With all due respect, where do you think they keep it. I beg to disagree. You will be shocked to know that many of them still keep such money in their houses. Not after many people got duped by those used to siphon money. Many no longer take such chances.Many Nigerian business men I know still carry cash around, many do not even use ATM or electronic transfer. Many bribes still take place with Ghana must go bags. I know this to be true. If these people are as rational as you think they will not even behave in the horrible ways they have been behaving. I have been privileged to do election work, hear the politicians talk, declare them winner, leave the courts to them. What do you think give them confidence to talk that way? Today being appointed to the Bench is saying good bye to any form of middle class life. They all aim to belong to the billionaire club. What is sad is that within the Bar they know the "sortable"( term for bribe coined by Nigerian students) judges and it is so openly discussed. They even know the lawyers including some SANs that act as their proxies. Just like in the Universities, students will tell you the sortable lecturers. Corruption is irrational and those who get involve in it are also irrational. The era of ghana must go loaded with money is yet to pass. If you think it is all gimmicks No, it is real.
Nkolika
Awka
From: Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju <toyin.adepoju@gmail.com>
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Tuesday, October 11, 2016 4:26 PM
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Judges arrest: How to cleanse the Judiciary
If I had large sums of money, particularly if acquired illegally, and in the strange context of various currencies, would I keep the money in my house?
If I had papers indicating wealth of ownership of illegally acquired real estate, would I keep such papers in my house?
I remain amazed at what I see as the naivete of imagination some Nigerians demonstrate when faced by high stakes politics.
Tricks dictators since Hitler, Stalin etc have executed across decades are conducted in Nigeria, by a government that is clearly far from honest and some are falling over themselves to swallow claims being made by the same government.
Even a person who has never watched a spy or crime film and has lived all their lives in a remote village in Okitikupa knows that being a thief is not for unimaginative people who cannot at least make an effort to hide their loot away from locations where it could be easily found.
The person accused of accepting such huge monies in bribes could not even bury the money in a hole in his compound, with such massive sums he has no access to various accounts outside the country where he could have wired or deposited his loot in this age of digital banking but kept an incriminating amount of it in his home.
He has no safe deposit box anywhere where he could have stashed the papers indicating ownership of illegal real estate but kept it in his house where it could be conveniently found by a random security raid?
Haba!
People, I beg, struggle and educate yourselves on strategies of white collar corruption and theft as well as techniques of entrenching dictatorship. Look up the methods used by dictators to claim to be acting in the public good when in fact they are either striking terror into the judiciary to make it pliable or instilling the fear of death or ruin in others to make them open to control.
Try and also read Franz Kafka's The Trial, in which a man is accused by state security agents of committing a crime. "What is my crime?", he asks. "That is how the guilty talk", the agents respond. His futile efforts to discover the crime he is being accused of in journeys through the labyrinths of the law is the core of the novel. Kafka lived in pre-Nazi Germany and foreshadowed the dictatorial future that bloomed in the Nazi party.
Nigerians were sold the Buhari alcohol on the platform of anti-corruption. The same character has stepped in to enshrine budget padding yet claims he knew nothing about it, a most implausible and shameful claim coming from a chief executive, and of a nation, for that matter, his never found secondary school leaving certificate remains in imagination as he hires the most expensive lawyers to defend the indefensible in a situation where he should have been disqualified from contesting for the Presidency in the first place, he unleashes an escalation of Fulani herdsmen's terrorism across Nigeria in the massacre of hundreds in Agatu and more in the Middle Belt, individual and large scale murders in the NW and SE, with the active connivance of the security forces, and he arrests not one of these murderous characters, even when the murderers openly justify their bloodthirsty barbarism, but initiates a national military task force to protect the cattle of these private fellow ethnic/religious business people of his, arguing for why they engage in murderous raids and colonization strategies across the nation in the name of claims that they have the right to roam the nation at will with their cows and commit atrocities beceause those grazing routes have been overrun by farmers, along with claims of dispersion by desertification and displacement by Boko Haram terrorism, claims made in the context of this character's efforts to try to steal by law the nation's land for these terrorists instead of working out how to develop the region where they come from so they can thrive there, enthrones crass nepotism by beginning appointments with his ethnic/religious cronies whom he places in control of security agencies, the ultimate agents of dictatorship, and makes sure he can't be removed from office by making one such crony and relative the head of INEC, the national electoral body, integrates known thieves into his cabinet and military leadership and ignores all known dubious actions of these characters, Buratai, army chief of staff and his dubious Dubai properties, Amaechi and his multi-million naira Soyinka birthday and literary festival in a land of huger used in buying the support of the social critic for the dictator of whom the critic was the most avid opponent before this sell out, Fashola and the horror of an 80 million naira website in his own name, from the state's money in an era of free websites, all these are in the highest echelons of this character's government and some Southern Nigerians whose eyes are blind to the tool the DSS have become are again jumping up and down to stories of arrests and unlikely discoveries in judges' homes.
My people, please learn to ask questions. Study and understand varieties of political strategy. Don't take what comes from the govt at face value bcs you are desperate for creative change. This desperation has brought you the horrors I have outlined along with an economic recession significantly contributed to by a person who has weakened confidence in the Nigerian economy by running a one man government for months into his swearing into office, has no idea how to manage unrest in the Niger Delta oil source of the nation except to focus on murderous force in the region and against those peacefully agitating for a nation of their own,Biafra, who has no business leading you if not that you fell for the cocktail of lies in which he was covered by spin artists. Don't let them spit in your mouth telling you its champagne. Ask questions.
I remain of the view that we don't have nation but only a glorified prison. This destructive character can't be removed by the ballot box bcs he has done everything to make sure that is impossible. An overwhelming number of those who share his ethnic/religious orientation will also support him bcs religion and ethnicity are the most potent unifying force of his region. If the arrests had been in the North, these people would have asked, for example, why all these judges suddenly discovered to be so crooked are from the the North.
We need ethnic self determination to found nations based on common values. The domination of the nation's politics by desperate right wing Northern Muslim politicians and military figures, of whom Buhari is a representative, destroys all possibility of genuine ideological alliances across any boundaries.
thanks
toyin
On 11 October 2016 at 13:29, 'kayode Ketefe' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> wrote:
--Judges arrest: How to cleanse the JudiciaryKAYODE KETEFEThe biggest news rocking the nation at this moment is the arrest of seven of the judges between last Friday and Saturday, by the operatives from the Department of Security Services. These highly placed judiciary icons comprising two Supreme Court Justices Sylvester Ngwuta and John Okoro, were alleged to have collected bribes to pervert the cause of justice by subverting judgement in favour of one of the two leading political parties in Akwa Ibom State and another state in the South East.The five other judges enmeshed in this debacle are Adeniyi Ademola of the Federal High Court, Abuja; Kabir Auta of the Kano High Court; Muazu Pindiga of Gombe High Court, Mohammed Tsamiya of the Court of Appeal in Ilorin, and the Chief Judge of Enugu State, I. A. Umezulike.
Nigeria has grappled with corruption in the Judiciary over the ages with many judges being booted out of office with ignominy over gross misconduct. The list of such judges includes a former judge of the Lagos High Court, Justice Adebayo Manuwa; a former judge of the Federal High Court, Abuja, Justice Chukwuemeka Nwaogwugwu; and a former Chief Judge of the Abia State High Court, Justice Kalu Amah. Others are former Justice Wilson Egbo-Egbo of Abuja High Court; and a former judge of the Enugu State High Court, Justice Stanley Nnaji.Earlier this very month, the National Judicial Council (NJC) (an organ constitutionally charged with appointment and discipline of judges) recommended compulsory retirement of, the Presiding Justice, Court of Appeal, Ilorin Division, Justice Mohammed Tsamiya and sack of Chief Judge, Enugu State, Justice I. A. Umezulike and Justice Kabiru Auta of the High Court of Justice, Kano State, for professional misconduct.The instant clampdown by the DSS on judges have sharply polarised the discerning Nigerians into two camps, we have those who faulted the arrest, especially the mode it was executed, seeing it as a slap on the Judiciary which consists an independent arm of Government. This group insists that the findings of the DSS should simply have been made available to the NJC which would then recommend the appropriate punitive action.On the other hand, we have those who assert that fighting corruption should not encumbered with the so-called due process and unnecessary adherence to technicalities. They believe that the invasion of the judges' homes and subsequent arrest could be justified on the grounds of necessity – that it would otherwise have been difficult to get to the root of the matter without resort to such sudden invasion and arrest.This writer will rather take a somewhat middle ground from these two sharply divided perspectives. To start with, the DSS has the powers to arrest anybody except those covered with immunity under section 308 and ambassadors and diplomats. Judges don't have such immunity.Specifically, Sections 12 (2) & 13 ACJA give a law officer the power to break into and out of any house for the purpose of arresting a suspect who fails to let the arresting officer in.
6Section 43 (1) ACJA states: "A warrant of arrest may be executed on any day, including a Sunday or public holiday."Notwithstanding the above, given the prime place judges occupy as head of another arm of government, the normal thing should have been for the DSS to invite the judges for quizzing. However, if the finding of humongous amount of moneys allegedly found in the homes of the some of these arrested judges is factored into the equation, the option of inviting the judges becomes problematic.It would take a fool to get an invitation from a topmost security agency like the DSS and still retain in his home the evidence that can nail him! For this reason the sudden invasion may be excused. Not that it is proper, but as a necessary aberration to unearth a cogent evidence that would otherwise be lost and frustrate the case.The judges deserve to be treated with utmost dignity and respect and all of them should be given bail (after making their statements) on self-recognisance, though they may be placed on surveillance, after all they are still innocent now until proven guilty.The proper route should still be followed. That is DSS should forward their findings to the NJC while the latter should make their recommendations to the President on the appropriate punitive measures, which of course, can include prosecution of the erring judges.In that case all the due process would have been followed and the expected ends would still be procured.Having said that I am not oblivious of the fact that the NJC itself has attracted criticisms over the years for perceived conservatism and lethargy. There has been a belief that the NJC has not particularly been active on the issue of discipline of judicial officers. The institution is seen to be overly cautious about taking punitive measures against judicial personnel in order not to give impression to the public that the judiciary is corrupt.True, the Council has disciplined many judges over the years with sanctions like caution, suspension or outright removal from the bench but, People do wonder what the number of casualties would have been if the Council has not been "liberal" with the judges!An objective and rational approach would be to insist that judicial integrity should not be compromised for whatever reason. So going forward, the NJC itself needs restructuring, to make it more dynamic and efficient. The composition of the body needs to be tinkered with to ensure that no one in the Council is too powerful to influence its decisionsKetefe may be followed on twitter @Ketesco
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