All too often, in the inexorable march of history, both despotism and arbitrariness have hidden under apparently worthy causes to beguile the unwary and undiscerning!
There is an innate streak in man that yearns for liberty and freedom, and which resists tyranny and servitude! Man's most ingenious constitutional device against the emasculation of liberty and basic freedoms was to separate power from the hands of an all powerful leviathan or ruler, and to lodge peculiar components of power into three distinct, but countervailing, arms of government.
Montesquieue called it the "theory of separation of powers." It was a theory designed to constrain the exercise of arbitrary power. And the purpose was to expand the civic right to free choice, and to enable fundamental rights to flourish!
Naturally, every leader who has ever harboured a desire for absolute and arbitrary rule has historically scoffed at the principle of separation of powers. He does this because the principle has the ingrained capacity to check arbitrariness and rapacious rule! In a sense therefore, the existence of an independent legislature and a fearless judiciary can be the strongman's albatross!
Therefore, when Muhammadu Buhari deploys the secret police at midnight on the homes of judges who also happen to have given rulings in judicial capacities against the interests of his governing coalition, it is only prudent to be sure that the fight against corruption, a noble cause in itself, is not being conflated with a leviathan's natural desire to dismantle checks.
And for democracy's sake, and for the sake of the flourishing of basic freedoms, it is safer to be wary of any strike of the executive branch of government on the soul of any of the other two arms, unless the evidence of corruption is clear and compelling.
In picking up the judges in connection with cases in which the APC had unfavourable judgments, or in which the President's enemies, like Dasuki and Nnamdi Kanu, got favourable interlocutory rulings, it was inevitable that the arrests, coupled with the manner of effectuation, would assume partisan underpinnings!
There are thousands of fat corporate litigations with huge potentials for graft and lucre- these should have provided the basis for convincingly transparent and non partisan "sting operations".
The one gratifying thing I find in this unedifying episode is that it is the government in power that is accusing the judiciary of corruption in the determination of cases in which the government had a partisan interest. It would have been more worrisome if it was the opposition that was accusing the judiciary.
Whether we accept it or not, the implication is that the much maligned judiciary was still able to stand eyeball to eyeball with its executive counterpart without blinking! And unless the DSS is able to demonstrate the very principles of law that their Lordships stood on the head in the determination of the political cases leading to their arrest, the logical conclusion is that their Lordships may have been hapless victims of raging tyranny!
By Kenneth Ikonne (SAN)
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