By Okechukwu Keshi Ukegbu
Late fiery human rights activist, Gani Fawehinmi aptly captured how selective dispensation of justice, especially those involving corruption is. “When the poor, the lowly and the weak transgress the law of the land, the fullest weight of the law through its punitive mechanism, is crushingly brought to bear on them; but when the powerful, the mighty and the rich offend the laws of the nation, they do so without the wildest punitive reaction of the enforcers and dispensers of the law.”
What we have succeeded raising are super personalities. Whether super cops, super politicians, or what have you. Some schools of thought have advanced solutions to corruption. They proffer that government ought to take decisive steps and impose stiff punishment on corruption, especially on top public servants. The position suggests that in the execution of the policy, any public servant who is proved to have compromised his status by receiving inducement should be dismissed from office and barred from holding any public office. The measure further suggested is the forfeiture of their property to the state. The second suggestion is that government should re-examine the present laws on corruption that exist in our statute books, with a view to reflecting what the appropriate consequence of either giving or receiving inducement of any sort ought to be.
But countries that have succeeded or seemed to have succeeded in fighting corruption or checking excesses of public officials have done that through the robust application of Rule of Law.
According to John Locke, “freedom in society means being subject only to laws made by a legislature that apply to everyone, with a person being otherwise free from both governmental and private restrictions upon liberty.”
Rule of law implies that every person is subject to the law, including lawmakers, law enforcement officials, and judges. Rule of Law opposes autocracy, dictatorship, or oligarchy: where the rulers are held above the law. It is further opined that, “lack of rule of law can be found in both democracies and dictatorships, for example, because of neglect or ignorance of the law, and the rule of law is more apt to decay if a government has insufficient corrective mechanisms for restoring it.”
The rule of law did not spare President Richard Nixon of United States during the Watergate scandal of 1973. It was the strict observance of the rule of law that forced him out of office in 1974.
The same fate befell the vice-president in 1973, when he was convicted and imprisoned for false tax declaration. Robust application of the rule of law did not shield Augusto Pinochet of Chile for series of murders he committed between 1973 and 1990, when he held sway as head of state. The same applied to Carlos Menen of Argentina, Abubakar Waheed, ex-president of Indonesia, former president of Philippine, Joseph Estrada, and Jonathan Aitken, a powerful minister of state in Britain. The same applied to a former deputy leader of Britain’s Conservative Party and millionaire, Jeffrey Archer.
The same rule of law provoked investigations in Germany into alleged illegal funding of the party of Helmut Kohl, long-serving German chancellor. In India, the strict application of rule of law enabled the Indians to jail their former prime minister, PV Narasimha Rao and his deputy, Bunta Singh on September, 29, 2000 for bribery and corruption.
They got three years imprisonment. A former General and head of state in Bangladesh was not spared. Neither did application of rule of law by the International Criminal Court at The Hague spare Slobadan Milosevic, a former president of Yugoslavia who was tried for murder before the war crimes.
On this note, a government that demonstrates tendencies of shielding powerful members of its cabinet or influential private individuals who have strong affiliations with it, is either paying lip service to such fight or deceiving the people. Also, the anti-corruption drive must not be portrayed as being selective. The sledge-hammer that was used in killing a fly must also be employed in murdering an elephant.
