RE: MONICA DONGBAM-MENSEM: IN GOD’S NAME, GO!

By

JESUTEGA ONOKPASA.

I have seldom read an article written by a lawyer that is most unbecoming of learned counsel as the load of crap written by Professor Chidi Odinkalu, which he weakly, and rather quite childishly titled “Monica Dongbam-Mensem: In God’s Name, Go!”

In what turned out to be no better than mere profusely pontifical narrative, he accuses Her Lordship, the President of the Court of Appeal and her colleagues on the Court of Appeal Bench of perverting the course of justice, and, he does this without offering the slightest substantiation that any true lawyer could possibly recognize as evidence.

Rather he kept piling suspicion upon supposition and heaping innuendo upon aspersion.

I kept reading and rereading, line after line, painstakingly hoping to come to that point at which he might provide even the remotest shred of what would be familiar to a lawyer as foundation for the accusations he plied against the Court of Appeal.

He presented absolutely nothing of the sort and, rather quite insultingly, for that matter, he seemed to expect his readership to subscribe to what I can only fathom to be a falacy of authority to the effect that simply because Chidi Odinkalu said so, then it must be so!

Indeed, “some mothers do have them” may be all to be said for the pompousness of the professor.

The sum total of the balderdash showcased in his poorly packaged piece amounts to no more than an ode to arrogance and self-aggrandizement and I am quite astonished that any lawyer would be the publisher of Odinkalu’s abominably defamatory drivel.

Clearly, this is the season wherein several hitherto respected lawyers also happen to have completely lost their heads and entirely took leave of their senses in a tantrumic reaction to the crushingly embarrassing loss of their preferred candidate in the presidential election, despite that candidate’s politically illiterate deployment of religion and ethnicity in aid of the actualization of a miserably mismanaged ambition that saw the Nigerian electorate seeing through the facade of his messianic pretentions, right down to the dreadful narcissism beneath.

This woefully immature reaction, indeed utterly infantile approach to managing disappointment, equally frames the most disgracefully unhinged and stomach-churning disposition that someone like Olisa Agbakoba, SAN, has adopted toward the Judiciary, the same institution which made him whatever he is and amounts to today, yet which he is determined to burn to the ground simply because he was not made a Supreme Court judge!

What Agbakoba, on his part, forgets is that at no time was he, or any other lawyer, in particular, ever necessarily the best infusion from the Bar into the Supreme Court, and, while I and most other lawyers insist that there should always be direct recruitment from our midst into the highest rungs of the Bench, it is not as if the process vide which he and others were supposedly nominated by the Bar for elevation to the Supreme Court Bench was howsoever democratic or reflective of the preference of the majority of lawyers in this country at that or any other point in time.

Odinkalu, on his own part, has clearly forgotten that the very last sin a lawyer should commit is to level accusation without offering proof, not to talk of learned counsel pitiably decomposing into motorpark mode and most abhorrently combining in themselves the utterly reprehensible stati of judge, jury and executioner.

Having not yet had the privilege of studying the judgement of the Supreme Court, I believe the decisions rendered by the Court of Appeal, at least in the case of Kano and Plateau States, was the right decision.

If you disobey a court order, it is not a preelection matter but a pending and subsisting infraction.

Indeed, you are, and remain, in contempt of court, a most egregious and quite heinous status, which in the contemplation of law, constitutes a display of the most unconscionable lawlessness and brazen rascality that you must be made to pay dearly for.

If you stuff ballot boxes with fake, unsigned and unstamped ballots, they ought to be deducted from your tally of votes in order to teach you and everyone else not to rig elections.

Nevertheless, I am a lawyer; evidence is my religion and reason is my procedure, wherefore I am quite willing to learn from the position taken by the Supreme Court unlike the likes of Agbakoba and Odinkalu who think they know it all and like their ilk, reject any and every thing that does not go their way.

When I get to read the decisions of our most honourable apex court, I will either agree or disagree with the judgements but regardless, I will still accept them, even as I have already accepted them, while not having yet read them because that is what proper lawyers do.

While, as lawyers, and indeed citizens alike, we are all certainly entitled to criticize judgements on points of what the law stipulates and what the facts compel, we do not, upon our disagreement with a judge’s decision, proceed to denigrate the Bench or become so maniacal as to go to the extent of accusing judges of corruption or other malfeasance without offering proof for such allegations simply because the court had not ruled in our favour.

Indeed, the fact that from time to time, judgements of lower forums might end up being set aside on appeal is the constant expectation of lawyers.

There is no lawyer who does not know that this is precisely why the Judiciary is set up in accordance with the template of an appellate architecture except such lawyer is not worthy to be a lawyer.

What every lawyer equally knows is that the fact that a judgement happened to be set aside is not in any way prima facie indication, much less confirmation, of malfeasance on the part of the court below.

I don’t know the sort of law Chidi Odinkalu teaches his students, wherever he teaches law, but from what I learnt from the likes of Obilade, Agbede, Omotola, Osinbajo, Osipitan, Uchegbu, Adeyemi, Uzodike, Agomo, Fogam, Utuama, Ajibade and other incontestable luminaries of our profession, the fact that a decision was overturned is not necessarily an indictment on the court below but ultimately a demonstration of the reliableness of the legal system and its administration of justice architecture.

In fact, any lawyer, indeed any judge, would readily tell you that often times it is the overturned decision that was the right one and it was the appellate decision that might had been rendered in error.

In ours, as well as in jurisdictions across the world, a superior court might overturn a decision of a court below only to end up eventually adopting it in a subsequent case as the correct interpretation of the law!

Of course, Odinkalu knows this very well but he apparently remains too irretrievably gaoled in disappointment and frustration by Peter Obi’s inevitable loss at the presidential election to even be minimally reasonable or vestigially truthful anymore.

I pity Professor Chidi Odinkalu because his article is not the submission of learned counsel; it is the vituperation of a badly brought up quack.

Onokpasa, a lawyer, writes from Abuja.