By Paul Onomuakpokpo
While the
plaudits tend to dim the caution against the danger of repudiating the
constitutional forts that guarantee the stability of our society in the guise
of prosecuting the anti-corruption campaign, we must keep on reminding
ourselves of the desiderata for the realisation of the vision of a transparent
society that President Muhammadu Buhari seemingly holds.
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| *Buhari |
As this
column has often stressed, there is no doubt that corruption is an enervating
plague that must be rooted out of our society to pave the way for an equitable
distribution of the wealth with which this nation is immeasurably endowed.
Yet, in arresting and
prosecuting the corrupt among us, we must guard against being befuddled by our
identification with the ruling party. It is such uncritical alignment that has
blurred the vision of those who should have declared the obvious excesses that
have smeared the anti-corruption campaign intolerable.
True, no one who is
keenly aware of the grim reality that the nation has suffered despoliation due
to the complicity of the corrupt guardians of the laws of the land would query
the raid on the residences of judges who allegedly have been living on sleazy
funds. Again, we cannot easily render impeachable the idea of the judges being
on suspension until they exonerate themselves from their alleged involvement in
practices that strongly detracted from their professional integrity.
Thus, the National
Judicial Council (NJC) may soon buckle under the pressure being mounted on it
to suspend the judges. The NJC may no longer bear being accused of complicity
with the judicial officers whose residences the Department of State Services
(DSS) raided for allegedly perverting the course of justice after being bribed
with dollars. Of course, apart from the DSS and the president, no one else
knows how compelling the incriminating evidence against the judges are. But to
save the judiciary from the moral absurdity of judges accused of corruption
presiding over cases of financial sleaze, they may have to be suspended while
their investigation lasts.
But it would remain an
ominous omission that mocks the anti-corruption drive if it is only the judges
that would be on suspension because of the allegations against them. This is
where the Buhari government must allow equity to lend credibility to the
anti-corruption campaign. The judges have alleged that they are being haunted
by the security agency of the government not because their professional
credibility is in question, but simply because they have refused to do the
obnoxious bidding of some of those in the ruling party.
Indeed, they did not
mince words. Justice Sylvester Ngwuta accused the Minister of Transportation,
Chibuike Rotimi Amaechi and Ogbonaya Onu of asking him to influence judgments
in their favour. Ngwuta alleged that Amaechi asked him to illegally remove
Ayodele Fayose of Ekiti State and Nyesom Wike of Rivers State
