That Disgraceful Conviction Of A Pension Thief

I cannot find it in me to exult in this hour, but my pen is herein appointed attorney to take these notes. There is inevitably something comic about this political enterprise of ours, something decidedly unprosperous in reason. Does it not seem the people are falsely imprisoned, though it appears it can only happen here? N23.3bn stolen admittedly by one Mr. John Yakubu Yusuf, a former Assistant Director in the Police Pension Office, in inordinate vanity and a dreadful humiliation of the country’s national character in another classic now known as the Police Pension Scam, and after months of back and forth, he gets two years imprisonment with an option of N750, 000 fine only. What does the country get in return?  Nothing, but a disgraceful applause. What do the people get? Shock, perhaps, mild disbelief, pain and destroyed hope.

Can I ask, did the Federal Government not spend more than N750,000 to prosecute that pension thief? Maybe, I am just wondering. Gleefully, the matter is reported as plea bargain, and even though I am a lawyer, being familiar with that word, yet my mind begins to extrapolate the things of the deep, and somehow this epiphany that can only be occasioned by logic leads me to perhaps ask what plea bargain indeed means here. Is it another word for the arrest of justice and its subsequent trial on the altar of bargain, and by the time bargain is closed, the highest bidder is throwing a party? Sounds to me more like justice auctioned to the highest bidder.

I thought there is something referred to as the mischief rule in the Canons of Interpretation, a rule which I suspect solemnly calls on today’s actors in the theatre of law and justice to reach out to the original intention of the parliament, to help them unearth the mind of the then makers of the law, to order their steps in doing justice. In the same vein, I would suppose that the makers of our criminal cum penal sanctions must have had the likes of Yusuf in mind while drafting our laws, but was it the intention of those same lawmakers that a man guilty of stealing N23.3bn be handed a two-year sentence that can simply be exchanged for a paltry sum of N750, 000? Certainly, I think not. Some have even attempted to advance the argument that after all the man has forfeited 32 properties to the state and returned part of the loot. 

I am confident that the position would be easily rubbished by the submission of any undergraduate law student studying elementary criminal law. Is the administration of our criminal justice system not rooted in punishing both the “mens rea” i.e. intention, and the “actus reus” i.e. act of an offence? Where a man steals N23.3bn as we have in this very ugly story and is later caught, and by reason of his being caught turns around, his return of the loot is not an escape route for him, given that it is incumbent on the law to still go ahead and punish his criminal mind. The law presupposes that his act of stealing is first and foremost anchored on the criminal intent built in his mind, which is buttressed by the fact that if he wasn’t caught, he would automatically have escaped with the loot. More importantly, the punishment of his criminal intent is to serve as a deterrent to others who may want to ride on the crest of his fraudulent success.

What all will admit without the smallest hesitation is that reconciling the Yusuf’s case with the above requirement will amount to nothing but trying to ferry a camel through the eye of a needle. Certainly, it is one case that will stand tall in our hall of fame of national absurdities for a long time to come. It is the saddest judgment I have ever heard of; it is the greatest attack on our collective intelligence.

Beneath this mess simply lies our fatal inability to live up to reasonably expected behaviour as it obtains in other climes, rather those in charge remain stubborn managers of an iniquitous system.  Every arm of government regales in the exercise of its powers ambushing the people and nailing the remnant of their hopes and aspirations of justice to the cross. Definitely, those who come after now will ask painful questions of those who seek to mismanage today. Is it not said that justice must not only be done, but must be manifestly seen to have been done? Is it not said that it is not the letters, but the spirit of the law that eternally waters the tree of justice. 

Do we have a tree around here, let alone watering? So what did we get at the end of the jamboree? The rogue walks out of the courtroom majestically with a triumphant swagger, attended to by his cronies in wild jubilation, making phone calls back home for them to start the party. He has cheated his country again, like other VIPs have done before him and he is not ashamed. He has defeated a country that does not know what it is doing, boasting to himself challenging those who even prosecuted him to cast the first stone. And then a press conference is organised in the courtyard, where in public view, the nation’s dirty linens are displayed for all to see. 

Retrospection is thrown to the garbage bin, sanity becomes a luxury, and in the worst show of disrespect for those great men who molded the concept of justice, a nation without morals and burdened with leaders without conscience is again made a laughing stock before a looking world. This is the best time in our nation, we are indeed grateful to the builders in government who all build their mansions on the nation’s shame and help remove a block each day from the collapsing integrity of their fatherland. No wonder Prof. Chinua Achebe refused to be honoured. It simply means that what an elder will see standing, certainly such is not given to a child, even if he conquers Mount Everest.

Congratulations to those who have brought us here, for they all will be well-remembered. Today, our nation is caught in a vice between justice and organised malignity, between a majority of rogues in civilian uniforms and a minority of the people in their right minds. Permit me to submit on this poignant notes, on which I assert that it is not the virtues of a government official that restrain him from wrongdoing, neither is it the vices of the demagogue that urge him on, rather the plain, natural history of all political institutions coupled with the aggregation of the will and consent of the ordinary people written in just laws, and backed up continuously by a fearlessly independent and courageous judiciary is the safeguard of sanity and survival of every human society. This is a code locked in the immortal Latin maxim, “Fiat Justicia, Ruat Coelum”, meaning, “Do Justice, even if Heaven will fall”. Once we lose this, we lose everything.

•Adegbite, Esq., a lawyer, wrote in from Kubwa, Abuja