It is a shame that Dele Farotimi is handcuffed for alleged cyberstalking or criminal defamation. To celebrate this as a triumph of justice is to encourage and celebrate the most crooked and wicked disgrace of the nobility of the legal profession.

No matter how uncivilised and unethical Dele Farotimi may have put down his thoughts, which injured the reputation of others, the treatment being meted to him while still, a member of the noble profession is as worse as the alleged offence he may have committed.

Handcuffing a lawyer who is yet to be debarred and who still has his name on the roll of legal practitioners in Nigeria and who has not been shown to be violent in conduct, is not only an abuse of criminal process, it is intolerably disgraceful.

The legal profession in Nigeria has destroyed itself. Primitive vengeance being undertaken by police institutions in the manner being done to Dele Farotimi is not damaging Dele Farotimi. It is destroying the legal profession, and this show of shame is worse and has lowered the integrity and reputation of the legal profession more than the defamation complained of in the charge.

By Nkereuwem Udofia Akpan, Esq.

This country is a big joke. A lawyer who is charged for an “offence” not recognized either by the State of arrest or the venue of the trial is in handcuffs like a common criminal while an ex-governor accused of stealing billions of Naira is treated like a rock star.

What makes it really interesting is that Yahaya Bello has been on the run, evading arrests and throwing tantrums and is a flight risk hypothetically and technically and Dele Farotimi is not a flight risk.

There are so many things I don’t agree with IPOB or Nnamdi Kanu but I must agree that when it comes to law enforcement and the entire justice system, this country is worse than a zoo.

The real loser in this comic show is Aare Afe Babalola who at 95 should be surrounded by family and genuine friends to advise him properly but who sadly is being misled by those who should be protecting him from this sort of vitriol, public angst and disapproval.

With this overreach, he has made Dele Farotimi a hero and elevated his disputed work into a bestseller. Not even the great Gani Fawehinmi had enjoyed this sort of unanimous sympathy

The Book would have laid gathering dust on shelves and folks like me wouldn’t bother to read it. Now I’m buying 10 Copies and gifting them as souvenirs this yuletide season

Chief Nkereuwem Udofia, a Constitutional Lawyer Author and Human Rights Activist can be reached @Chiefnkereuwem on X formerly Twitter.

By Lasisi Olagunju

Adeola was a destitute woman with neither a surname nor a known relative who died at 1:15 p.m. on Friday, 29 June, 1888 at the Colonial Hospital in Lagos. She was buried at 4 p.m. the following day at Ereko Cemetery, Lagos. The manner of her death on Friday and burial on Saturday was to soon put the entire colonial establishment from Lagos to London on ‘trial’. A police officer had, some days earlier, found the woman “huddled up in an Ereko market shed, utterly helpless and in a ‘bad state of health.’”

Her story: She was just Adeola – no other name. She had no living person she could remember as a relation. About 30 years earlier (1858), she had been bought as a slave at Ikorodu market by a man from Beshe (Ibese?) who later converted her to a ‘wife.’ She had a child for the man but life soon happened to her in more devastating details. One after the other, the ‘husband’ died, the child died too. She became lonely and alone, ill and terribly diseased. Her case became like the sentry of Apomu who lost his divination nuts to thieves, had his wife snatched, and, in horror, watched his last item of survival taken by a bad dog that escaped and slipped into a deep well. “It is time to leave this town!” the man cried.

Utterly broken Adeola left Beshe for Lagos in search of hope and cure for everything that ailed her. She arrived in Lagos on 4 June, 1888. It was because she knew nobody and had no one in Lagos that she found ‘home’ in that market shed where the police officer found her. With that police officer, favour appeared to have found her as she was moved to the Colonial Hospital and was admitted as a patient. If she thought her prayer answered at that point she was wrong. Her story changed on 20 June, 1888 when the senior of the two Oyinbo doctors at the hospital wrote on her treatment sheet: DNI (Discharged, Not Improved). The doctor said she was an “incurable” and “no good could be done for her by treatment” and got her removed from the hospital. And “like a log of wood”, she was taken out of the facility on a stretcher taken far away from the hospital, and “pitched out of the stretcher” like dirt and left to die in the bush.

A man and his carpenter saw everything from the top of a house they were reroofing. They reported what they saw to the authorities who intervened and ordered the woman to return to the hospital by 5 p.m. the following day, 21 June. Adeola was reported dead on 29 June and buried by the evening of the following day. Then trouble started. The Lagos public got to know of everything that happened to the poor woman from the day she was first admitted to the hospital and the day she was reported dead and buried. It became a big human rights issue.

Governor Moloney demanded explanations from the hospital and was not satisfied with what he was told. The matter went to a coroner who ordered the exhumation of the corpse. My historian wrote that “when the coffin was opened, the jury was struck by the observation that the body was found placed in a lateral decubitus. This was very unusual, and gave rise to the suspicion that the woman might have been encoffined before life petered out of her.” To be “encoffined before life petered out” of one is to be buried alive.

The jury tried the case and indicted all the key hospital personnel involved, including the doctor who wrote DNI on her diet sheet. Then the coroner, friend and messmate of one of the doctors, stepped in and annulled the verdict of the jury and cleared all the indicted persons. That was done because the woman was a nobody who had nobody. Lagos as a city became enraged and a huge rally of 374 persons was held inside the Town Hall of Lagos on 9 July, 1888. It was from that meeting that the people of Lagos addressed an appeal petition to the Secretary of State for the Colonies in London who took over the case and ordered the governor of Lagos to implement the jury’s verdict and relieve the chief culprits of their duties. They were sacked. The pauper woman finally got justice. Her story is fully told in Adelola Adeloye’s ‘African Pioneers of Modern Medicine’ (1985); check page 60 through page 71. I got the story from that book; the various quotes I used are from its pages.

Scroll up again and read the Adeola case; the higher the appeal went, the better the reasoning, the surer the justice. Today, nothing in our courts is cast in law. The 1888 scandal happened well before Nigeria became a country. The Lagos public fought the injustice in Lagos for the nameless underdog. When Lagos compromised on truth and justice, the people took the case to London, fought and won in a very comprehensive way. The unfortunate woman in the story was the very definition of underdog. She had nothing; no full name; no address, no blood or bloodless relation. Everyone who fought for her did not know her from anywhere. She was a complete pauper with no material value to anyone. Yet, she got the people behind her and got justice. She was the underdog in the contest for space in the Colonial Hospital. She lost the battle of life but won the war of justice. She had her day, even after she died.

Americans have a day dedicated to almost everything. The third Friday in December of every year is their National Underdog Day. They’ve celebrated their underdog Fridays since 1976. The next one holds on 20 December, 2024. And, if you are a Nigerian, I am sure you’ve heard or come across ‘underdog’ more than once in the last one week. If you haven’t, it means you’ve not been following the war between Chief Afe Babalola, SAN and firebrand lawyer, Dele Farotimi. One, a senior advocate; the other, a subaltern in legal practice. Like in all contests, figures of speech have been flying like Saddam Hussein’s Scud missiles and George H. W. Bush’s Patriots. I heard the junior lawyer being called an underdog, the big man the top dog. I’ve also come across the expression: every underdog would have their day.

Nigerians are bitterly divided between Chief Afe Babalola and Dele Farotimi. Each side thinks it is right. I read some comments and commentaries and shuddered. The extreme positions being taken and the measures being canvassed remind one of the contents of Edward P. Cheyney’s 1913 article on ‘The Court of Star Chamber’ of 17th century England: “The law-officers of the crown were especially inclined to prosecute offenders against the dignity of judges or other persons connected with the courts. An angry litigant who in 1602 attempted to stab a lawyer who had spoken against him was brought before Star Chamber and sentenced to have his ears cut off and to be imprisoned for life. One man had his ears nailed to the pillory at Westminster for traducing Lord Chief Justice Popham; another was sent to the pillory for saying Lord Dyer was a corrupt judge, another for writing a letter to Coke charging him with chicanery in practice, still others for writing a letter to the Mayor of Wallingford charging him with injustice, and for speaking disrespectfully to the Lord Mayor of London in the wrestling place at Clerkenwell…” The pillory in that piece was a wooden device for displaying and shaming convicts. It was known in Anglo-Saxon times as “catch-neck”, the French called it the pillorie. If you were sentenced to the pillory, your punishment included being abused by ecstatic members of the public and being pelted with filth, including rotten eggs. We’ve seen much of that in the last one week.

I have not read Farotimi’s book but I listened to some of his online appearances on this matter. His words are extreme just as the reaction of Afe Babalola to them. And, while I was wondering if a journalist like me should be read saying anything on this matter because it is already in court, subjudice, I watched Chief Babalola’s lawyers waiving aside that rule and addressing a press conference in Ado Ekiti on Friday. They took the top lawyer’s case before the court of public opinion. I am not blaming them; we live in a constantly changing world in which the Internet is the super jury. The landscape has changed forever. Babalola’s lawyers said Farotimi was angered because he lost his client’s case to their chief’s client before the Supreme Court in 2013. That was eleven years ago! Lawyers must have very long memories – like elephants – for them to have sustained a war this long.

And, it is from Chief Babalola’s case, as presented by his lawyers at the press conference, that I picked my item of interest – how the Supreme Court did this work and created this war. From what I read, it would appear that the Supreme Court was the edá rat that sparked the blaze which our firefighters are dealing with. “You will recall that 254 hectares (of land) were sold to the Gbadamosi Eletu family. However, instead of the 254 hectares, Honourable Justice Kumai Bayang Aka’ahs, JSC, who wrote the lead judgment, recorded 10 hectares in error,” Chief Babalola’s lawyer told the media. Now, listen. Nigeria’s topmost court wrote “ten hectares” when it should have written “254 hectares” and delivered it as its judgment in that contentious land case on 13 July, 2013. I read that and got confused. Figures 10 and 254 neither sound alike nor do they compare in values. So, where did the error come from? The Supreme Court is not a one-man tribunal. There were at least four other justices on that panel. Not one of them saw the mistake of their leading colleague; they all endorsed the error, lock, stock and barrel. The court later corrected this on 18 March, 2014 – that was eight months after the judgment. It blamed the discrepancy on what our law calls “clerical error.” Then this Farotimi-Babalola war started, assailing reputations and curtailing freedoms.

We are ruling our world in manners that are at variance with how we met it. The British who created this country worked better in the administration of justice. I wrote earlier that in the Adeola scandal case above, the higher the appeal went, the better the reasoning, the surer the justice. Even in places where sharia ruled, the British encouraged discipline, diligence and competence. In Ilorin, an Alkali was dismissed in 1912 “because he could neither read nor write Arabic.” In the same Ilorin, the colonial government removed Chief Alkali Mallam Salihu sometime in the 1930s and replaced him with Mallam Muhammad Dan Begori (Belgore) because inquiry showed that he had been “extremely negligent in his supervision of the clerical work of his subordinates.” H. O. Danmole’s ‘The Alkali Court in Ilorin Emirate during Colonial Rule’ published in the Trans-African Journal of History (1989) contains those details, including the quotes.

Now, you would want to ask: The justices who professed the 10-hectare-for-254-hectare error at our Supreme Court in 2013, where are they today and what were the consequences of their mistake which now proves costlier than they could ever have imagined? The man who wrote the error retired in December 2019. How does he feel hearing all these about his error? The others who concurred with him, what do they feel? The Supreme Court itself, in the name of which those lords of the law acted, is it proud of what is happening? The criminal cases that branched out of their “clerical error” and filed last week, if they eventually go up to the Supreme Court, how is the court going to sit on them? The Body of Benchers, if a student of the Nigeria Law School wrote ten hectares where he was supposed to write 254 hectares, would they reward such a student with a call to the Nigerian Bar?

While I waste my time asking those questions, the battle between the forces of Chief Afe Babalola and those of Dele Farotimi rages on. And, it is not one between David and Goliath. No. Both are losing at the same time. They are both underdogs being tried in two parallel courts – one at the law court; the other at the court of public opinion. Unfortunately, both are not doing fine at all, but they are unyielding. I pity the two sides. They are pitched in a no-win duel while the rats who sparked the fight enjoy their suya, sip their coke, and pick their teeth. In the play, ‘Topdog/Underdog’ by American playwright, Suzan-Lori Parks, two brothers lose everything they fight over – woman, inheritance, everything. “Screaming in agony” is how a critic describes the cries of one while the other is too dead to hear his brother’s too-late regrets.

By Chidi Anselm Odinkalu

Paul Anyebe was a judge of the High Court of Benue State in north-central Nigeria who had a young son with sticky fingers and a sense of adventure  It was his role as a dad that endangered his job as a judge.

One night around 1983, Anyebe caught his son attempting to steal from his bedroom. In response, Anyebe pulled his gun in an effort to scare the boy. The gun went off, discharging a bullet which hit and seriously injured the boy. The Attorney-General of Benue State decided to prosecute Paul Anyebe for attempted murder. The Penal Code applicable in Benue State at the time had ample provisions for the crime of attempted murder.

The Attorney-General also added a charge of illegal possession of firearms, a federal offence. Unlike the crime of attempted murder, which was a state crime in Benue State, all firearms offences are federal. The Attorney-General of Benue was well within his powers to prosecute for attempted murder but only the Attorney-General of the Federation could prosecute or authorize prosecution for federal offences.

At the conclusion of the trial, the High Court of Benue State discharged Paul Anyebe on the charge of attempted murder, a state offence, but convicted him on the charge of illegal possession of firearms (a federal offence)for which it sentenced him to three years in prison. The Court of Appeal reduced this sentence to six months in prison or a fine of one hundred Naira. Following this decision and while his appeal was yet to be heard by the Supreme Court, Paul Anyebe was dismissed as a judge.

When the Supreme Court decided Anyebe’s appeal in January 1986, Dahunsi Olugbemi Coker, a Justice of the court, summed up the issue for decision in one sentence: “The short point is whether a State Attorney-General can prosecute an offence created by an Act of the National Assembly.” To this question, the court unanimously responded in the negative. They nullified Anyebe’s trial and ordered the fine paid  – one hundred Naira – refunded to him. The Court of Appeal ordered his reinstatement with full benefits.

Adolphus Godwin Karibi-Whyte, one of the justices who decided Anyebe’s appeal at the Supreme Court, said of what the case decided that ”the Attorney-General of a State has no general authority to exercise the powers of the Attorney-General of the Federation to prosecute in respect of Federal offences.”

One effect of this decision is to preclude the prosecution of federal crimes before state courts. A Magistrates Court is a state court. It does not have jurisdiction over federal crimes.

38 years after the Supreme Court of Nigeria established this principle in Anyebe’s case, the Nigeria Police Force (NPF) on 4 December arraigned lawyer and writer, Dele Farotimi, before a Magistrate in Ekiti State on 16 counts of crimes under the Criminal Code Act, a federal legislation.

Three years ago, Ekiti State enacted into law the Criminal Law of Ekiti State, no. 12 of 2021, which repealed and replaced the state’s pre-existing Criminal Code Law of 2012. Comprising nine parts, 429 sections and 140 pages, Ekiti State’s Criminal Law of 2021 does not include the crime Criminal libel or defamation. Section 70 of the law contains a crime of causing disaffection or breach of the peace through offensive publication but that is a simple offence punishable by six months in prison. It is not in issue in this case.

Last week, on 3 December, operatives of the NPF heisted Dele Farotimi from his residence in Lagos State, where the crime of criminal defamation is similarly unknown to law. They raced him across state lines to Ekiti where they detained him. The following morning, on 4 December, the police arraigned Dele before a Magistrate in the state capital.

This is important because the gist of the charges purportedly preferred against Dele Farotimi before the Magistrate in Ekiti is precisely criminal defamation which is not a crime in Ekiti State.

It seemed quite clear that the charges presented by the police did not disclose a crime known to the laws of Ekiti State nor did they disclose a crime over which a Magistrate in Ekiti State could purport to exercise lawful jurisdiction. Despite the evident absence of jurisdiction on multiple fronts, the Magistrate proceeded with undue haste to order the remand of Dele Farotimi in prison custody for one week until 10 December. The Magistrate probably did not realise that 10 December is International Human Rights Day.

Even if the Magistrate had jurisdiction, which he did not, the crime alleged was punishable with two years in prison. Under section 4(5) of the Criminal Law of Ekiti State, this is classed as a “misdemeanor” at best, that is to say “an offence punishable by imprisonment for not less than six months, but less than three years.” These are bailable on liberal terms. Offences punishable by more than three years in prison are called “felonies”. Those are regarded as serious offences. The order of remand in this case seemed wilful with a whiff of the pre-determined about it.

The United Nations Declaration of Basic Principles of Justice for Victims of Crime and Abuse of Power has a name for what happens when a court orders prison remand for a crime which does not exist in law and in proceedings over which it lacks powers. It is called “criminal abuse of power.”

Many people claiming to be senior lawyers have invited Dele Farotimi to have his day in court where he can prove the allegations the subject of these charges or face the consequences. This is clearly designed to make all this seem like an invocation of law. It isn’t.

First, Dele Farotimi can only do so before a court of competent jurisdiction. A Magistrate claiming to sit over a crime that does not exist in the state is not such a court.

Second, the burden in criminal proceedings is on the state to prove that the accused guilty. So, criminal proceedings in Ekiti or anywhere cannot possibly be the forum for Dele Farotimi to prove the truth of his claims. Anyone who makes that assertion is either wilfully jejune or must concede that the only opportunity to put that to test has to be in civil proceedings.

Third, insisting on the kind of proceedings now going on in Ekiti state without any sense of irony only reinforces the kinds of claims that Dele Farotimi makes in his best-selling book about supposedly legal and judicial processes which seem to occur in the pockets of human principalities given to playing god. A lot of things may yet happen in those kinds of proceedings but it does not look like law will be one of them.

Moreover, in 2021, the Supreme Court of Nigeria – no less –  condemned as “vexatious and oppressive” and “dangerously rampant”, the “misuse of the criminal law machinery for getting reliefs in disputes that are civil in nature, by using the instruments of State.” The court also required that “a complainant who initiates a prosecution with the knowledge that criminal proceedings are unwarranted and the remedy lies in the civil law, should be made accountable in law for pursuing misconceived criminal proceedings.”

In that same case in 2021, the Supreme Court described the crime of criminal defamation as “an innovation in Star Chamber”, a reference to a notoriously arbitrary and captured judicial forum dating back to late mediaeval England. It was not a judicial endearment.

Dele Farotimi himself was perspicacious about the events as they have so far unfolded. Shortly before he was taken from Lagos, he warned: “Abducting me to be tried in Ekiti State is not justice but a witch-hunt.”

Somewhere in Ekiti State on International Human Rights Day 2024, the very rights consecrated by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights will face the Guillotine with Dele Farotimi strung up as the sacrifice. Those who think this vindication may yet live to rue their affliction with terminal hubris.

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