Odili’s N6bn libel suit and his own perpetual injunction

After years of telling us of reforms in the judiciary, it turns out that the rot in the system is going nowhere.

You can imagine the frustration, when judges had to be visited with hammers at their bedroom doors during midnight.

I’m not in support of what has been widely condemned as human rights abuse by the Muhammadu Buhari government, but I do sincerely think this is a soul-searching moment for the judiciary.

Of course, the invasion of judges’ houses by the secret police has been explained away by the Attorney-General and Justice Minister, Abubakar Malami.

Malami wants the nation to crack the nut of corruption by whatever means.

“The fundamental consideration is whether there is an allegation of the commission of a crime, whether there is the need for investigation, and whether the relevant provisions of the law and indeed, all circumstances, as provided in the Administration of Criminal Justice Act (ACJA) are put into consideration in our conduct as regards the fight against corruption.

“The bottom line is that we have a responsibility to fight corruption. Corruption is a crime and nobody, regardless of how highly placed is exempted as far as issues that border on crimes and criminalities are concerned,” he said.

Okay, but we’ll see where this takes us in a matter of days.

Just on Tuesday, the former Governor of Rivers State, Peter Odili, a man whose name is synonymous to ‘perpetual injunction’, was in court. It was to be the hearing of a suit he instituted against the Director-General of the Nigerian Maritime Administration and Safety Agency and former governorship candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC), in Rivers State, Dr. Dakuku Peterside, for defamation. He is claiming N6 billion damages.

Since 2009, Odili has evaded justice. The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) said it has serious case against him. But no thanks to a sick judiciary‎, Odili cannot be tried and he is still a power block in the politics of Rivers State.

Just days before he stepped down as governor in 2007, when he would have lost his immunity, Odili approached court to get perpetual injunction against the EFCC.

In his autobiography, ‘Conscience and History: My Story,’ Odili even boasted and bragged about what he did.

In March 2008, the UK-based news agency, Reuters wrote: “The former governor of Nigeria’s richest oil state secured a “perpetual injunction” against arrest by the anti-corruption police in a court ruling on Wednesday.

“Peter Odili governed Rivers state, which has an annual budget well over $1 billion and where most of the estimated 5 million residents have no power, clean water or access to functional schools and clinics, for eight years until May 2007.”

Now, for straight eight years, the court has made it impossible for the EFCC to get Odili.

And when the EFCC tried to fight back, a high court under Justice Ibrahim Buba simply told EFCC that, “the subsisting judgment of March 2007 by this court is binding on all parties. Therefore there is a perpetual injunction restraining the EFCC from arresting, detaining and arraigning Odili on the basis of his tenure as governor based on the purported investigation.”

Unarguably, we have had many confabulations on corruption, yet people who soiled their hands deeply continue to ride on the ineffectiveness of our judiciary.

The exploitation of public office for personal gain has been everything a theme at forums and conferences by experts, yet we are far away from the cesspool of corruption.

But the continued rise of corruption in Nigeria and the brigandage of thieves will continue as long as configuration of institutional inefficiency persists.  A nation where weak legislation and judiciary systems prevail will find a nest for political corruption.

In a straightforward petition to the National Judicial Council (NJC) in 2009, one up-front lawyer, Osita Mba, sought to remove the shackle from EFCC by petitioning the NJC  over Odili’s perpetual injunction granted by Justice Ibrahim Buba.

Mba asked NJC under the leadership of Justice Idris Kutigi to remove Justice Buba, because the perpetual injunction granted by Justice Buba was illegal.

He described it as “gross Incompetence and flagrant abuse of powers amounting to judicial misconduct and violations of the code of conduct for judicial officers.”

The petition probably ended in trash basket. Did you hear anything further?

But the same Mba in 2013 brought sanity to a corrupt system in the United Kingdom.

After being an insider working for the HM Customs and Revenue, Mba noticed the rot in the system and became a whistleblower.

He was taken seriously by the UK parliament that turned the heat on HM Customs and Revenue with sweltering hearings over HM Revenue and Customs’ tax deals.

Mba had acted in public interest calling attention to how big banks were getting away without paying tax. It raised public anger and led to many inquiries, though people with high level of interest in the matter tried to discredit Mba’s testimony.

In this particular case Mba provided parliamentary committees with evidence that a handshake between the then head of tax, Dave Hartnett, led to a deal that made it possible for Goldman Sachs to escape paying £20m in interest charges.

My point is that institution works in the United Kingdom, where Mba did exactly the same thing he had tried to do in his country and failed. For now, the story is: Odili has sued Peterside in the same court he cannot be sued.

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