By Ochuko Akuopha

Justice Miakpo Emiaso is a retired President of Delta State Customary Court. In this interview, Emiaso speaks on the Supreme Court judgments on the appeals filed by Mr Peter Obi and Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, candidates of the Labour Party and the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) respectively, against the affirmation of President Bola Tinubu’ election by the Court of Appeal and the issues bordering on the judicial system and true federalism in Nigeria. He also speaks on the claims by Justice Dattijo Mohammed who just retired from the Supreme Court that the nation’s judiciary is in shambles, and why he wrote the book, ‘Perceived Corrupt’. Excerpts:

The Supreme Court judgments that validated the election of President Bola Tinubu have been generating controversy. What is your take?

Many Nigerians appear to have a pre-meditated take; they had made up their minds long before the judgments that the judgments have to go in a particular way. So when the judgments did not go in that preconceived way, they were disappointed; so you had those varied reactions. But in my short stay in the legal profession, I have come to a stage where I don’t take a position over any matter in court before judgment. I keep my mind open and get prepared for whichever way the judgment will go. In the particular case involving President Ahmed Bola Tinubu, I never had any doubt that the judgments could go any other way. Even in his own words, President Tinubu had said that long before his opponents conceived of any problem, he had gone past them and worked out the solution. So, what you saw in those appeals, I assure you that he had it all worked out long before the matters got to court and I had that feeling all along, so, I wasn’t expecting anything different. It was not possible for you to have those judgments go any other way. You probably wonder why I talk like this. You see, I have been there on the Bench and I know that judges are very powerful people; a judge is, in the affairs of men, next to God with the kind of power he wields over any case. I know you know that Nigerians say lawyers can turn black to white and all that. Yes, a judge, with his pen, can get any result he wants from any set of facts. If you want him to write a judgment with the same set of facts and arrive at five different decisions, he would do it and you won’t be able to fault any of those five decisions. So, I am saying the judgments of the Supreme Court in the Peter Obi versus Tinubu and Atiku Abubakar versus Tinubu were not a surprise. Then of course there is this long standing perception of most Nigerians that the Nigerian judiciary is corrupt, so whenever a judgment does not go their way, they blame it on corruption as the judge had been bought. I won’t go that far to say that the Justices of the Supreme Court had been bought in this matter, but I am prepared to say that a lot of preparation had been put in place long before the appeals went to court.

Justice Dattijo Mohammed who just retired from the Supreme Court faulted some aspects of the country’s judicial system. What is your view on this?

I sympathize with his Lordship that he had to wait until his valedictory session to say the things he said. The things he said did not happen in one day, two days, three days or two weeks; they have always been there. He had been part of the system but he couldn’t say them; that is why I say I sympathize with him. I am not condemning him, l sympathize with him because that is the way our system is made of. Once you are sitting there, there are certain things you cannot say; you cannot say those things even when you see them glaringly happening before you. The rules of office which you occupy restrict, gag you and prevent you from being yourself. I tell people that I was lucky to have retired in one piece because there were a few things I couldn’t say when I was on the Bench. I will be in open court and I will make certain statements that were clearly not in praise of the powers-that-be and it will appear that those things will filter to the ears of those powers-that-be. So, until I retired, I was never in the good books of those powers. I knew they were planting trap for me but I survived. My Lord the Honourable Justice of the Supreme Court who just retired opened up when he was leaving, so he would have no powers to take any steps to change the things he was complaining about, but he could have said that when he was still in office. I agree with him completely that in this country we don’t like doing things the right way; there are persons who benefit from ensuring that things are done always the wrong way. I mean, look at the number of appeal that goes to the Supreme Court. How do you expect that the handful of Justices that are there can possibly handle all those cases without being stressed up? I hold the view that the constitutional provision for the number of Justices that should be in the Supreme Court is too small, we should double it. Come to think of it, the idea of having one Supreme Court for the entire country is like running the country like a Boy Scouts organization. I think this is the part of the aftermath of the prolonged military government, you know since 1979 when government of then-General Olusegun Obasanjo cooked up a Constitution for us and said Nigeria should now run a presidential system. That is as a result of their military way of doing things with command and everybody falls in line. Even before General Olusegun Obasanjo did his own in 1979, let’s go back to 1966 when General Aguiyi Ironsi made a decree that turned this country from a federation to a unitary republic. What the 1966 coup d’etat beneficiaries inherited was a truly federal arrangement whereby every federating unit called region enjoyed maximum autonomy over their resources and that is why Chief Obafemi Awolowo (then Premier) was able to use the resources that they generated from palm oil and cocoa to develop Western Region because he didn’t have anybody restricting him. All the crazy court judgments that we are complaining about in Nigeria, you are not going to cease having them if we continue to run the crazy type of federal system we are running now.

The retired Justice specifically complained about too much powers vested in the CJN…

I just said it now that we over-concentrate powers, we over-centralize things in this country, your electricity, your police, your judiciary, that is the military mentality, their command structure, the zombie way of doing things according to Fela, whether the command is foolish or not, everybody follows the command. There is no how you will concentrate powers in anybody, even me, that the powers will not corrupt him. His Lordship is very correct to say that the powers that are concentrated in the Chief Justice of Federation are overwhelming, because the Chief Justice of the Federation is an individual human being. Those powers, whether at the level of the CJN or at the level of Aso Villa, wherever you find over-concentration of powers, you must decentralize, you must spread them out.

You have been an advocate of true federalism. Looking at President Bola Tinubu’s antecedents in the days of NADECO, what are your expectations of him?

Expectations of the Nigerian politicians are a wrong and dangerous thing to think of. Something tells me that the average Nigerian, when he gets to office, the office changes him. But, if you want to look at the antecedents of President Bola Tinubu, with particular reference to his activities during the NADECO era, you will say he is a true federation-minded person, so, you will expect that now that he has the mantle, he will do what he has advocated for in the past. But, like I said, the office tends to change people; when they get there, something just happens to them and they don’t sing the same song anymore. I just pray and hope that President Tinubu, given his antecedents and given the fact that he is from the South, will do what he must do if he wants this country to make any progress. There are states in the North that are contributing near zero to the economy of this country and they just think they are entitled to the good things of life without working. Now, if you enthrone true federalism and they wake up one day to realize that unless they go to the farm to till the ground they will go hungry, they will till the ground.

Recently, you published a book ‘Perceived Corrupt’. What informed your decision to publish this book?

I served in that judiciary that is generally perceived in Nigeria to be corrupt and, even outside Nigeria, it is viewed to be a corrupt system. But it pains me so much that people say the Nigerian Judiciary is corrupt and I was part of that system. And unless I spoke out, it will remain so that I served in the corrupt system and that I was also corrupt. And I needed to tell my story, I had to create a forum to enable me tell that story. And to also tell the world what the Nigerian Judiciary looks like from the inside because everybody just looks at the Nigeria Judiciary from outside. I have the privilege of seeing the Nigerian Judiciary from the inside and outside. And I thought that if I put my experience down, somebody might just benefit from it. It is an opportunity to say I went through it and beat my chest and say that I never allowed myself to be corrupted while I was going through it. I challenge anybody to come out and say if he ever gave me 10 kobo to pervert justice. That is the kind of thing that prompted me to write that kind of book.