Buhari’s Headache
THE President has headache. That is the heart-rending news from Addis Ababa in far away Ethiopia. President Muhammadu Buhari himself did the diagnosis. Judging from the symptoms, as he explained it to Nigerians resident in the Horn of Africa, clearly it is not life threatening, but it is not the kind of headache that a combined dosage of any popular pain reliever or even the more potent APC can cure.
The ligitigants of enormous means, counted in millions and even billions in their bank accounts, do boast openly that they can tie their opponents in court for years and they do succeed in the Nigerian judicial system where the wheel of justice grinds slowly. The man of enormous means, the plaintiff, goes for the best lawyer money can hire, he chooses his court and apparently chooses his judge. At the end of the whole proceedings, he gets his way. He has paid handsomely for the judgment.
President Buhari is currently fighting corruption. He has fingered many crooked Nigerians who have stolen the country blind. The biggest scandal rocking the country almost to its foundation today is the $2.1 billion arms scandal popularly called Dasukigate.
But the total harvest of corruption in Shagari’s time is nothing comparable to what obtains today; the mindless looting that has happened in the last few years. Fair-minded Nigerians must share in the pain of the President in the fight to recover the nation’s stolen wealth. But in his current efforts, Buhari, now a converted democrat, cannot set up military tribunals as he did in 1984. That will be patently illegal and nigeria unconstitutional. At the same time he cannot rely on the courts as they are today to get all the guilty into prison after they might have been forced to disgorge what they have swallowed unjustly.
The ligitigants of enormous means, counted in millions and even billions in their bank accounts, do boast openly that they can tie their opponents in court for years and they do succeed in the Nigerian judicial system where the wheel of justice grinds slowly. The man of enormous means, the plaintiff, goes for the best lawyer money can hire, he chooses his court and apparently chooses his judge. At the end of the whole proceedings, he gets his way. He has paid handsomely for the judgment.
President Buhari is currently fighting corruption. He has fingered many crooked Nigerians who have stolen the country blind. The biggest scandal rocking the country almost to its foundation today is the $2.1 billion arms scandal popularly called Dasukigate.
But the total harvest of corruption in Shagari’s time is nothing comparable to what obtains today; the mindless looting that has happened in the last few years. Fair-minded Nigerians must share in the pain of the President in the fight to recover the nation’s stolen wealth. But in his current efforts, Buhari, now a converted democrat, cannot set up military tribunals as he did in 1984. That will be patently illegal and nigeria unconstitutional. At the same time he cannot rely on the courts as they are today to get all the guilty into prison after they might have been forced to disgorge what they have swallowed unjustly.