Did you read former governor of Abia State, Orji Uzor Kalu’s statement after the Supreme Court’s seismic judgement last Friday which set him free? Kalu and his co-accused had on December 5, 2019 been sentenced to jail by Justice Mohammed Idris.
He stood trial, alongside his firm, Slok Nigeria Limited and Udeh Udeogu, Director of Finance and Accounts at the Abia State Government House. Justice Idris found Kalu and his co-defendants guilty and was sentenced to a concurrent jail term of 12 years imprisonment.
The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, (EFCC) had on July 16, 2018 preferred a 39-count charge bordering on N7.65 billion fraud against the accused. He had spent five months in jail.
In his remarks lauding the Supreme Court judgement, the former governor had waxed lyrical, sanctimonious and even sounded as if he was a human rights activist just released from jail. He critiqued the Nigerian system “whereby over 70% of all prison inmates population is made up of people awaiting trial” which “cannot be allowed to continue… situations where innocent people are falsely charged with murder just to get them out of the way” which “does not dignify our country and cannot continue,” and promised to “henceforth dedicate my time to fight injustice.”
So many questions arise from Kalu’s sudden “realizations” and new-found activism. The first is, as governor of a Nigerian state for eight years, at what point did it occur to Kalu that the Nigerian system is a bulwark of injustice? Why was he feigning ignorance of this rotten system which he was one of the dramatis personae who dragged it into the current sewage?
Don’t forget that Nigerians see the rot in the system as largely perpetrated by the political class, where the innocent is said to be framed so that they could be pushed out of the way. As governor, was Kalu unaware that a large population of inmates in prisons were awaiting trial? So why was he sounding like a man who just jumped from Uranus or one just returning from the Holy See?
The way Kalu sounded in that statement, you would think that the Supreme Court judge, led by Justice Olabode Rhodes-Vivour, had acquitted him of complicity in the N7billion theft charge against him, which the court did not. It only set him free on account of a technicality based on the provisions of 396(7) of the Administration of Criminal Justice Act (ACJA), promulgated in the bid to depopulate courts of cases.
Hitherto, judges who got promoted to higher courts had cases they were hearing in their former courts begun de novo.
In the Kalu case, the state is not done yet with allegation of complicity or otherwise of that young student of the University of Maiduguri in the late 1980s who was alleged to have donated cartons in place of pledged cash.
Methinks what Kalu should have done was to leave his prison home, not with a sense of deja vu and not the demeanour of a victor. It was bad enough that he got accused and initially sentenced for complicity in the fraud case. For the Nigerian criminal system, it is an opportunity to begin the matter afresh but with more circumspection.
However, knowing the extent of the rot in the Nigerian legal system, this Kalu “victory” may well be a systemic quid pro quo – a rob my back, I rob your back kind of class prevarication. The onus to be reticent and bear his shame without grandstanding was on Orji Uzor Kalu; that is what I think.
