[OPINION] Must we always yell for justice?

By Abimbola Adelakun

On Sunday night, Attorney General of the Federation, Lateef Fagbemi, reportedly responded to the public outrage that attended their administration putting minors on trial for treason by requesting the case files. Days after, the cases against those boys were dropped. The government also announced they would be reconciling them with their parents. In the past week, since that case happened, people have raised crucial questions about our justice system that tries minors for treason and asks malnourished minors brought to court to post a N10m bail each.

Despite the president’s quickly swooping into the situation to play the hero by ordering his AGF to get the cases dropped, the conclusion of this case remains unsatisfying. If it takes the president to unilaterally order an accused undergoing trial to be freed, what is the point of either the police or the court? On the surface, ordering those children to be freed looked like magnanimity on behalf of the president. Unfortunately, it does nothing for our society when the farce of trying children for treason only became aborted because a president, eager to score some PR points, intervened.

By going through the route of presidential intervention, what they have further entrenched is a warped idea of what justice means and what it takes to achieve it in Nigeria. Justice cannot be taken for granted; it is neither constitutionally guaranteed nor worked out procedurally. Justice is negotiated based on factors such as how much the rest of society can yell for it and the value derivable from the outrage. Justice is not a condition of being or the prime condition of our humanity. It is a privilege for which we must always yell and yell before it—or its mere semblance—can be handed to us.

Another recent example that buttresses this attitude is the EFCC’s case against an employee of crypto trading company Binance, Tigran Gambaryan, whom they abducted (along with a colleague who escaped) in February. The charges they brought against him never made sense, but then, few things in Nigeria ever do. One can understand bringing charges against an organisation, but why abduct an individual to extract money from his organisation? After arresting him, they realised the limit of their negotiating powers. They had no idea what to do, so they just punished the poor guy endlessly. It was not until Bola Tinubu was informed that US president, Joe Biden was going to call him over the protracted detention of a US citizen that the EFCC quickly dropped all the charges. The same EFCC and its paymasters that had stood resolute against reasonable intervention quickly capitulated when Biden pulled the leash.

If they had a sturdy basis for incarcerating the man all along, they would not have quaked. They buckled under the scrutiny of the US president because the case against the man was groundless all along. The whole case was about finding an external agent to blame for the failures of their ill-designed economic policies. Gambaryan, who works for an international organization trading in a commodity like cryptocurrency, was unfortunate to have been the one to walk into their gulag. It was even far more painful watching some so-called experts on television rationalizing the spurious charges and detention of the man. You wonder, who are these people darkening counsel with words without knowledge?! It never ceases to amaze me how some Nigerians open their mouths wide to justify injustice. Is it that some people are this psychologically damaged or they are putting on an act for which they have been paid?

At the Presidential Villa on Tuesday, during the official handover of those minors to their state governors, Vice President Kashim Shettima claimed that though those children destroyed public property to the tune of N300bn, they were freed because his boss was merciful. Shettima is overstretching the truth here. Freeing those kids was not an act of mercy; it was pure political calculation. The moment certain characters in the north brought out their usual weapon of warfare—the next election—to threaten the president, you knew their spines would start to melt. Hardly any president can stand up to the blackmail of those who regularly remind political power of the little—but not minor— power in their thumbs.

Shettima, like some other northern elements threatening revenge at the 2027 elections, must have been baffled that the police even dared to put northern children on trial in the first place. In this same country, we have seen northern youths commit atrocities for which no institution dared to confront them or even speak of a trial. We were all here recently when some youths in Sokoto lynched their classmate Deborah Samuel Yakubu over perceived offences to their religious sensibilities. What did the police do? These people put their faces on camera and admitted their crimes, but they never paid for it. The APC government did not think that her life was valuable enough for them to stake their political capital in northern Nigeria to pursue justice on her behalf.

Shettima also says they have documented “incontrovertible digital video and photographic evidence” that these children committed the crime, and that some of them even uploaded the videos online by themselves. Unlike the case of Deborah Samuel in which her youth assailants also uploaded videos of their crime and even admitted it, this one at least ended in a trial. It must have felt odd to those who have considered themselves beyond reproach to have found themselves at the mercy of a justice system, one that is unfortunately operated according to the whims of political power and not according to laid-down procedures.

From the beginning to the end, where the president and his attorney general get to play the hero, everything is wrong with that trial. Even if the police investigated all those children and found incontrovertible evidence that they truly damaged public property during the #Endbadgoverance protests, the reasonable response was not to abuse their lives. The police could have sat down and planned prosecution with an eye toward rehabilitation and reform, not to set them on the path of criminalisation by starving and incarcerating them.

Even when they saw the blowback to their poor law enforcement strategies, they still doubled down with a press release (signed by their PRO, Muyiwa Adejobi) that suggested that those emaciated children who fainted in court were playing for sympathy. We have seen politicians deploy all kinds of gimmicks in the court to evade trial, from fainting inside the court to being wheeled out on a stretcher, they have tried all. At no time has the police or the prosecuting agency taken them on for playacting. When children who have been deprived of nourishment slumped in the court, it turns out the police take it less seriously.

Overall, the Nigerian police have a penchant for embarking on unthought journeys. One of such ill-reasoned adventures was this instance of putting youngsters on trial for—of all things in the world—treason. What do kids of their age understand of geopolitics that their hoisting of the Russian flag can be taken to mean anything more than them mirroring the adults around them? Young people generally go through their phase of stupidity, and there is no need to destroy them while they are at it.

In any case, the president left them carrying the can. Next time they are sent on a slave errand, they will deliver it with the nobility of a freeborn. The embarrassment from the fallout of their efforts reminds me of the proverbial tortoise when he embarked on a journey. His neighbours asked, “Brother tortoise, brother tortoise, when are you going to be wise and return?” He replies, “Not until I encounter disgrace!”

Culled from The Punch