Former Minister of Education, Dr. Oby Ezekwesili says the average man in Nigeria no longer believes the age-long slogan that judiciary is the last hope of the common man.
Speaking in an exclusive interview with News Central, Ezekwesili said the judiciary in Nigeria today is a complete departure of the days of military rule in Nigeria when the likes of Justice Kayode Esho, Chukwudifu Oputa and others held sway.
“I don’t think any Nigerian common man believes that slogan anymore. I think we underestimate what our variant of politics has done to us as a people”.
“We have had a political system and process that basically has enabled the worst amongst us to bubble up to the top and control the infrastructures of governance. So, what has happened is that the judiciary has not in anyway been fortunate to stand in integrity”.
“The judiciary that you and I knew when we were growing up were people of the likes of Justice Kayode Esho, Justice Adefarasin, Justice Oputa. They just stood out. They knew what to expect even though you and I grew under military rule. We still know that these justices, they had no time for any kind of bad behaviour; they were not enablers of bad behaviour”.
“What then has happened over time with our political process is that the more banditry we saw within the process of our democracy, the more entry into it raised a very strong barrier against a certain quality thought and pedigree. So, we have what I frankly called a criminal enterprise gang that the first thing they did was assault all the systems of governance so that they could capture the state. The politicians are the criminal enterprise gangs. We need to admit it”.
Speaking further, Ezekwesili said the country is in a state-capture situation orchestrated by politicians who have mastered manipulating governance structures to serve their interests.
“The first thing they did was to assault all the systems of governance to capture the state. So we’re in a state capture situation,” Ezekwesili said, emphasising that Nigeria’s political problems are not tied to any particular party but to a deeply entrenched political class.
”Take each of the prominent Nigerian politicians and map their user journey in terms of which political affiliations they have had since the dawn of our democracy, and you would find that you can’t place them, you can’t put them in some ideological platform because they don’t have any.”
Ezekwesili said the sexual allegations saga rocking the Nigerian Senate is “one of the saddest things that we have seen in our democracy, to have witnessed in the last couple of days what I called democratic aberration, that the Senate, being the upper House of our parliament has engaged itself in”.
