What has been happening in Ado Ekiti, the capital of Ekiti state in the South West Nigeria in the past few days is akin to a make-belief movie from a distant land. In deed, no one would have believed that in this millennium; in this digital age where even the illiterate ones have risen from the rubbles of the history and darkness, people, whatever is their denomination, character and mood, would still relish in the medieval attitudinal disposition, all in the name of politics.
It was unbelievable that some people, in the name of thuggery, would physically assault a judge of a court; a judicial officer who is supposed to be a referee between the aggrieved and the aggressor.
It first happened when on Monday, September 22, 2014, some people classified as political thugs invaded the High Court Number 6 in Ado-Ekiti where Justice Olusegun Ogunyemi was presiding. The invasion of the court by the so-called thugs led to the abrupt end of the court session even as the presiding Judge was ferried away by a detachment of police officers after he had been harassed and chased around his office by the said thugs.
And came again on Thursday, September 25, 2014, when another set of political thugs in their hundreds, invaded the High Court premises in the same state capital. In the process, they assaulted Justice John Adeyeye, beat him up and tore his suit into shreds. This was as the police officers on guard were said to be looking unconcerned and uninterested.
Other judges in the court, the magistrates and members of staff of the court ran away in panic for their dear lives.
In the process, the vagabonds damaged and or destroyed court properties.
And worse of it all, the governor-elect under Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Mr. Ayodele Fayose addressed newsmen in Lagos on Friday with veiled acknowledgment of the attacks on the two judges. Though he claimed that he was not aware of the attacks but that he and his party (PDP) were not satisfied with the way the judges were handling the electoral petition filed by the All Progressives Congress (APC) which is currently ruling the state.
Though, a different, but closely related matter, of killing the former chairman of Road Transport Union later cropped-in and threw the state into chaos, the weight of attacks on judicial officers still remained too heavy to be beaten into the background.
We in the Greenbarge Reporters consider any assault on the judiciary and or the judicial officer as sacrilege, from the point of view of the place it (the judiciary) occupies in the life of any society, even the medieval one.
This is backgrounded on the fact that out of the three arms of government: the executive, the legislature and the judiciary, the last (judiciary) is obviously the one that stands out in terms of promotion of equitability, peaceful existence of homo sapiens and justness in the society.
In other words, in a situation where the executive and legislature are suspended, as in after a military coup, the judiciary has always continued to be irresistibly relevant and has always been functioning.
It is a common sense therefore for reasonable people to imagine that an attack on the judiciary, under whatever guise or excuse, is an attack on the fabrics of the civilization of the society, portraying he who launches such an attack as purely animal that ought to be roaming aimlessly somewhere in the jungle.
We urge the state and federal governments to take this matter more serious by investigating the circumstances for the attacks, the sponsors of the attacks, whether directly or remotely connected; the reasons for the attacks and other relevant matters. The government would in deed, be saving the entire people of this great country from the shame of being classified in the civilized international communities as barbaric that have refused woefully to grow out of the stone-age period; the age before the coming of the Christ.
Anything less, like the government trying to engage in the usual blame game with the opposition or justifying the attacks would not change the sordidness of the act and the negative effect it would have in the future of the judiciary in the country.
[myad]
