Justice As The Bedrock Of Democracy In Nigeria (2)

By Ebun-Olu Adegboruwa, SAN

The introductory part of this piece started last week, in
defining the concept of Justice, in the midst of lawyers and other
stakeholders, during the Annual Law Week of the Nigerian Bar
Association, Ibadan Branch. Coined from its ordinary meaning which
is the layer of solid rock below the soil, the Word ‘Bedrock’,
according to the Oxford Advanced dictionary, means the fundamental
principles and ideals on which something is based. Flowing
therefrom, this paper shall conclude that the pursuit of justice
lies at the very heart of democracy. In that the tenets of
democracy dictate that though the majority would have their way,
the minorities must always have their say.

Within the context of the Nigerian state and its multi-plural,
ethnic and religious make-ups, there is the yearning for justice
from different peoples, regions and age-brackets within the
Nigerian state dating back to the Sir Henry Willink Commission and
thereafter the Lyttleton Constitution. This is reasonably so
because democracy is not a vague concept. It is a system that comes
with some expectations from the citizens and where these
expectations are met, one can then talk of justice. The Department
of State of the United States of America beautifully captures the
just and basic expectations of citizens in a democracy thus:

“The legitimacy of democratic institutions derives from an
implicit promise to help everyone achieve their full potential
within society. Fulfilling this promise requires each element of
society to do its part. Individual citizens should vote and
participate in the political process, for example, through
political parties and civil society organizations. They should
respect the rights of others and live their lives under a culture
of lawfulness. They should be prepared to exert the effort
necessary to improve their work skills and those of their children
by supporting and taking advantage of services, such as education,
provided by the state. They should partner with their employers for
mutual economic benefit. And they must bear in mind that democracy
thrives where individual interests are joined by a broad allegiance
to protecting the rights of all and providing for the well-being of
future generations.”
(https://2001-2009.state.gov/p/wha/rls/43521.htm, (retrieved
November 12, 2020).

Similarly, Roland Dworkin, in the Bill of Rights for Britain
1990, at pages 35 – 36 stated thus:

“… True democracy is not just statistical democracy, in which
anything, a majority or plurality wants is legitimate for that
reason, but communal democracy, in which majority decision is
legitimate only when it is a majority decision within a community
of equals. That means not only that everyone must be allowed to
participate in politics as an equal through the vote and though
freedom of speech and protest, but that political decisions must
treat everyone with equal concern and respect, that each individual
person must be guaranteed fundamental civil and political rights no
combination of other citizens can take away, no matter how numerous
they are or how much they despise his or her race or morals or way
of life… It is, in short, a social and political system
characterized by a high degree of personal liberty and equally high
degree of political liberty, manifested in regular and free
competitive elections, protected by a legal system based upon a
constitution, and often articulated by means of federalism.”
Lakoff, S. (1996), Democracy, Boulder, Colo.:Wiseview Press.
(retrieved from
https://intime.uni.edu/tenets-democracy, November 11,
2020).

Consequently, democracy is basically set up to deliver justice
to citizens in a plethora of ways, which we shall briefly highlight
below:

(a) Electoral justice;

(b) Protection of fundamental rights;

(c) Economic justice; and

(d) Judicial justice.

ELECTORAL JUSTICE

The only legal process for hiring and firing
leaders/representatives in a democratic setting is through
elections. This is the only means through which section 14 (2) of
the 1999 Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria (as
amended) can become real and active, when it provides that
“sovereignty belongs to the people of Nigeria from whom government
through this Constitution derives all its powers and authority”.
Consequently, the authority of a state and its governments are
created and sustained by the consent of its people through their
elected representatives. The consent of the people obtained through
free, fair and credible elections, gives legitimacy to the
government in the performance of its functions to the people.
Elections in this context must not be confined to the casting of
ballots on the day of election but the whole gamut of the process,
which usually begins with voters’ registration, primary elections
of the political parties, campaigns/campaign funding, etc, through
to the announcement of winners. The dictum of the learned Jurist,
Omoyele, J.C.A. in the case of ANPP & Anor v. Osiyi & Ors. (2008)
LPELR-3781 (CA) p. 34 is germane on this point thus:

“The word “Election” in the context in which it is used in
Section 137(1) (b) of the 1999 Constitution means, the process of
choosing by popular votes a candidate for political office in a
democratic system of government. The word “Election” is not
restricted to the activities at the polling station on the day of
an election. See the case of: Buhari v. Obasanjo (2005)2 NWLR (Pt.
910) p. 241. The process in an election starts from the voting by
political party members to choose candidates to represent the
political party at the ward level and the primaries up to the
polling day when these political party candidates are presented by
the political party to the electorate. An election covers all the
activities in Part IV of the Electoral Act, 2006 from Sections 26
to 77.”

Thus, any act which compromises any of the stages of the
election is electoral injustice. It is electoral injustice where
party structures are hijacked by money-bag politicians who foist
their anointed candidates on the party. It is electoral injustice
on the Nigerian people where the sanctity of the ballot is
compromised by the electoral umpire, in concert with security
collaborators and a particular political party. It is electoral
injustice where the wishes of the people are truncated by judgments
from the courts. It is electoral injustice on the Nigerian people
for the government of President Buhari to refuse to sign the
amended Electoral Act, which would give legal teeth to full
deployment of technology in our electoral process. These issues
deserve serious introspection if Nigeria must deliver a democracy,
where justice is pivotal.

PROTECTION OF FUNDAMENTAL RIGHTS OF
CITIZENS

It is the legitimate expectation of citizens in a democracy that
justice would be served by their governments, through the
protection of their fundamental rights, at all times. The United
Nations General Assembly High-level Meeting on the Rule of Law,
held on September 24, 2010 declared thus:

“Human rights, the rule of law and democracy are interlinked and
mutually reinforcing and that they belong to the universal and
indivisible core values and principles of the United Nations”
Indeed, government responsiveness to the interests and needs of the
greatest number of citizens is strictly associated with the
capacity of democratic institutions and processes to bolster the
dimensions of rights, equality and accountability.”

The above declaration captures the essence of protecting the
fundamental rights of citizens in a democracy. Thankfully, the
Nigerian Constitution has also attached the needed importance to
same, with its devotion of a whole chapter i.e. Chapter IV, for
this purpose. This is an important function of law in a democratic
society. For in the absence of law mechanism in this regard,
society slides to the Hobessian state where might is right and
where life is nasty, short and brutish, in the words of the English
philosopher Thomas Hobbes. One cannot talk of justice in any
democracy, where the rights of the citizens are trampled upon by
the government they have “elected” to serve them. It is an act of
injustice where the forces of state are deployed in an
irresponsible manner to repress dissenting voices and foist fear in
the minds of the people; for as attributed to Thomas Jefferson:
“When government fears the people there is liberty, when the people
fear the government, there is tyranny.” It is thus no more
democracy, where citizens cannot ‘SOROSOKE’ against the ills of
society.

ECONOMIC JUSTICE

In his description of this concept, Tom Kibasi, former director
of the Institute of Public Policy Research, London in his article
titled “What is Economic Justice and why does it matter”, defined
economic justice thus:

“Economic justice is the idea that the economy will be more
successful if it is fairer: that prosperity and justice go
hand-in-hand rather than in opposition to one
another.”(https://www.newstatesman.com/politics, accessed November
25, 2020.)

Economic justice encompasses the following:

i. Establishment of a thriving economy that produces sustainable
growth and increases the prosperity of the people. It involves
creating viable opportunities where people who work hard can derive
great output for their sweat in a sustainable manner. It is about
an economy that is skewed towards dispensing the benefits of growth
in the economy to the people, which in turn leads to a virtuous
circle of prosperity.

ii. Another element of economic justice is the just
re-distribution of wealth in the society, putting into
consideration the demography of age groups, region, sex and other
indices in the economy. For as Tim Kibasi cited earlier puts
it:

“Research from the IMF shows that redistributing income from the
richest to the poorest in society, actually boosts growth because
poorer people are more likely to spend in the economy (a higher
“marginal propensity to consume”). This flies in the face of the
free market ideologies who have long claimed that inequality is the
price paid for efficiency: that those at the top need to be
disproportionately rewarded as ‘wealth creators’.”

iii. Economic justice also projects fair distribution of the
wealth of that economy across all generations i.e. the present and
future generations. That is the purport of what is captured in the
SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals), which defines sustainable
development as “the development that meets the needs of the present
without compromising the ability of future generations to meet
their own needs.”

It is thus a clear mark of economic injustice, for the
government and people of this generation, to deplete the
environment in an irresponsible manner through indiscriminate waste
disposal and non-adherence to building master-plans in urban
settlements, continue gas-flaring unabatedly and to keep
accumulating loans from developed countries, which are thereafter
deployed for servicing recurrent expenditures of governments and
heaping for the future generations, unnecessary burden of
re-payment of these kinds of loans. That certainly does not accord
with the concept of Justice that we all dream of.

Life without Christ is Crisis

By Ebun-Olu Adegboruwa, SAN

The introductory part of this piece started last week, in
defining the concept of Justice, in the midst of lawyers and other
stakeholders, during the Annual Law Week of the Nigerian Bar
Association, Ibadan Branch. Coined from its ordinary meaning which
is the layer of solid rock below the soil, the Word ‘Bedrock’,
according to the Oxford Advanced dictionary, means the fundamental
principles and ideals on which something is based. Flowing
therefrom, this paper shall conclude that the pursuit of justice
lies at the very heart of democracy. In that the tenets of
democracy dictate that though the majority would have their way,
the minorities must always have their say.

Within the context of the Nigerian state and its multi-plural,
ethnic and religious make-ups, there is the yearning for justice
from different peoples, regions and age-brackets within the
Nigerian state dating back to the Sir Henry Willink Commission and
thereafter the Lyttleton Constitution. This is reasonably so
because democracy is not a vague concept. It is a system that comes
with some expectations from the citizens and where these
expectations are met, one can then talk of justice. The Department
of State of the United States of America beautifully captures the
just and basic expectations of citizens in a democracy thus:

“The legitimacy of democratic institutions derives from an
implicit promise to help everyone achieve their full potential
within society. Fulfilling this promise requires each element of
society to do its part. Individual citizens should vote and
participate in the political process, for example, through
political parties and civil society organizations. They should
respect the rights of others and live their lives under a culture
of lawfulness. They should be prepared to exert the effort
necessary to improve their work skills and those of their children
by supporting and taking advantage of services, such as education,
provided by the state. They should partner with their employers for
mutual economic benefit. And they must bear in mind that democracy
thrives where individual interests are joined by a broad allegiance
to protecting the rights of all and providing for the well-being of
future generations.”
(https://2001-2009.state.gov/p/wha/rls/43521.htm, (retrieved
November 12, 2020).

Similarly, Roland Dworkin, in the Bill of Rights for Britain
1990, at pages 35 – 36 stated thus:

“… True democracy is not just statistical democracy, in which
anything, a majority or plurality wants is legitimate for that
reason, but communal democracy, in which majority decision is
legitimate only when it is a majority decision within a community
of equals. That means not only that everyone must be allowed to
participate in politics as an equal through the vote and though
freedom of speech and protest, but that political decisions must
treat everyone with equal concern and respect, that each individual
person must be guaranteed fundamental civil and political rights no
combination of other citizens can take away, no matter how numerous
they are or how much they despise his or her race or morals or way
of life… It is, in short, a social and political system
characterized by a high degree of personal liberty and equally high
degree of political liberty, manifested in regular and free
competitive elections, protected by a legal system based upon a
constitution, and often articulated by means of federalism.”
Lakoff, S. (1996), Democracy, Boulder, Colo.:Wiseview Press.
(retrieved from
https://intime.uni.edu/tenets-democracy, November 11,
2020).

Consequently, democracy is basically set up to deliver justice
to citizens in a plethora of ways, which we shall briefly highlight
below:

(a) Electoral justice;

(b) Protection of fundamental rights;

(c) Economic justice; and

(d) Judicial justice.

ELECTORAL JUSTICE

The only legal process for hiring and firing
leaders/representatives in a democratic setting is through
elections. This is the only means through which section 14 (2) of
the 1999 Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria (as
amended) can become real and active, when it provides that
“sovereignty belongs to the people of Nigeria from whom government
through this Constitution derives all its powers and authority”.
Consequently, the authority of a state and its governments are
created and sustained by the consent of its people through their
elected representatives. The consent of the people obtained through
free, fair and credible elections, gives legitimacy to the
government in the performance of its functions to the people.
Elections in this context must not be confined to the casting of
ballots on the day of election but the whole gamut of the process,
which usually begins with voters’ registration, primary elections
of the political parties, campaigns/campaign funding, etc, through
to the announcement of winners. The dictum of the learned Jurist,
Omoyele, J.C.A. in the case of ANPP & Anor v. Osiyi & Ors. (2008)
LPELR-3781 (CA) p. 34 is germane on this point thus:

“The word “Election” in the context in which it is used in
Section 137(1) (b) of the 1999 Constitution means, the process of
choosing by popular votes a candidate for political office in a
democratic system of government. The word “Election” is not
restricted to the activities at the polling station on the day of
an election. See the case of: Buhari v. Obasanjo (2005)2 NWLR (Pt.
910) p. 241. The process in an election starts from the voting by
political party members to choose candidates to represent the
political party at the ward level and the primaries up to the
polling day when these political party candidates are presented by
the political party to the electorate. An election covers all the
activities in Part IV of the Electoral Act, 2006 from Sections 26
to 77.”

Thus, any act which compromises any of the stages of the
election is electoral injustice. It is electoral injustice where
party structures are hijacked by money-bag politicians who foist
their anointed candidates on the party. It is electoral injustice
on the Nigerian people where the sanctity of the ballot is
compromised by the electoral umpire, in concert with security
collaborators and a particular political party. It is electoral
injustice where the wishes of the people are truncated by judgments
from the courts. It is electoral injustice on the Nigerian people
for the government of President Buhari to refuse to sign the
amended Electoral Act, which would give legal teeth to full
deployment of technology in our electoral process. These issues
deserve serious introspection if Nigeria must deliver a democracy,
where justice is pivotal.

PROTECTION OF FUNDAMENTAL RIGHTS OF
CITIZENS

It is the legitimate expectation of citizens in a democracy that
justice would be served by their governments, through the
protection of their fundamental rights, at all times. The United
Nations General Assembly High-level Meeting on the Rule of Law,
held on September 24, 2010 declared thus:

“Human rights, the rule of law and democracy are interlinked and
mutually reinforcing and that they belong to the universal and
indivisible core values and principles of the United Nations”
Indeed, government responsiveness to the interests and needs of the
greatest number of citizens is strictly associated with the
capacity of democratic institutions and processes to bolster the
dimensions of rights, equality and accountability.”

The above declaration captures the essence of protecting the
fundamental rights of citizens in a democracy. Thankfully, the
Nigerian Constitution has also attached the needed importance to
same, with its devotion of a whole chapter i.e. Chapter IV, for
this purpose. This is an important function of law in a democratic
society. For in the absence of law mechanism in this regard,
society slides to the Hobessian state where might is right and
where life is nasty, short and brutish, in the words of the English
philosopher Thomas Hobbes. One cannot talk of justice in any
democracy, where the rights of the citizens are trampled upon by
the government they have “elected” to serve them. It is an act of
injustice where the forces of state are deployed in an
irresponsible manner to repress dissenting voices and foist fear in
the minds of the people; for as attributed to Thomas Jefferson:
“When government fears the people there is liberty, when the people
fear the government, there is tyranny.” It is thus no more
democracy, where citizens cannot ‘SOROSOKE’ against the ills of
society.

ECONOMIC JUSTICE

In his description of this concept, Tom Kibasi, former director
of the Institute of Public Policy Research, London in his article
titled “What is Economic Justice and why does it matter”, defined
economic justice thus:

“Economic justice is the idea that the economy will be more
successful if it is fairer: that prosperity and justice go
hand-in-hand rather than in opposition to one
another.”(https://www.newstatesman.com/politics, accessed November
25, 2020.)

Economic justice encompasses the following:

i. Establishment of a thriving economy that produces sustainable
growth and increases the prosperity of the people. It involves
creating viable opportunities where people who work hard can derive
great output for their sweat in a sustainable manner. It is about
an economy that is skewed towards dispensing the benefits of growth
in the economy to the people, which in turn leads to a virtuous
circle of prosperity.

ii. Another element of economic justice is the just
re-distribution of wealth in the society, putting into
consideration the demography of age groups, region, sex and other
indices in the economy. For as Tim Kibasi cited earlier puts
it:

“Research from the IMF shows that redistributing income from the
richest to the poorest in society, actually boosts growth because
poorer people are more likely to spend in the economy (a higher
“marginal propensity to consume”). This flies in the face of the
free market ideologies who have long claimed that inequality is the
price paid for efficiency: that those at the top need to be
disproportionately rewarded as ‘wealth creators’.”

iii. Economic justice also projects fair distribution of the
wealth of that economy across all generations i.e. the present and
future generations. That is the purport of what is captured in the
SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals), which defines sustainable
development as “the development that meets the needs of the present
without compromising the ability of future generations to meet
their own needs.”

It is thus a clear mark of economic injustice, for the
government and people of this generation, to deplete the
environment in an irresponsible manner through indiscriminate waste
disposal and non-adherence to building master-plans in urban
settlements, continue gas-flaring unabatedly and to keep
accumulating loans from developed countries, which are thereafter
deployed for servicing recurrent expenditures of governments and
heaping for the future generations, unnecessary burden of
re-payment of these kinds of loans. That certainly does not accord
with the concept of Justice that we all dream of.

Life without Christ is Crisis