THE GUARDIAN www.ngrguardiannews.com
24 Sunday, March 30, 2014
COVER
ODIACHI: We Need Homegrown Definition For Corruption In Nigeria As the debate over corruption perception of Nigeria rages, Mr. Robert Odiachi, the chairman of SIAO, a Nigerian auditing, accounting and general professional services firm, told MARCEL MBAMALU in Lagos that it is high time the nation looked inwards to rediscover itself, based on the peculiarities that daunt progress. According to him, corruption perception of Nigeria should take cognizance of its value system and bad leadership that have further impoverished citizens and put undue pressure on leaders. O you share President Jonathan’s view that corruption perception of Nigeria is exaggerated?
D
Corruption perception itself answers the question. We really have to sit down as a country and define what corruption is, because the way we are structured as a nation would seem to support the fact that there is an exaggeration of that perception; certain things that we do locally, which are internationally perceived as corrupt practices, may certainly not be so. I am not supporting the President, neither am I saying that he is right in saying that it is exaggerated. But we really have to ask the president to define what corruption is to him. We saw the applicants who applied for the immigration job; was that corruption, or our way of doing business? If you know that so many people are unemployed and the state has no responsibility towards them, and then they come up with ways of survival, would you say that is corruption? If you come up to say corruption is endemic in Nigeria, you really must define what corruption really is. So, what is corruption in your own opinion? Corruption, to me, is to do that, which, ordinarily, you are not expected to do. That is to say, I will not jump the queue if I am sure there is enough for everybody on the line. But where I am certain that we don’t have enough, it will be really had to tell somebody not to jump the queue. Sop, doing what one is not expected to do is corruption, by your own definition? Yes. Can you draw the line between corruption and fraud or crime? Yes there is a major difference. Crime is doing something that is against the law. But a good law is that which is obeyed; a bad law is not obeyed. So, you must do a good law. If you ask people not to steal, you must provide for them. If you haven’t provided for them, it will be hard for them to agree with you on the law. Any other description for me is hard to understand; you cannot tell people to go to school when there is no school. So, for you to ask people to go to school, you must build the school. If you ask people what the duty of the Federal
Government is, they can’t really say. Government acknowledges that there is so much unemployment, but what are they doing? Are they giving any social services to the people? Lets face it. In the UK, they give social service to citizens; they give them accommodation; they give them (the unemployed) food. So, anybody that goes out of his way to do what is not expected is a criminal. If a guy has not eaten all day, has no where to lay his head and he picks up a piece of orange somewhere, would you want to call him a thief? Back to the immigration job stampede, the applicants reportedly paid N1000 to register for the interview, which claimed 20 lives. Won’t you call that (selling job application forms) corruption? The forms don’t cost N1000; it is corruption. And to give that magnitude of an exercise to some organisation without commensurate or proven skills also begs for an answer. We have WAEC, which is powered and have capability to do such work. They (the Nigeria Immigration Service) should have looked at that. It is a corrupted process, and it is difficult to understand the logic of 65,000 people gathering in one place. I am not saying that the company shouldn’t have been given the job, but the way and manner it was going to do the job
should have been agreed with some people. What about Nigerians and the way we do things. Is corruption exclusive to government officials? Government officials are not from another planet; they are among us. So, I am not saying government officials are corrupt. I am saying there are times we don’t do things the proper way; and, often times, it is clear why things are not done like that. Are we structured to be corrupt? If we are, then we can’t prosper without bending? Now look at that transaction (immigration job interview contract). Was it advertised? Was proper due diligence done? Did anybody look at the process through which it was going to be done? Was it approved? We have just seen a letter in the papers from the Comptroller General of Immigration to the Minister of Internal Affairs. The Comptroller General was not aware of that exercise; he read it in the newspapers as we did. He wrote a letter of objection before the incident, asking why the Ministry would be employing people for the Immigration Department and the Comptroller General was not aware. That’s corruption; it is not just money. So, we ask again: Is corruption perception of Nigeria exaggerated? No. We must, first, define what it is and who we are. If you take us to the strictest test, you would say corruption in Nigeria is rampant, but is it our way of life. Is that the way we want to do things? President Mugabe said Nigeria is corrupt because you sit in a plane and you have to bribe the pilot before he would take off. Nobody replied him. There are certain things that happen and you wonder how people are bound to react. I am not supporting corruption. I am saying that it would be tough to say that people would see that unemployment is rampant the way it is in Nigeria today (and the government has no social welfare for these guys) and to now criminalise them and expect that they won’t cut corners. To me, you can’t label those people criminals. They roam the streets all day. Does this excuse you have given on behalf of the impoverished also apply to government officials? They don’t live outside of us. If you know the amount of pressure that is being applied to a government official by his municipalities, dependants and associates, you would be sorry for him or her, because he is seen as a window of opportunity for his constituency. How much does he earn anyway? The pressures to be corrupt are heavy. Do you know how many people have come to ask me for employment? There is serious pressure. What is corruption may not necessarily be corruption in his own definition. But if you ask a Nigerian, the perception of our corruption is different from a foreigner. The way we display wealth is corruption. They say champagne is banned in other countries, but it is everywhere here in Nigeria, because it is one of the commodities under licence. So, it is tough to define corruption; you have to define it from the pinnacle to the base. That is to say to whom much is given, much is expected.
Lawyers Are Not Properly Supervised By Bar Associations — OLADELE CONTINUED FROM PAGE 21 admit to stealing, or if it is rape case and you want to change it from rape to maybe criminal sexual assault of lesser degree, or to something much less, you have to agree you did that thing, which you want to bargain for. Defence also has to specify the aspect of prosecution case, which he disagrees with. The whole essence is to narrow down the issues and avoid irrelevancies. So, if I’m going to bring 10 counts against somebody, and the person says he agrees with two of the 10 counts, it pays me as a prosecutor to reduce the charges to those two; then, I can ask for conviction on admission. I don’t need to prove it again because he has admitted it. Even if I waste time proving them, by the time the judge makes his decision, the person might be sentenced to 10 years on each count, and each sentence will run concurrently. The sentence I would have obtained with two counts is the same I will obtain on all the counts because they would run concurrently anyway. Sometimes, this is what motivates the prosecutor to enter into a plea bargain with the accused. But people have a wrong notion that when there is plea bargain, the person goes scot-free; there is nothing like that. He might receive a lighter sentence but he will go home empty-handed. And I think there is a suggestion by Femi Falana that the law has to be amended on the option of fine to ensure that the option of fine is increased to about 85 per cent. A lot of practitioners don’t have the practice direction and many of them get to know about
their duties when they get to the court and the judge tells them that, under the current practice direction, this is what they are supposed to do. The practice direction is something that should have been mass-produced and distributed to all the Bar Associations in the country as well as be made available to the various High Court libraries. For instance, under the new practice direction, the hearing of cases shall be scheduled on day-to-day basis as far as the schedule of the court will permit, priority given to all cases prosecuted by EFCC, ICPC or the SSS. Again, the court and the parties must prevent unwarranted and unnecessary delays accordingly not more than two adjournments shall be granted to any person on an action covered by the provision of the practice direction”, that is corruption, rape, kidnapping and terrorism. Not more than two adjournments, but what do we see today? Many lawyers don’t even know that they are not supposed to take more than two adjournments. The defence cannot take more than two adjournments; the prosecutor cannot take more than two adjournments. And then, where a party seeks to change his lawyer, during the lifespan of a case, the court must not give that party more than two adjournments. You don’t come to court and say my Lord, ‘I’m still looking for a lawyer, I need an adjournment,’ and then the court grants you and you come back again for another adjournment and the beat goes on and on. That is a ploy to delay hearing and trial of a case. Accused persons change their lawyers
to delay hearings. I’ve read about cases where lawyers tell the court they have just taken over the case and they need adjournments to get acquainted with the case? It must not be more than two. If you have gotten adjournments two times in order to get a lawyer and the lawyer eventually appears, the lawyer might find it difficult to get additional adjournments under the new practice direction. If you have taken two adjournments before the lawyer comes in, too bad for the lawyer, he has to face the case and that is why the directives say further that court shall ensure that counsel must ensure they are present in court and are ready to proceed with their cases at all times. In the event that this proves to be impracticable, by reason of ill health or other unavoidable reasons, such lawyer must make sure that somebody of relevant experience ones to court from his chambers to represent him. So if you cannot come, you send somebody to represent you. Getting a junior lawyer to come to court and say ‘I don’t know the facts of this case; I was given the file to come and take an adjournment’ is no longer allowed. Judges are also instructed to “ensure that business of the court is taken with proper professional decorum.” So, you don’t come to court and behave as if the judge is in your pocket or you want to take over the court from the judge. For instance many lawyers, because they want to grandstand to their clients that they have what it takes to delay a case and frustrate the legal process, they go to court with frivolous motions. In such situa-
tions, it is the duty of the court to ensure that such lawyers comply with professional decorum. So far, these are some of the things contained in the Federal High Court practice directive. If we comply with the rules and everybody knows what is expected of him or her, we are not going to have problems with expeditious hearing of cases. The defence should also know that it is the right of an accused person to have speedy trial. Lawyers should not also violate their client’s right by prolonging cases unnecessarily. Right to speedy trial is a fundamental constitutional right. Where a lawyer begins to prolong cases maybe because he wants to collect more money from the client, it violates the accused right’s to speedy trial. I think by the time this matter of freezing of accounts happens and lawyers know that their clients don’t have much money to spend on legal fees; they will put in more attention and make sure the case is dispensed with expeditiously. We all have roles to play; the judiciary and legislature have roles to play. Some laws must be amended. If you look at John Yusuf’s case, he was charged under the Penal Code and the provision of the code allows the judge the latitude to manipulate it. Because when the law says that two years or a fine not more than a particular amount, a corrupt judge can easily manipulate that to the advantage of the accused person. There is need to review the various laws to ensure that the penalties and punishments tally with the degree of offence committed. In John Yusuf’s case, the judge can easily justify his action and it would be