Emeka Etiaba, son of the first female deputy governor/governor of Anambra State, Mrs. Virginia Etiaba, was among the 21 legal practitioners conferred with the prestigious rank of Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN) and sworn in on September 21 by the Chief Justice of Nigeria. He bares his mind in this interview with Senior Correspondent, ONYEWUCHI OJINNAKA, on punishment for corruption offences, disciplining of corrupt judges, among others.
At a time the international community is trying to dump capital punishment, the Nigerian Labour Congress seems to be clamouring for it because of corrupt politicians. Do you support capital punishment?
No, I do not. I think it is a call that goes to the extreme; but that again can only be blamed on the desperate desire of the citizens of Nigeria to bring in measures that will dissuade people from continuing to loot public funds. That may not at the end of the day be the innermost desire of those calling for capital punishment. But that is just an expression, the desires of Nigerians for the government to take extreme measures against corruption because for too long we hear that those who embezzled our money are arrested, investigated, charged to court, and that is the last you hear of such cases.
Although I am not in support of capital punishment, I am in support of serious measures being put in place which include the jail term, even when plea bargaining comes in like in the case of James Ibori who still went to jail in London after plea bargaining.
Some pundits are of the view that the laws of the land are weak; the judiciary being a product of the society is also corrupt and that is why corruption has continued to thrive in our country. Do you share this view?
Everybody says the judiciary is corrupt, but nobody comes up with the evidence of corruption. Everybody keeps shouting that the judiciary is corrupt, but nobody has come up with evidence. Even the Chief Justice of the Federation has called that if you see any corrupt judge, do a petition against that judge.
Are you then saying that the judiciary is not corrupt?
I cannot sit here and tell you the judiciary is corrupt. If there are particulars of corruption, then I can come up with it. There are times judgments are analysed by people who never read the whole judgments and they will say this Judge must have taken bribe, which is not enough evidence. There are some proven cases of corruption, and the National Judicial Council (NJC) dealt with such cases, sacked those judges involved or in other cases suspended them. But that is not enough to criticise the judiciary as being corrupt. One case, two cases, even 10 cases are not enough to say the judiciary is corrupt. So, do not make a blanket labelling of the entire judiciary. One or two people may be bad eggs, but not all. That is the truth. You really have to search for those bad eggs and deal with them. Nobody is saying there are no bad eggs.
Then you talked about the laws. Yes, the system is bad, the laws are not too good; that is why the new Act came into being. And with the introduction of the new Act, criminal trials are supposed to go on day to day like the election petition tribunal. It is not like come today and take an adjournment for another three months. No, it is now day to day. The interlocutory appeals cannot stop trials. There is nothing like stay of proceedings anymore. Those are the things that delayed trials.
But also remember that Nigeria is a place where people shout that someone has stolen, and when you call them as witnesses, they will collect bribe and will not appear in court to testify. In some cases, they will not come to testify because they are afraid. It is not only the failing of the lawyers or the judges, because lawyers will not go into the witness box to testify; it is the people who witnessed the act that will stand in the box and testify.
Again, another problem we have is that because we do not have enough judges to sit over these matters, you find out that in one day a judge sits over 30 cases. Sometimes it is up to 45 in some courts. How does a judge, one man, cope with 30 cases (in a day)? So we need more judges to deal with cases. Some people said we also need judges who are specialised in criminal matters. That is the theory propagated by some people, but the truth about it is that I believe they do not need special training to handle cases of crime.
Do you think the NJC is doing enough in the area of penalising of judges, compared to the Ghanaian judiciary which sacked about 22 judges from the Bench at a time because of corrupt practices?
The case of Ghana is different from the case that you have in Nigeria. Like I said before, where are the witnesses? In Ghana, they have the CCTV (closed-circuit television) camera showing where the judges were taking bribe. Who has ever produced such in Nigeria? The NJC meets, looks at the petition; if it has merit, NJC will call on the judge to respond and call on the petitioners to come and establish their claims. Unfortunately, in the Ghanaian experience you just mentioned, they brought CCTV to show their claims. Who can do that in Nigeria? What Nigerians do, and I must tell you especially lawyers, is to convert cases that should go on appeal to a petition issue.
I go to a court, the court makes pronouncement that I am not satisfied with, rather than go on appeal, I write a petition or ask my client to write a petition that the judge is biased; that he takes bribe. In some cases, they would tell you he accepted $50,000. Were they the ones that brought the money? How did they know that the money is $50,000? Most times, the people who write petitions do not have evidence, but they just write to frustrate the case because the judge would say: ‘a petition has been written against me, I will withdraw, I will not handle the matter anymore’. Some petitions are targeted at achieving that. NJC is doing the most it can in the circumstance. They (NJC officials) are human beings. They are not machines. And human beings work based on evidence availed them. Evidence has to be made available. For the much they have done, they were able to achieve it because evidence came at the appropriate time.
How can the war on corruption be fought and won?
The war on corruption can be fought and won if proper system of accountability is put in place, if laws are put in place, so that people will not abuse it. Like a lot of people say, all you need in Nigeria is to steal enough to be able to compromise the system with the best of lawyers there for you. But if the legal system is tightened, I am very sure that people will think twice before committing atrocities. We also need to regenerate our hearts. Growing up, I remember we had moral instruction in school. I do not know how much of that goes on, and with the advent of the internet today, it is bad. Tomorrow it is likely to be worse because there are no boundaries anymore; your parents cannot actually determine what you hear, what you watch. In our own days, it was easy; but these days, not even my little boy can be under 100 per cent control because of the influence of internet. So, things are likely to grow worse, rather than go better because of the internet and the moral standard. We really have to tighten our belt and live right.