Dele's Abduction
Jibrin Ibrahim
Dele Farotimi: Are the Guilty Afraid?
Jibrin Ibrahim, Deepening Democracy, Daily Trust, 13th December 2024
There appears to be panic and deep pain in Afe Babalola’s actions since the publication and sales of the new international bestseller - Dele Farotimi’s book, ‘Nigeria and its Criminal Justice System’. It became a bestseller precisely because the all-powerful Mr. Babalola is determined to stop Nigerians and the international community from reading it. Apparently, no one has explained to him that the best way to get everybody to read a book is to tell them that they must not read it. Mr Babalola has however persisted in his errors by getting a court to restrainDele Farotimi Publishers as well as bookshops from circulating and selling the book. M.A. Adegbola, the presiding judge, restrained the defendants and their republishers, including Amazon Online Bookstore, Rovingheights Bookstore, Booksellers Bookstore, Jazzhole Lagos Bookstore, Glendora Bookshop, Quintessence Lagos Bookstore, and Patabah Books Limited, from further publishing and selling the book. Deep panic.
Last week, the Ekiti police command, acting on behalf of Mr Babalola had arrested Farotimi over alleged defamation and cyberbullying. The activist was accused of spreading false information against Babalola. That was not enough, subsequently, the inspector-general of police filed a 12-count charge bordering on cybercrime against Farotimi. The ruling on the book followed an application by Kehinde Ogunwumiju, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria and managing partner at Afe Babalola & Co. seeking N500 million in damages from Mr Farotimi for allegedly defaming him in the book. The said book, ‘Nigeria and its Criminal Justice System’, is an unfiltered, freewheeling critical account of Mr Farotimi about some top Nigerian legal firms and the Nigerian judiciary.
Many of my readers will wonder how some top lawyers can pursue routes to futility with such determination. The book gained tremendous traction, reaching a top spot on Amazon’s bestseller list within days of cascading police actions against Mr Farotimi following Mr Babalola’s petition last week. PDF copies of the book, which was launched in July, have circulated widely in the last one week due to free publicity offered by Mr Babalola. Now the entire Nigerian Police Force might be placed in streets all over the country on a “search and hide the book” mission. Goodluck Mr Babalola.
Meanwhile, all that the 104-page book did was to research that led to the accusation that the law firm was guilty of “compromising the integrity of the Supreme Court,” scheming with “crooked lawyers and incompetent justices,” and “doctoring” a Supreme Court judgement. It also accused Mr Babalola of corrupting the Supreme Court in the service of his clients. The problem is that most Nigerians would consider such accusations to be most likely TRUE.
The response of Mr Babalola, the police and the judiciary has been extreme punishment for Farotimi for daring to tell his story. It is for this reason that civil society organizations strongly condemn the arrest, detention, persecution and torture of Mr. Dele Farotimi. The manner of his arrest was an aberration and that Mr. Farotimi should never have been subjected to the criminal justice process in this case. Additionally, the prohibitive terms of bail for what is supposed to be a misdemeanour raises the real possibility that Mr. Farotimi’s right to be tried - as required by Nigeria’s constitution - by a court “constituted in such a manner as to guarantee its independence and impartiality” is compromised.
There are many troubling aspects of Mr. Fatotimi’s encounter with Nigerian law enforcement, beginning with the unnecessarily aggressive and confrontational manner in which his arrest was affected. The CCTV footage released by his office after his arrest revealed the thoroughly unprofessional and violent nature of the police officers who travelled out of the State of their posting to arrest him. The officers were not dressed in uniform and could have passed as armed thugs. They also threatened Mr. Farotimi’s staff for no reason after unlawfully seizing their phones. The brutal manner of his arrest suggests the apprehension of a bandit on a most-wanted list rather than a publicly accessible human rights lawyer.
Even more troubling than the manner of the arrest was the reason adduced. Before he was unlawfully “picked up” from his office on the 2nd of December, Mr Farotimi had foretold the Nigerian public of his impending arrest. In a press release that went out from his office a day before, he stated that the police had invited him to answer for certain claims he had made in his most recent book. Mr. Farotimi went on to state that his impending arrest was being orchestrated by two powerful individuals: Chief Tony Elumelu and Chief Afe Babalola CFR, SAN, who were apparently displeased with the unflattering depictions Mr. Farotimi had made of them in his book. Rather than challenging his claims by suing him for defamation in civil court, they decided to wield their enormous influence to have him arrested, detained, and charged to court for a crime that does not exist in the jurisdiction of his arraignment.
Defamation is a civil matter and should be treated as such. Section 4 of the Police Act 2020 clearly forbids the police from wading into civil matters. In an orderly society built on the rule of law, those contending the veracity or otherwise of the claims Mr. Farotimi made in his book or who feel he has defamed them in any of his writings or speech would seek justice in the civil court, where Mr. Farotimi would have had to defend his claims or provide redress should he have been found to have maligned their character. In the process, the resources of the Nigerian State, our law enforcement agents, and our criminal justice system should not be trivialized and expended on pursuing personal vendettas. When a person feels that his or her reputation has been tarnished, the law creates opportunities for redress in civil court. As Nigeria’s Supreme Court pointed out in 2021, Criminal defamation was invented by the ‘Star Chamber” in late Mediaeval England. That is why it has been written out of the law in most states in Nigeria as well as in many more Commonwealth countries.
Another troubling aspect of this saga is the fact that Mr. Farotimi was charged by the Police before a Magistrate Court in Ekiti State on 16 counts of criminal defamation. However, the crime of criminal defamation is unknown to the Ekiti State’s Criminal Law of 2021 which currently spells out the criminal law regime in Ekiti State. It also does not exist in the Criminal Code of Lagos where Mr. Farotimi resides, works, presumably wrote his book, and was abducted from. Our Constitution provides in Section 36(12) that “subject as otherwise provided by this Constitution, a person shall not be convicted of a criminal offence unless that offence is defined and the penalty therefore is prescribed in a written law”. The Nigerian Supreme Court has repeatedly affirmed this canonical provision as the anchor of our criminal jurisprudence, so we are left to wonder under which powers the court in Ekiti presumed to order the remand of Mr. Farotimi. Moreover, the act of charging Mr. Farotimi before the Magistrate Court for a “crime” that the Court clearly did not have jurisdiction to entertain is an abuse of legal processes.
The Police should drop the charges against Mr. Farotimi and he should be immediately released without preconditions. The Attorney General of Ekiti State should step in immediately to officially discontinue the case against Mr. Farotimi if the police do not act fast enough in doing so. All laws that support criminal defamation in Nigeria’s criminal jurisprudence should be immediately repealed and cases initiated under those laws should be struck out by the courts. We need to make the case that our law enforcement agencies need to uphold their constitutional mandate to serve and protect citizens, rather than act as tools for the powerful to silence dissent.
Oluwatoyin Adepoju
Great thanks
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Cornelius Hamelberg
It would seem that rather than acting in good time and pre-emptively, the Nigerian Authorities are now guilty of closing the stable door after the horse has bolted, and the book is now on the shelves.
Hopefully, the Chief Justice / Security Chief is not going to pass a fatwa or put out a contract for the heads of the publishers, the distributors, and maybe even the readers as was the case with Rushdie - a lethal form of literary criticism , according to V.S. Naipaul,” an extreme form of literary criticism”
In our Democratic Sweden, the term is rättssamhälle (https://dictionary.cambridge.org/sv/ordbok/svenska-engelska/rattssamhalle
But Nigeria is not governed by the law of the jungle, and here (in cyberspace) I’m speaking , not as a law expert but as a concerned layman and Pan-Africanist: The big baboon goon tactics are clearly reprehensible - unacceptable.
Surely, they can do better than that, in the name of Democracy, Human Rights, Freedom of Speech etc, but yet, in my opinion, there’s reason for caution, I’d say, not as an apologist, but in the name of what’s often invoked as being in the best interests of State Security - the threat to the integrity of the judiciary - such an important pillar of the executive, that most essential independence and integrity of the judiciary, and especially when we start talking about Separation of Powers, this ought not to be taken lightly. In this case, should the integrity of the Nigerian Judiciary, the very foundation of executive power, be lawfully or unlawfully undermined or sabotaged, it would mean that the whole edifice of executive power is standing on shaky ground
Therefore , in my opinion I’d say that there must be some provision, some legal mechanism whereby for example some of the more dangerous aspects/ parts of Dele Farotimi’s book, ‘Nigeria and its Criminal Justice System “ can be excised
Banning the book itself need not be criminal or undemocratic per se, when you come to think of it, there are many precedents elsewhere - in the Democratic UK ( distinct from Democratic Congo) for example. there was the case of Spycatcher by Peter Wright, a former M15 operative, and the hullabaloo was mostly based on The Official Secrets Act
In Sierra Leone , Ahmad Tejan Kabbah invoked State Security -”seditious libel” in his case against Paul Kamara
We are to suppose that depending on how Defamation is defined by Nigerian law, the Nigerian authorities could also press charges of Seditious Libel - and at least have the book impounded, which of course could result in underground distribution and the book gathering both profit and fame in the Black Market
Cornelius Hamelberg
One wonders what is The Nigerian Bar Association doing about the current state of affairs as outlined by Professor Jibrin Ibrahim, aware that, sadly, no longer with us, is the legal luminary Gani Fawehinmi a man of integrity and a fighter for Justice, who, if he were with us today would have been probably leading the way.
In my opinion ( and here I’m reading rapidly, as I sometimes do, as a detective) and find that there is overwhelming evidence of defamation, even in this article. Indeed, it’s a thorny - and in this case, clearly, just as with a little learning, a dangerous thing, tarring and feathering and ostensibly defaming the ones that Professor Ibrahim has already pronounced “guilty” , although to be fair, it is “a fundamental principle behind the right to a fair trial is that every person should be presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty.”
Drinking deep here would require that the evidence of corruption should be unassailable, since, as you know, His Lordship the Chief Justice of Nigeria and other eminent members of the Judiciary should not take kindly or look favourably on those whose main aim in life is to tarnish their reputation.
( BTW A few days before leaving Nigeria, I had dinner with the Chief Justice of Rivers State ( I had met him at a party that I attended with Senator Francis Ellah’s younger Brother Joe Ellah in my first week in Nigeria - he wanted me to please take a suitcase with me for his cousin in Gothenburg)
“Defaming” some decrepit poetry is quite another order of reality, as the man said, ”criticism is as inevitable breathing” - it’s called literary criticism - it’s much better to ignore the decrepit - a bloody waste of time when you are not yet even done with W.H. Auden . (BTW, I thought that all hell must have broken loose with the publication of In the Closet of the Vatican by Frédéric Martel but up to now it seems he has not had to face charges of libel, slander, character assassination or defamation of character. I asked a Catholic friend about it and he quoted Jesus saying,“ And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.”
Re, “The book gained tremendous traction, reaching a top spot on Amazon’s bestseller list within days of cascading police actions against Mr Farotimi following Mr Babalola’s petition last week.” - apart from giving the country a bad name, is testimony of the extent to which the reputations of the litigants have been tarnished and disparaged - which means that Dele Farotimi could be in plenty of trouble and will probably have to pay some astronomical sums as damages -after the litigants lawyers have deep fried him and have him sizzling in the oil in the witness box, in his upcoming trial.
And if he is subjected to further torture, at least it won’t be as bad as in the first five pages of Mo Yan’s Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out