By Chidi Anselm Odinkalu
Josiah Majebi is the fifth chief judge of Kogi State (in North-Central Nigeria) in four years and the fourth to exist almost entirely in the pocket of the state governor. He has been in office as substantive chief judge since the beginning of February 2023, having acted in that role since 26 June 2022, when his predecessor, Richard Olorunfemi, retired. Henry Olusiyi served in that office for just under seven months from the end of June 2020 until January 2021. Sunday Otuh, who succeeded him, spent eight months in office before retiring in September 2021.
The last Chief Judge of Kogi State who attempted to hold that office with dignity and independence, Nasir Ajanah, paid with his life, un-mourned and exiled from the state. He was the second Chief Judge of the State to be politically lynched by the government of Kogi State in one decade.
At the beginning of April 2008, the Kogi State House of
Assembly, defying an order of the state High Court, adopted a resolution asking
the state Governor to remove long-serving Chief Judge of the state, Umaru Eri.
On that basis, then acting governor, Clarence Olafemi, promptly announced the sack of the Chief Judge on 2
April 2008 and designated another judge, Sam Ota, to act in his place.
In his defence, Umaru Eri
claimed that his crime was that he had declined the request of the politicians
to act as go-between in bribing the election petition tribunal on behalf of the
then state governor, whose election was in dispute. On 16 May, 2008, Alaba
Ajileye, a judge of the High Court of Kogi State, reversed the sack and reinstated Umaru Eri.
Eleven years later, on 18
June 2019, Alaba Ajileye presided again in deciding a case that seemed
uncannily to reprise issues in his earlier decision. As with the 2008 decision,
the claimant in 2019 was another Chief Judge of Kogi State, Nasir Ajanah with his
Chief Registrar, Yahya Adamu. The defendants included the Kogi State House of
Assembly, its Speaker, and the State Governor, Yahaya Bello.
At the directive of Governor
Yahaya Bello, the Secretary to the Government of Kogi State wrote on 14
November, 2018 to Chief Judge Nasir Ajanah, asking him to provide “the payroll
of judicial staff for the ongoing pay parade of civil servants in the state.”
At the time, the Governor was a defendant in the court of the Chief Judge, so
the Chief Registrar responded to the letter and explained that the judiciary is
a self-accounting and co-equal branch of government supervised by the state
Judicial Service Commission.
An affronted
Governor Yahaya Bello wrote under his own name to Walter Onnoghen, then chief
justice of Nigeria and chair of the National Judicial Council (NJC), asking the
NJC to find the Chief Judge guilty of misconduct and requiring that he “step
aside and (an) Acting Chief Judge (be) allowed to take his place.”
While his petition was still waiting for the attention of
the NJC, Yahaya Bello resorted to political self-help. He referred the
perceived effrontery of Nasir Ajannah to the State House of Assembly, which
promptly constituted an investigation committee. The Chief Judge sued. While
his suit was pending, on 2 April 2019, the State House of Assembly adopted a
resolution asking Yahaya Bello to remove the Chief Judge and also requiring
disciplinary action against the Chief Registrar.
On 18 June 2019, Alaba Ajileye sitting as the
High Court of Kogi State in Kotonkarfe, determined that the Kogi State House of
Assembly and the Governor acted unlawfully in seeking to remove the Chief Judge.
The reaction of the governor was bestial. He first went
after Alaba Ajileye, a man of courage and learning whose judicial record was
unblemished. With a doctorate degree in law, Alaba Ajileye was an expert in the
rarefied subject of digital evidence.
Following this judgment, however, Yahaya
Bello’s government made it known that they could no longer guarantee his
safety. Yet, when he was put forward for elevation to the Court of Appeal, the
same Kogi State government actively blocked it. A man who would easily have
adorned the Supreme Court with distinction, Alaba Ajileye retired from the High
Court in February 2023 and has since then forged a career as a scholar and academic.
Turning to the state Chief Judge, meanwhile,
Yahaya Bello made life unbearable for Nasir Ajannah. He began by banishing the
man from official state functions. When Chief Judge Ajannah attended the
swearing in of the new Grand Khadi of Kogi State on 21 May 2020, the Chief
Security Officer to Yahaya Bello informed him that “the governor gave a
directive that he should not be allowed to attend the function.”
In the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, Governor Yahaya
Bello made Nasir Ajannah persona
non-grata in the state. As a result, he was forced into
internal displacement in Abuja, where his personal arrangements were worse than
transitory. While in hiding in Abuja, Nasir Ajannah contracted COVID and died
in isolation in Gwagwalada, in the Federal Capital Territory, on 28 June 2020.
His death went unacknowledged and even the institutions of the judiciary were
reluctant to mourn his passing.
The men who
followed Nasir Ajannah in the office of Chief Judge of Kogi State learnt to
stoke the vanities of Yahaya Bello and avoid his anger. Ahead of his departure
from office at the end of eight years as governor of Kogi State in January
2024, Josiah Majebi as chief judge and chair of the Kogi State Judicial Service
Commission, prepared a list of candidates for nomination as judges of the High
Court of Kogi State. At the top of the list was a wife to Yahaya Bello, the
basis of whose claim to the nomination was the dutiful fulfilment of the duties
of connubium in Yahaya Bello’s bedroom. For the Chief Judge, it was also proof
that he had truly abjured any pretensions to a mind of his own.
Alarmed at what they saw as perversion of the system of
judicial appointments, a group of seven Senior Advocates of Nigeria (SANs) from
the state wrote to Josiah Majebi to dissuade him from this course of action. In
January, they sued challenging his judicial nominations. Pending the outcome,
the NJC suspended the process of appointment to the
Kogi State judiciary. On 18 April, James Omotoso, a judge of the Federal High
Court in Abuja, many of whose judgments usually have something of a smell
problem about them, implausibly ruled that
these SANs had no legitimate interest in the process of appointment of judges
in their state and that, in any case, the discretion of the NJC in appointment
of judges was effectively not open to review.
It was the day after Yahaya Bello’s chosen successor and
blood relative, Usman Ododo, chose to turn his predecessor into a fugitive from
the legal process and two days after Mr Ododo opened his case in the petition questioning
the lawfulness of his election as governor of Kogi State. As a bungling
Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) waited to arrest Yahaya Bello
in Abuja, one IA Jamil, a judge of the High Court of Kogi State, issued an
order claiming to restrain the Commission from doing its job.
According to the order of the judge, the case which was filed
over two months earlier on 8 February, was hurriedly assigned while the siege
was on going in Abuja, argued, heard and decided and the judge quickly signed
the order and handed it to Governor Ododo to take with him to Abuja, from where
he spirited his cousin away from the legal process in a blaze of gunfire. The
court was almost assuredly disingenuous about the date of filing. In all
likelihood, the case was filed the same day on 17 April and then back-dated.
The EFCC now claims it has declared Yahaya
Bello a fugitive but the real question will be how a compromised and complicit
judicial leadership will now treat the nomination of his unqualified wife as a
judge and the petition against the declaration of his violent cousin as
governor of Kogi State. The judges who currently control Nigeria’s criminal
politics now must show how much they owe Yahaya Bello.
*Chidi Anselm Odinkalu, a lawyer, teaches at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and can be reached through chidi.odinkalu@tufts.edu
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