embarrassing the judiciary.

The storm of hype on which the innocuous message on the billboard is now enjoying free-ride by the amateur reaction makes the citizens curiouser and curiouser. As I said earlier, I have several times come across the social media version of “All Eyes on the Judiciary” and never paid it any attention. Now, because of this hysterical reaction, I am, like many citizens, forced to check it, and I found out that it was created on February 23, 2023, even before the elections were held. However, as a lawyer and a member of the Peter Obi legal team, our eyes and attention are on the facts, evidence, and relevant laws, on which we tango with the INEC and its illegal declaration.

Nonetheless, we acknowledge that we are in unusual times, a season of ‘war’, self-inflicted, within and without, such that even harmless songs are viewed by the powers that be as conspiracies against the fumbling administration. Jà l’ódé, t orin d’ we (only in times of misunderstanding does a song become a proverb) is the Yoruba proverb explaining the legion of connotations that can be ascribed even to ordinarily friendly words by the jittery in times of troubles.

Conclusively, it is the inalienable right of the citizens and indeed an exercise in futility to expect their eyes not to be on the judiciary as the last hope in a dispute on which their lives are dependent, irrespective of genuine concerns in recent times. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., in 1897, in his definition of law, put it most strikingly: “The prophecies of what the courts will do in fact, and nothing more pretentious, are what I mean by the law”. 

Nigeria, we hail you.

*Chief Ebiseni is a commentator on public issues