One issue that has dominated public discourse in Nigeria lately is the need to establish special courts to handled corruption cases in the country. While it is no longer news that corruption is one of the greatest challenges facing the country in recent time, many have wondered why the system can not effectively deal with the menace.
The damage corruption has done to the polity and the generality of the people is unimaginable. The malaise pervades all strata of the society, the three tiers of government and its arms, the private sector, law enforcement agencies, institutions of higher learning and other sectors. In the last two years, hardly a month passes without the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), the body statutorily responsible for tackling the menace arresting one public officer or the other over allegations bord`ering on corruption.
In spite of the seeming arrests and arraignments of these suspects before the regular courts, more and more damning revelations and arrests of public officials involved in one form of treasury looting, embezzlement, contract and bribery scams or the other are being made. The impunity with which people in power allegedly loot and steal these days is not only alarming, but embarrassing. Most Nigerians no longer express bitterness each time they hear of billions of naira being stolen from public coffers, what they feel sad about is for a system which treat such cases with levity.
The feeling in many quarters is that the inability of government and its institutions to deal with corrupt public officers usually sends a wrong signal to the public that corruption is not punishable. Specifically, many analysts have argued that the inability of the nation's justice system to decisively deal with corrupt officials is obviously one of the reasons for the resurgence and it sends wrong signals to the public that corruption would only attract mild punishment as long as the judiciary and other institutions could be compromised.
This feeling may have been given credence by the way and manner those accused of massive embezzlement of public funds are allowed to enjoy their ill-gotten wealth or traverse the length and breadth of the world instead of being in detention.
When a comparison between the number of arrests and arraignments since the inception of the EFCC, and the number of convictions recorded, the result would be shocking and embarrassing to the ears. If the courts do not deliver rulings that will further render the existing Acts upon which suspects are standing trial nugatory, it is the defence counsel that will through frivolous applications frustrate the trial.
It is against this background that many analysts are currently canvassing for the establishment of the special court to handle the multiple corruption cases in the country as a way of tackling the menace. One of those in the forefront of the advocacy is the Chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), Mrs. Farida Waziri herself.
Speaking in an interview with journalists recently, Waziri said the slow judicial processes in the regular courts were a major challenge to the commission's effort at tackling the malaise. She said the establishment of a special court to try corrupt officials would facilitate the commission's operations, adding that her commission had duly investigated many cases, but was being hindered by delayed prosecution. She added that it high time the country devised proactive ways to bring corrupt persons to justice.
The EFCC boss called on the National Assembly to begin the process of creating special courts with the requisite jurisdiction to bring to book, public and private officials involved in corrupt acts. Disclosing that nations have successfully adopted the strategy to curb a social problem confronting them, Waziri said Italy used special constitutional courts to check executive lawlessness when it was a problem to their nation-building process, "so did other nations establish special criminal courts for the same purposes".
According to her, "the slow judicial processes our courts are known for and the bureaucratic and legalistic bottlenecks of the judicial system of this country, do not allow us to achieve our stated goals easily. The legal process takes quite a lot of money, energy, time and deployment of personnel to get a single conviction.
"A special court for EFCC-related offences will take us away from the undue legalities that many brilliant lawyers have capitalised on to twist the hand of the courts and the commission. It is a common practice to define the success of an institution like the EFCC on the number of convictions it had. However, analysts should put into consideration the slow and windy justice system. Under the rule of law as enshrined in the Constitution, a person is presumed innocent until found guilty. If the perpetrators of corruption use the rule of law to frustrate attempts at bringing them to justice, then the state must device other appropriate methods," she advised.
Also, while delivering a lecture titled: "How Corruption Undermines Democracy" recently, the EFCC boss lamented that corrupt officials and their counsels were capitalising on the rule of law policy of the current administration to frustrate or slow down the nation's anti-graft war. She regretted that many people standing trial on charges of corruption had, through their lawyers, devised means of undermining the effectiveness of the courts in carrying out accelerated trial of their cases. She cited two of the delay tactics to include questioning of the courts' jurisdiction and flimsy applications for stay of execution even when judgment is given.
According to her, "the justice system is slow and windy. Under the rule of law rooted in our Constitution, they are presumed innocent until proven guilty. The test before us today is to be proactive and ingenious in devising appropriate mechanisms to frontally address the endemic corruption problem. Medication must suite an ailment. We cannot pretend to solve this extraordinary problem with normal or conventional methods."
She declared her total endorsement of the proposed non-conviction-based legislation on asset recovery saying "it is a law we must have". According to her, the non-conviction-based legislation is not only desirable but it is a law for a country with acute corruption problem such as Nigeria. Waziri further said the law is rooted in the United Nations Convention Against Corruption (UNCAC) as "abuse of office", adding that UNCAC had accepted the legislation as international best practice today.
"If culprits cannot be tried and convicted; they can at least have their assets confiscated without the necessity of a trial, conviction and sentence. It is a democratic law that seeks to take back assets illicitly acquired and deny the corrupt the enjoyment of loot they are not entitled to in the first instance. "It is my hope that the National Assembly gives it expeditious consideration and passage into law," she added.
A public affairs analyst, Mr. Anayo Onyema, believes that one of the reasons why corruption thrives in the country is because they know that when they are arrested, nothing concrete would come out of it. According to him, "governors, legislators and other official are not scared to steal and loot because nothing will happen to them when they are caught. With this precedent, the present and upcoming generation are encouraged to go ahead knowing that nothing happened to their predecessors were all above the law.
"I am particularly bothered about our judicial system. The system looks like one fashioned to favour the elite in the society. I have seen many incarcerated for minor offences, whereas the bigger looters of our treasuries walk around as free citizens. The symbol of blindfolded justice with the scale looks like it would always tilt to the side of the elite who can afford to pay legal charges to hire smart lawyers. Judicial officers in the recent past have shown that justice is not cheap and can only be got by money bags and people who had looted state funds," he said.
In an interview recently, the President of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Nigeria (ICAN), Chief Uchechukwu Uche, advocated for the setting up of the special courts that will speedily try people accused of corruption, adding that the processes the ordinary courts cannot give offenders the convictions necessary to stem the tide of corruption. Uche also said the regular courts were too slow to guarantee justice against corrupt members of the society, many of whom, he said, are flouting their ill-gotten wealth because they can manipulate the judiciary process.
"We need special courts that can try corruption cases speedily. For such courts, there should be deadlines or time frames within which cases should be dispensed with. This is critical because, if people corruptly enrich themselves and know that they can exploit the judicial processes then they could go any length to perpetuate frauds in spite of the preaching by government.
"Yes, government has been saying that it is fighting corruption but I must say that the government is beginning to sound like a broken record. All we hear is talk, talk, talk about people being charged, there was corruption here, it was uncovered there, billions here, millions there. But we never hear a lot about convictions. If government is to make people know that something is truly happening in the fight against corruption, we need to see convictions.
"It is not enough to charge people to court and then the next day they would be granted bail and that is all about it. They go about as free people to flaunt their ill-gotten wealth. This insults the sensibilities of honest members of the public and cannot therefore continue. This has assumed proportions that should be of great concern to all well-meaning Nigerians. We all know the situation in the courts with cases that drag for years. We need special courts to try corrupt persons. That is the only way to achieve results in the anti-graft campaign. You cannot prosecute a corrupt person in the ordinary courts with their well-known slow pace of things," the ICAN boss said.
Even members of various civil society organisations who gathered in Abuja recently for a workshop, special courts to try corrupt people in the country are the best alternative. They said such courts will facilitate corruption cases and prevent lawyers from frustrating prima facie (proven) cases. The members, who participated in a capacity building workshop on anti-corruption programming in Abuja, lamented that proven corruption cases are sometimes frustrated by lawyers.
