Smart judges can help fugitive Yahaya Bello escape justice

Josiah Majebi is the fifth Chief Justice of Kogi State (in north-central Nigeria) in four years and the fourth to be almost entirely in the pocket of the state governor. He has been serving as substantive Chief Justice since early February 2023, having held the role since June 26, 2022, when his predecessor, Richard Olorunfemi, retired. Henry Olusiyi held that office from late June 2020 to January 2021 for just under seven months. Sunday Otuh, who succeeded him, served for eight months before retiring in September 2021.

The last Chief Judge of Kogi State who tried to hold that office with dignity and independence, Nasir Ajanah, paid with his life, without mourning and banished from the state. He was the second Chief Justice of the state to be politically lynched by the Kogi State government in a decade.

In early April 2008, the Kogi State House of Assembly, defying an order of the state High Court, passed a resolution asking the state governor to dismiss long-serving Chief Justice Umaru Eri. Based on this, on April 2, 2008, then Governor Clarence Olafemi promptly announced the resignation of the chief judge and appointed another judge, Sam Ota, to act in his place.

In his defense, Umaru Eri claimed that his crime was that he rejected the politicians’ request to act as an intermediary in bribing the Election Petition Tribunal on behalf of the then Governor whose election was in dispute. On May 16, 2008, Alaba Ajileye, a judge of the Kogi State High Court, reversed the dismissal and reinstated Umaru Eri.

Eleven years later, on June 18, 2019, Alaba Ajileye again presided over the decision of a case that seemed to eerily repeat the issues in his earlier decision. Similar to the 2008 decision, the plaintiff in 2019 was another Chief Judge of Kogi State, Nasir Ajanah, with his Chief Registrar, Yahya Adamu. The defendants included the Kogi State House of Assembly, its Speaker, and the state Governor, Yahaya Bello.

On the orders of Governor Yahaya Bello, the Secretary to the Kogi State Government wrote to Chief Justice Nasir Ajanah on November 14, 2018, asking him to “provide payroll of judicial staff for the ongoing wage parade of civil servants in the state.” At the time, the governor was a defendant in the court of the chief judge, so the chief clerk responded to the letter, explaining that the judiciary was a self-accountable and co-equal branch of government overseen by the state Judicial Service Commission.

An aggrieved Governor Yahaya Bello wrote under his own name to Walter Onnoghen, the then Chief Justice of Nigeria and Chairman of the National Judicial Council (NJC), asking the NJC to find the Chief Justice guilty of misconduct and demanding that he “take a step step aside and (…) a) Acting Chief Judge may take his place.”

While his petition was still awaiting the attention of the NJC, Yahaya Bello resorted to political self-help. He referred Nasir Ajannah’s perceived insolence to the State House of Assembly, which promptly set up a commission of inquiry. The chief judge filed a lawsuit. While his suit was pending, the State House of Assembly passed a resolution on April 2, 2019 asking Yahaya Bello to dismiss the Chief Judge and demanding disciplinary action against the Chief Registrar. On June 18, 2019, Alaba Ajileye, sitting at the Kogi State High Court in Kotonkarfe, found that the Kogi State House of Assembly and the governor acted unlawfully in their attempt to dismiss the Chief Justice.

The governor’s response was brutal. He first went after Alaba Ajileye, a courageous and learned man whose judicial record was impeccable. With a PhD in law, Alaba Ajileye was an expert on the tenuous subject of digital evidence.

However, after this verdict, Yahaya Bello’s government announced that they could no longer guarantee his safety. Yet the same Kogi State government actively blocked this when he was nominated for elevation to the Court of Appeal. Alaba Ajileye, a man who would have easily adorned the Supreme Court with distinction, retired from the Supreme Court in February 2023 and has since forged a career as a scholar and academic.

Meanwhile, Yahaya Bello turned to the chief justice of the state and made life unbearable for Nasir Ajannah. He began by banning the man from official state functions. When Chief Justice Ajannah attended the swearing-in of the new Grand Khadi of Kogi State on May 21, 2020, the Chief Security Officer of Yahaya Bello informed him that “the Governor had issued a directive that he should not attend the meeting.”

In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, Governor Yahaya Bello appointed Nasir Ajannah persona non grata in the state. As a result, he was forced into internal displacement in Abuja where his personal arrangements were more likely than transient. While in hiding in Abuja, Nasir Ajannah contracted COVID and died on June 28, 2020 in isolation at Gwagwalada in the Federal Capital Territory. His death was not recognized, and even the institutions of the judiciary were reluctant to mourn his passing.

The men who followed Nasir Ajannah into the office of Chief Judge of Kogi State learned to fan the vanities of Yahaya Bello and avoid his wrath. Prior to his departure from office after eight years as Governor of Kogi State in January 2024, Josiah Majebi, as Chief Judge and Chairman of the Kogi State Judicial Service Commission, drew up a list of candidates for appointment as Judges of the Supreme Court. of Kogi State. Topping the list was a wife of Yahaya Bello, whose claim to the nomination was the dutiful performance of the duties of connubium in Yahaya Bello’s bedroom. For the Chief Justice it was also proof that he had truly renounced all claims to his own arbitrariness.

Alarmed by what they saw as a perversion of the judicial appointment system, a group of seven state Senior Advocates of Nigeria (SANs) wrote a letter to Josiah Majebi to dissuade him from this course of action. In January 2024, they filed a lawsuit, challenging his judicial appointments. Pending the outcome, the NJC has suspended the process of appointment to the Kogi State Judiciary.

On April 18, 2024, James Omotoso, a judge of the Federal High Court in Abuja, many of whose judgments usually have a stink problem, implausibly ruled that these SANs had no legitimate interest in the process of appointing judges in their constitutional state. state and that the discretionary power of the NJC in the appointment of judges was in any event not subject to review.

It was the day after Yahaya Bello’s chosen successor and kinsman, Usman Ododo, chose to make his predecessor a fugitive from legal proceedings and two days after Mr. Ododo opened his case in the petition questioning the legality of his election as Governor of Kogi questioned. Stands. As a bumbling Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) awaited the arrest of Yahaya Bello in Abuja, one IA Jamil, a judge of the Kogi State High Court, issued an order claiming to restrain the Commission from its work to do.

According to the judge’s order, the case, which was filed over two months earlier on February 8, was hastily admitted while the siege was ongoing in Abuja. Arguments were made, heard and decided, and the judge quickly signed the order and handed it over to Governor Ododo to take to Abuja, from where he led his cousin away from the legal proceedings under fire of gunfire. The court was almost certainly dishonest about the filing date. In all likelihood, the case was filed the same day, April 17, and subsequently backdated.

The EFCC now claims that it has declared Yahaya Bello a fugitive, but the real question will be how a compromised and complicit judicial leadership will handle the appointment of his unqualified wife as a judge and the petition against the declaration of his violent cousin as Governor of Kogi. Stands. The judges currently controlling Nigeria’s criminal politics must now show how much they owe Yahaya Bello.

A lawyer and a teacher, Odinkalu, can be reached at [email protected]