El-Zakzaky goes home at last
By Tunji Adegboyega
Let El-Zakzaky go”. That was the message that Justice Gideon Kurada of Kaduna High Court sent on Wednesday when he upheld the no-case submission of the leader of the Islamic Movement in Nigeria (IMN), Sheikh Ibrahim El-Zakzaky and his wife, Zeenat, on the charges levelled against them by the Kaduna State government and consequently discharged and acquitted them. The court ruled that the state government failed to establish a prima facie case against the couple. El-Zakzaky and his wife were arraigned in May, 2018, on an eight-count charge bordering on culpable homicide, unlawful assembly, disruption of public peace, among others. The couple had pleaded not guilty to the charges. Yet they had been in detention since December 2015.
Lead counsel to the defendants, Femi Falana, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN), had told the court that none of the 15 witnesses called by the prosecution established any connection between the alleged crimes and his clients and prayed the court to dismiss the charges. Last Wednesday’s judgment supported this view.
Although journalists were barred from covering the judgment, an elated IMN spokesman, Ibrahim Musa, told journalists after the judgment that “With this victory in court today, the false charges filed against them have finally been punctured for good after almost five years of excruciating illegal detention.”
Without doubt, the victory again highlighted the reign of impunity unleashed on Kaduna State by its governor, Mallam Nasir El-Rufai. The law under which El-Zakzaky was tried was apparently customised, as it had to take retroactive effect to achieve its objective. What the court did was to throw that law in the trash bin, at least as far as El-Zakzaky’s case was concerned. According to Falana, “The court found that the charges filed in 2018 pursuant to the Penal law enacted by the state government in 2017 were over an alleged offence committed in 2015. The court, presided by Justice Gideon Kurada, held that the charge was not supposed to be filed in the first place, as the government cannot arraign someone for a said crime that was not an offence at the time.” What Governor El-Rufai did in essence only gives him out as a graduate of the then General Buhari’s ‘College of Retroactive Laws’. We should recall that the Buhari/Idiagbon military regime also promulgated a decree with retroactive effect in the 1980s. It is gratifying that the court has demonstrated that Nigeria may not be there yet in terms of human rights, rule of law and all that; at least we have passed the stage where people would be punished based on the whims and caprices that informed El-Rufai’s 2017 Penal law.
The unfortunate thing in this matter is that El-Zakzaky is just being made the beast of burden for a problem created by the northern oligarchy. The truth in this case, indeed as with most other tendencies that are now manifesting in the north, is that whatever El-Zakzaky is thought to be, or actually is, has its roots in the actions and inactions of that oligarchy. If El-Zakzaky is able to recruit the hundreds of thousands of followers that he controls in that part of the country, it is because of what the northern elite had allowed over centuries; in the name of religion and culture. How would people give birth to children only to go and dump them with alfas and imams without providing funds for the upkeep of those children? Where did they expect the religious leaders to get funds to cater to the needs of those children? Naturally, the religious leaders in turn resort to sending them to the streets to go beg for alms when they should be in school. It’s a long story which is all too familiar to be fully retold in a time like this, but which we still must always bring to remembrance when discussing such topic. The irony of it all is that while the northern elite play games with the poor people’s children, they take time to get their own children the best of education, home and abroad. How they ever thought they would continue to deceive the poor in the name of culture and religion in perpetuity is bewildering. Some of us have always had cause to warn that these children that the elite have chosen not to train (read educate) will someday come to haunt them. Unfortunately, those children are not just haunting them, they are haunting the entire country today. Yet, every part of the country has always got money from the centre in the better part of our post-independence era, with the north having the lion’s share because of its huge population. The question now is; what has the northern oligarchy done with that lion’s share of money that they have been collecting as a matter of entitlement, because of that huge population? If they had utilised those funds to educate the children on whose behalf they have been collecting the lion’s share, people like El-Zakzaky would not have the thousands, if not millions, of the ignoramuses that they recruit because those ones would know their right from their left and thus be better armed to reject fallacies being coated in religious garbs.
Obviously El-Zakzaky is being treated the way he is, despite being a respected Muslim cleric, and a northerner, to boot, because of his brand of Islam (Shiite Movement). Nigeria’s northern elites largely belong to the Sunni sect. So, it is not all the time about ethnicity or even Mohammedanism in the north. Were the matter that simplistic, El-Zakzaky may not only be walking the streets free, he, probably like Sheikh Ahmad Gumi, be doing all manner of things, including being an authority liaising with bandits and terrorists and advising the government on the way out for them. What I am saying is that; even in the north, you must not only be religiously correct, you must be correct sect-wise, too. So, just as I said last week, some of these ‘wars’ ostensibly being fought in the national interest are mere extensions of personal or other group interests having nothing to with the health and wellbeing of the nation.
If you doubt this; just ask yourself how is El-Zakzaky’s IMN worse than other Islamic groups that have kept on terrorising the nation, even as the man has been in incarceration for about five years? How are his teachings more ‘poisonous’ than those of many others who are fraternising with those in power? We know of a minister who had expressed support for terrorism in the past but he is still sitting pretty in office because they said that was when he was blind; that now, he can see! Daily, we keep witnessing terrorists being handed amnesty on a platter and being asked to go but sin no more. Yet, the government insisted on keeping El-Zakzaky behind bars.
Perhaps what the governments that have made this possible do not understand is the spiritual dimension to some of these might-is-right decisions. Many governments in the country are not doing well, no doubt. But both the Federal Government and the El-Rufai Kaduna State government have been in the news almost in perpetuity for the wrong reasons. It is not all the time that you punish someone unfairly (at least unfairly to the extent that there are others like him, or probably worse than him that are untouchable) that you don’t have consequences, almost always negative. Only a few days ago, President Muhammadu Buhari was reported to have said he is doing his best for the country. Perhaps he should look in the direction of some of these multiple standards for reasons why his best is not good enough for the country. There could be spiritual dimensions to it. I am not saying El-Zakzaky is a saint; but the point I am making is that there are other religious and probably political leaders with worse indoctrinations than his that are enjoying government cover. Is that not the reason we keep engaging in needless debates over certain acts being mere banditry and others, terrorism; neither of which is visited with the desired state might that could have nipped them in the bud, in spite of the needless hair-splitting on their definitions?
But we must commend the Shiites for their near-absolute resolve to follow the process through to this end, despite having lost about 347 of their members in the course of the crisis. As human rights lawyer, and Director, Centre for Labour Studies (CLS), Femi Aborisade, said, the judgment is victory over tyranny. “The judicial victory has established the innocence of Zakzaky and his wife on the false accusations levelled against them. The judicial victory has vindicated the Shiites Movement in Nigeria who courageously defied all menacing vicious repression by security agents and continued to protest peacefully for the release of Zakzaky and his wife.”
We must also commend the judiciary for finding the law for the weak (apologies to the Late Chief Gani Fawehinmi) in the El-Zakzaky case. With this judgment, El-Zakzaky’s enemies should have realised the limits of raw or naked power. They should imagine the humiliation they will go through when they leave power when, even in government, they keep failing in their bid to define governance in their own narrow, parochial and authoritarian perspectives. If you pursue a man with all the might and force of power this far and keep getting floored by him, the sensible thing to do is to beat a retreat, silently leak your wounds and set him free. (Ta ba leni, ta o ba ni, a dehin leyin eni). This trite Yoruba saying aptly summarises El-Zakzaky’s recent experiences in the hands of both the Federal Government and the Kaduna State government that lost in this matter which is obviously more political than legal.
It is gratifying that a man who had been denied the opportunity of enjoying bail several times has finally regained his freedom. One of such occasions was on December 2, 2016, when the Federal High Court in Abuja ordered El-Zakzaky and his wife released from detention as their continued incarceration violated their rights. It also ordered the government to pay him N50million compensation. For want of anything reasonable to say, the Federal Government had said then that El-Zakzaky was under protective custody; in other words, that he was being kept by the government in his own interest.
Whereas it should not take more than 48 hours (two days) for any person detained to be arraigned in court, it took the Federal Government two years to get El-Zakzaky a hearing in court. Agape love indeed!
The more those in power in the country are made to realise that the days of might as right are gone for good, the better. It is the same thing they want to export abroad, impunity; when they should be exporting agricultural products with value added to get money. And when those outside turn them down, they want to make that look like a crime against Nigeria. Just the same way they treat us at home.
El-Zakzaky should press for compensation from those who incarcerated him unjustly. That is how best to draw the curtain on the unjust treatment.
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