Emefiele: Nigeria’s legal system on litigation

Justice assurances fairness, equity and leads to freedom and prosperity. With justice, standards, due processes, and methods are diligently followed and observed. With this, security, peace, calmness, and orderliness are substantially achieved.

Sadly, what we have witnessed in the suspended governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, CBN, Mr. Godwin Emefiele’s case, is a departure from what real justice as expounded by the country’s judicial system and its legal framework, should be.

In other words, the question ought to be asked: Is Emefiele facing prosecution or persecution? This question has become imperative given the fact that the Nigerian system is at war with itself, thereby encouraging and promoting illegality and outright contravention of what ought to be.

Simply put, Emefiele’s case cannot be treated in complete or comprehensive isolation, about all related files.

The former governor of the CBN cannot, without lawful cause be treated like a common thief.

Remarkably, the sordid story of the fraud called Nigeria Air could not be left unattended to by the relevant anti-graft agencies, including the Department of State Services, DSS, while Emefiele is being harangued or harassed.

Recall that the immediate past officials of the Ministry of Aviation staged a national scam in which they blindfolded the entire nation and the entire world through the fraud called Nigeria Air.  Without due process and disregarding pleas by aviation experts and the Airline Operators of Nigeria, AON, insisted on their idea of the Nigeria Air project, which has brought international disgrace to the country.

When the fraudulent project of reviving the national carrier was initiated, the AON used a Federal High Court in Lagos to stop it by obtaining an injunction in November 2022. Hampered by the injunction, which prohibited the Ministry of Aviation from going on with the illegal idea of launching a new national carrier, officials of the ministry, on three consecutive occasions in March, April, and Early May 2023, boasted that the launch would go ahead.

Nigerians of good conscience were shocked when on May 24, 2023, the then Minister of Aviation, Hadi Sirika, on Channels TV, contended that despite the court order against him and the ministry, a new aircraft belonging to Nigeria Air, would land in the country on May 26, just three days to the expiration of the administration he was serving as minister.

Edited by Damilola Adeleke