Our unserious Supreme Court

When the news story that the Supreme Court had gone rogue on critics of its recent judgments was first shared with me, my initial thought was that it had to be an internet hoax. I imagined it was impossible that a SC would ever single out individuals in the bid to justify itself. SC might respond to a peer institution if the need to give an account of itself arises, but to single out individuals critical of their functioning and threaten them? Preposterous! When they said, “Our silence must not be mistaken for weakness or cowardice,” what exactly do they plan to do? Do we no longer have the right to freely comment on our disaffection with the Supreme Court or any institution?

Second, the press release warning their critics was so badly written, so lacking the eloquence one would expect from an institution like the SC, that I thought there was no way that could have emanated from them. The statement read like the intellectually pretentious verbiage universities’ Student Union Government put out. The SC press release must have been written by a copyist who mistook verbosity, pomposity, and ostentatious use of -isms as the art of oratory. Even Customary Court officials display better rhetorical skills. After all the huff and puff in the piece, the SC still offered neither explanation nor clarity on their legal interpretations that drew the castigations in the first place. The hot air turned out to be a mere exercise in self-demystification.

Despite my initial skepticism that the SC could not have gone so low, the tactlessness they displayed by issuing that witless press release is common. Many Nigerian MDAs are similarly unserious. From the presidency to the EFCC, DSS, CBN, and so on, they simply write whatever their gut instincts dictate. Whether written or spoken, their statements give them away as an unserious bunch. Their output tells the degree to which they understand the significance of what they do, their respect for the public they supposedly serve, and their overall attitude to excellence.

The shock of the SC’s salvo was preceded by the ruling statement of the Chairman of the Osun State Governorship Election Petition Tribunal, Terste Kume. He descended from his official capacity to add spite and belittlement to his ruling. By getting personal and petty enough to mock Governor Ademola Adeleke’s penchant for dancing, Kume gave himself away as frivolous. There is a reason the culture that bequeathed us the modern court system also has the saying, “as sober as a judge.” Officials whose pronouncements carry legal and moral weight are not supposed to fool around. Of all people, a judge should be aware that the language used in jurisprudence must be carefully thought out, each word carefully selected, and any trace of silliness expunged. That way, even when people disagree with your ruling, they will at least know that you took the issues seriously enough.

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Once upon a time, judges were buffered from the visceral rage of the public by being remote. But now, the times have changed. We live in an era where social media has drastically changed the structure of communication between leaders and the led. In the analog age, individuals who needed to express their dissatisfaction would compose a letter, send it to the newspaper, and wait for a while before it was published. These days, the agenda-setting or regulating functions of the media has been severely undercut by social media. People no longer need to go through the media houses, and more people can vent at their leaders with an immediacy that was unimaginable some years ago.

Unfortunately, the brevity of distance also corresponds to the abbreviation of thoughts that sometimes go into these exchanges. In place of public officials who have taken their time to seriously think about what they say and how they should present their thoughts to a rageful public, get a set of people who shoot out their poorly processed thoughts like Molotov cocktails. In the bid to give it back to the inhabitants of the internet “fire-for-fire,” these people jump into the mindless gutter that sometimes typifies social media exchanges. Ultimately, they lower the public perception of the ethical and intellectual requirements necessary for their offices.

By responding to criticisms with an uncouth letter, the SC demeaned itself. They should not have done it. It was bad enough that they reacted at all, but even far worse they did it so poorly! Partly due to ideological leanings and judicial activism, some recent judgments of the Supreme Court of the United States have verged on the incredulous. The justices of SCOTUS have been severely criticised. Yet, not once did they make the court’s clerk respond to the rage. It would be beneath their status to barrack those who take issues with their judgment.

However, if the SC thinks that the public fumes at them because people do not understand the basis of their decisions and they fear that such dissatisfaction will erode public trust, then they should engage prudently. Rather than merely ask the head of the PR department to yell back, they should hire scribes trained in jurisprudence and are also elegant writers. We are not talking here about a civil servant merely redeployed from one ministry in the FCT to work in the Supreme Court like it is any other department. No, the SC should seek out talented people who can communicate the ambiguities of their decisions to the public thoughtfully and meaningfully. From universities to research institutions, Nigeria is full of talented and even-tempered people who understand what is at stake when an institution like the Supreme Court wants to justify itself to the public. They should find them and let them handle the SC’s communication with the public.

It is disingenuous for the SC to put out a press release blaming their critics for “disingenuously stand(ing) logic on its head to show their level of incredible dexterity… who have cultivated the unfashionable penchant of constantly attacking the Judiciary over every judgment or ruling given should better have a rethink….” Whether they want to admit it or not, everyone knows that judges are neither infallible nor incorruptible. Nigeria is endemically corrupt; there is no point pretending that people do not buy judgment from the courts at all levels of the judiciary. Those who suspect the SC’s moral compromised in the controversial cases did not merely pull their presumption out of thin air. In the recent past, we witnessed anti-corruption agencies arrest some judges—including those of the SC—for corruption. They need not feign righteousness to us.

If they have enough confidence in the merit of their verdicts, they should clearly and thoughtfully enunciate it. Merely vituperating and threatening critics give the impression they are hiding some bad behaviour.

As for the person(s) who scribbled and signed that appalling press release on behalf of the SC, they should be redeployed to the stenography department where they are unlikely to do any future damage to the reputation of the Supreme Court. I will be kind enough to the person to say the person has passion for their job. The person is probably logophilic, going by how they pull random words from the thesaurus, threw them together, and arrived at ogbunigwe grammar like, “observe the caution gate of self-control,” and –my personal favorite— “a mood of bellicose jingoism.” Such a person must love their job; they just do not have the intellectual heft that writing such a document requires.