Are these people truly learned? By Femi Orebe

Writing in his column of 6 March, 2016 in this newspaper, Biodun Jeyifo opined: “almost without exception, most newspaper and news magazine columnists – the commentariat – nurse the illusion that what they/we write collectively has a decisive role to play in the fate of the nation, especially with regard to the terrible condition of the masses of the poor and the underprivileged in our country. He went further to suggest that about the only way for columnists to meaningfully impact society is “if what we write as pundits move the masses to act, to intervene…”  I have always known that between columnists and successive Nigerian governments, it has always been a dialogue with the deaf, and that is if they read you at all. In recognition of this, I have many times directed my exhortations on these pages to the Nigerian people directly: a good example being my no less than three articles  about” STORMING THE BASTILLE” in which I exhorted  the Nigerian hoi polloi  which Jeyifo  describes as  -“the bottom layers of the socio-economic order, the truly disadvantaged, “the wretched of the earth” – to move against a thoroughly anti-people  National Assembly,  with its members  ever desirous of milking the country dry as in its on-going effort to amend the constitution to gift themselves   hundreds of millions in pension payments,  after many of them, as former governors,  had thrown their states into an intractable debt peonage. Beyond what we write moving the masses to act, Jeyifo did not prescribe that columnists should, willy nilly, also be at the barricades. With the help of hindsight, therefore, the failure of the Leaderless Russian revolution of 1905, Jeyifo’s suggestion would then imply that there is a need for an intervening corps of activists to eventuate postulations by columnists since the masses appear incapable of acting of their own.  Fortunately, we do not lack such activists in the country; they will only have to add this to their repertoire anew.

However, in order to ensure that I do not indulge in any sterile punditry today, I am directing this piece to a group/ individuals that we have been led, all this long, to believe, are learned. Unfortunately the more you look at their new behaviour, acts or what they say, you begin to wonder if the word ‘learned’ has not taken a new meaning. Take for instance the interesting case of some money which the EFCC insists was paid to a judge’s bank account.  Not only was the  agency reportedly told, initially, that the money was an assistance by some unnamed friends  towards the burial of the judge’s relation, the same source would later come round with a  “superior affidavit” to the effect that the account to which the money was paid was, indeed, not  the judge’s, but somebody else bearing the same names. That should remind us of one of Ibori’s many cases.  Nor was that all. In explaining another allegation, we were told that monies paid to another judge, by the same person or his chambers, were for ‘client recruitment’ services, rendered by the now serving judge when, aeons ago, he was a member of that chamber.  And this money kept rolling into the judge’s account from 2012 to 2015? Where is the logic, or ‘knowledge’ in all these or really, where is the learning? And, Pray, what do they take Nigerians for, fools?

But the above pales into insignificance when one hears Olisa Agbakoba, a highly regarded member of the Nigerian bar and member of the Nigerian Judicial Council, to boot, weigh in on the issue of corruption in the judiciary as he says judges could not be blamed for taking money from lawyers because many of them are in financial difficulties and cannot meet most of their needs. This he attributed to their poor pay asking whether Nigerians expect a judge whose mother is dying of a terminal illness to be thinking of the Code of Conduct. This has naturally elicited reactions from many quarters. I quote below one of such reactions in the hope that these ‘learned’ people will benefit from the views of we, their ‘unlearned’ compatriots, learn to respect us and also, as a group, strive for much needed moral re-armament amongst their ilk.

“I am hugely disappointed and terribly scandalised by these comments from Mr Olisa Agbakoba. Does it mean that we have over-estimated these guys these many years? Now, the chicken is coming home to roost. The wind is blowing and showing the rump of the chicken! Statements like this, if made by Ricky Tarfa? or his donating friends, one will not bat an eyelid but coming from an Agbakoba, it is as ridiculous as it is worrying. Should we then ask that his accounts be scrutinised too? Is the judiciary the only poorly funded organ in Nigeria? Does this ‘excuse’ permit corruption? Selling justice should then be justified? Are judges the only poorly paid public officers in this country? Would Mr Agbakoba excuse an armed robber who gives a seemingly pathetic story which he claims warranted his action? And would Agbakoba ask that he be freed because of the extenuating circumstances surrounding his criminal action? What kind of country and people are we turning into? Where are the values that formed the bedrock of our growing up years? Somebody, please tell Mr Agbakoba that he goofed, and badly, too! Why worry about corruption if we can give excuses for some perpetrators? How much of consideration will Mr Agbakoba give the Nigerian worker earning the pitiable minimum wage whose child needs a kidney transplant and goes to rob his millionaire boss and kills him in the process? What a sad day today has become?!!There are two great teachers of lawyers I sympathise with in this season of anomie – Professors Oyebode and Sagay. I can only imagine their pains!  Oh, we don’t seem to know what good looks like anymore!

 How sad and shameful!”

Credits: Femi Orebe, Ekiti Forum