Yusuf Olaolu Alli, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria, SAN, is one of the few senior legal practitioners in Nigeria, who have crisscrossed the whole country, doing what he knows how to do best. Alli became a Senior Advocate of Nigeria in 1997, barely three years after establishing his Ilorin-based lawfirm, Ghalib Chambers. His brilliance, exceptional contributions to legal discourse and practice catapulted him to the rank of Senior Advocate within a short time. His grasp and understanding of Nigeria’s electoral laws has earned him several high profile cases and accolades, as he is always sought after by politicians across political parties, to handle their electoral petitions. This has taken him to several parts of the country. It was, therefore, no surprise that he is presently a key member of President Muhammadu Buhari’s legal team. The team successfully defended the mandate given to the president during this year’s election at the Presidential Election Petition Tribunal. The battle line has now shifted to the Supreme Court, following the decision of Atiku Abubakar, the candidate of the opposition party, the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, to appeal the decision of the tribunal. In this interview with AYODELE OLALERE, the legal luminary bared his mind on the level of corruption and insecurity in the country, and warned that if something urgent is not done to curtail it, Nigeria might be heading into extinction.
You have taken part in several election petition cases. What have your experiences been like?
I have taken part in many of these election petitions since 1998 till now and it is very demanding. You must be on the go all the time, especially for some of us who are lucky to get briefed in more than one case. But one thing I’ve enjoyed thoroughly out of it is that it has assisted one to empower other colleagues professionally and otherwise, by constituting different teams to appear with you in cases and the like. For me, that humanistic service is very important.
In election petition, the rules and the dynamics are still the same and the one thing that is quite apparent is that apart from the names of candidates, I don’t see any difference between any of the parties and the personnel involved. The fluidity of movement from one party to the other makes it clear that apart from names, the parties and those who are involved are still the same on every imaginable divide. For example, those who were in PDP are APC members now and vice versa so they are still the same set of people.
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The challenge with election petitions, however, is that it is not as lucrative as people think it is in terms of payment of fees. Our politicians, for reasons I don’t know have, come to believe that the work of lawyers is not as important in election petitions. I wouldn’t know what has informed such belief but most times, it is either they agree to the fees which they won’t later fulfill, or something else comes up.
Corruption has eaten deep into our system such that many Nigerians believe it can never be eradicated. What is your view?
Nigeria is the only country I know where corruption has ethnicity and religion. If a Yoruba man accuses a non-Yoruba person of being corrupt, it is strictly in the prism of tribalism. If a Christian says a Muslim is corrupt, it is immediately seen as a religious issue. We leave the substance and pursue the shadow. Nobody will ever try to look into the allegation and see if it is likely to be true. No, we would rather focus on who says it and not on what he has said. So, this is our country and if we don’t change, it is quite unfortunate.
When people even say we’ll pray to God, I hold the view that God doesn’t have time for unserious people like us. He is busy attending to serious people elsewhere. These are problems that God Himself has given us brains to solve so why should we still be saying it is God? If a person steals in America or the UK, nobody says “God will catch him.” God won’t catch anybody because He has given you the brain to go and work and solve.
Going by the recent cases where the government seemed not to have obeyed court orders and followed rule of law, there are insinuations that judges have been cowed and afraid to enforce court judgments. Lawyers have also been accused of succumbing to intimidation by the government. Do you share the same view?
It is a perception and it is clear that you either don’t see the things that are supposed to operate or they are not even there. Apart from judicial integrity you also need judicial courage because you must have courage to express your convictions. But you see, there is lack of courage in every facet of our lives. In the good old days, when people hear the sound of thieves in their houses, they would come out to defend and protect their neighbors. But now, when such happens, everybody would take to their heels. So, that tells you where we’re coming from. It is symptomatic of the problem we have as a country.
However, I don’t think we lawyers are intimidated because the only thing we can do is to speak out. And I think we’ve been speaking out. It’s only few people that would really speak out in any society. For me, I think that the best thing we can do as lawyers is to speak out against or in favor of anything we feel strongly about and I think we’ve been doing our piece in that regard. But it would have been better if we had more people who know the exact direction our country should go and are also ready to offer opinions about it.
You are close to the seat of power being a member of President Muhammadu Buhari’s legal team at the tribunal. Was there any occasion you have had the privilege to speak truth to those in government?
In my own little way, those who know me know what I stand for and I don’t hide my views. People know that I cherish integrity, anti-corruption, saying the truth and, of course, I like being a good neighbour. I’ve said at times that our situation has gotten to a point where speaking out now may be akin to trying to speak to the deaf and dumb and that I’m not going to be wasting my time anymore. I will take care of my own little corner of the world, do and act rightly, behave correctly and generally try to ensure that I keep my environment the way I think is proper for good environment to be kept in terms of where I operate from and that is very important for me. I always say that if every person keeps his own corner clean, the whole street would become clean and the same applies with the country as a whole.
Banditry and kidnapping is on the increase. Many of the killings, especially in the South-west have been attributed to the Fulani herdsmen. How do we solve these problems, especially the security issue?
If you’re looking at symptoms and you don’t look at the root cause, there is a problem. Why we are where we are, I think should be the starting point. You can’t offer palliatives to a person with a terminal disease; palliatives can never solve the problem of a terminally ill person.
This kidnapping issue, for example, I have said it that we shouldn’t be wasting time. Let us deploy drones with the capacity to take photographs and there would be a control center somewhere so that the pictures taken are transmitted immediately. That way, if there is a crisis, we would know better how to handle it. But we still believe when there are crises, we send the police to mount roadblocks everywhere whereas right behind them something else would be happening. The world has gone far beyond this Stone Age and amateur security maneuvering.
When someone steals in the United States, how are they caught? It is the CCTV. The CCTV we have in Abuja has not been functioning. Nobody has ever asked questions on who did those things that are not working or on how much of our money had been swept into it. No questions are asked, we just behave as if nothing has gone wrong. So, with that kind of problem, do you think it would amount to anything tangible for one to start making noise about it when nobody listens?
The way forward is to ensure first of all that we have a correct diagnosis of what the problem is, before we start to apply medication. I delivered a paper in KWASU (Kwara State University) about a year ago about this herdsmen issue and I said look, we all grew up in this country, we all knew that the highest thing the ordinary herdsman would hold would be a cutlass, but now, we suddenly have herdsmen carrying AK47. You see, we are fixated people; once we see that a problem is caused by something, we hardly take out time to do proper investigation or inquiries as to why and whether it is the same problem or another one. I think we should dig deeper as to what is going on.
High levels of unemployment, illiteracy and ignorance are a problem too. Exacerbation of divisive things; ethnic, religious and economic wise is also a problem. The followers look up to their leaders. So, when they see that their leaders are insincere, they believe they don’t have an obligation to be patriotic. So, there are a lot of issues surrounding all the problems confronting our country and they must be properly addressed. When there are able bodied men who believe that there is no future, a hopeless person can do just anything. A lot of Nigerians are hopeless and when you are hopeless, nothing counts for anything to you, not even human lives. So, we must take a holistic view of all these things, do a thorough identification of what the issues are, and then proceed to proffer solutions. Something as simple as the supply of electricity has a lot to do with security as well as a lot of security implications. A well-lit street is not likely to harbor miscreants but a dark place is a good place for men who plot evil to hide.
The poverty level is also on the increase as many Nigerians now live in abject poverty…
(Cuts in) Poverty has no ethnic or tribal boundaries. It has no colour. The discovery of oil made us to forget that there are other things and because we have an attitude of liking easy things, we have forgotten that easy come, easy go. Our sense of diversification of the economy didn’t come because there was easy money which at the end of the month people could go to the center and get. I have said several times that as long as the only thing we do is revenue allocation and monies are shared every month, we won’t make much progress because it promotes indolence and lack of accountability. It promotes all the bad things you can imagine.
In other serious countries, you don’t hear of people going to the center to distribute money and things at the end of the month. You work for the money through taxes. Ours is a different story and that’s why we’re reaping what we sowed. In the first republic when we were largely dependent on produce and the regional governments were paying taxes to the Federal for maintenance, there was more accountability, more seriousness and there was a thriftier spending of money. But when free money came and it became so easy to get, we all lost our sense of moderation.
But government has been blamed for the high rate of poverty in the country.
You see, I’ve said it often that as a people, the followers determine the type of leaders they get. In other parts of the world too, their leaders do not say that they would do well, but they know the followers would not allow them to do otherwise. But here, anything goes and we’re even our own worst enemies. What we do to ourselves is worse than what the government does to us. In other parts of the world for example, when festive seasons approach, prices of food would come down so that it would be affordable for everybody. But here, on our own, we hike the prices just to make sure that we maximize our own profits to the detriment of the people. So what can a person do about such level of wickedness?
It is the people who determine the direction of their government. It is as simple as that. That majorly underscores the point I have made. When Nigerians decide that they’ve had enough of everything going on, the leaders won’t have any other choice than to follow suit and give the people what they want. We still have corruption and all these problems because we all love it and we don’t care. But the day we begin to care and the leaders realise that we as a people would not accept such misbehaviour or lack of behaviour, there would be changes.
Let’s restore all the good things of the past that made the rest of the world to respect us like hard work, integrity, honesty, good neighbourliness and empathy. These are things that our forebears had and the world respected them for. Let’s do less or do away with the worship of materialism, less of undermining institutions, less of the “me and my family alone” mentality. Let us know that if you or members of your family are well fed and go to bed satisfied and your neighbours are hungry, you are in danger.
Many Nigerians no longer have faith in the judiciary. They believe justice is for the highest bidders and that lawyers and judges compromise a lot. Can we ever have a trustworthy judiciary?
It is depressing because you see, for some of us who believe that cases should be won or lost on the basis of facts and law, it is depressing to hear that something other than that contributes to the winning or losing of cases. It should be a source of real concern for people who still have some modicum of integrity. But till tomorrow, I won’t change in my way of holding tenaciously the view that only law and facts should determine cases in our courts. That is what I believe in, that is what I’ve been doing and that is what I will do till the end of time.
Lawyers, whether at the Bench or the Bar, are only a fraction of the larger Nigerian society so they cannot be isolated from the general problems that afflict our country. It is not every person that can have the strong armour of integrity and use it to live his or her life. Those who have weaker minds would fall for just anything. That is why I said individuals will have to make up their minds on the way they want to live and the way they want to be remembered.
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There are those who believe our constitution is one of the major problems we have, that it was give to us by the military. Will you advocate for a review of the constitution?
The constitution is not the problem, we are. The one we have presently, has it not been practiced in America for 254 years? We are just not serious with it and if we go back to 1963 constitution we’re going back to the same problem. When we practiced it in 1963, we couldn’t sustain it, and we left it. Our problem is not with constitution, it is we the people. Britain has no written constitution and their society has been prospering for centuries, so what are we talking about? As a people, we just have our problem and I think we need to address it.
Is it true there are no more genuine human rights lawyers like the late Chief Gani Fawehinmi?
Chief Fawehinmi of blessed memory was a man with his own peculiar qualities and no two persons can be the same. We have different styles of confronting issues. Like I always tell people, it is not all lawyers who say that they are human rights lawyers that are human rights lawyers. A lot of lawyers are human rights lawyers but some just don’t make it so obvious. At least in my office, we do a lot of pro bono cases but it is not something that we advertise because it’s not necessary. We see it as a covenant between ourselves, our profession, our conscience and God. So, I think it is a matter of style. Each person’s style would be peculiar to him or her. You can talk to power in different ways and the way that works for you may not necessarily work for me. But we must agree that Chief Gani Fawehinmi left a vacuum.
You are a very busy lawyer, always moving across the different states of Nigeria. As you journey around, do you feel safe?
I have said it before both publicly and privately that the level of insecurity in our country now is not only alarming, it is also unbelievable. You can hardly sleep now with your two eyes closed and you can hardly traverse the roads now without your heart pumping faster on occasions and I think the problem, if not addressed in due time, has the tendency of degenerating to a state of lawlessness. Quite honestly, our country is not safe. As you’ve rightly said, we go around all the time doing what we’ve been trained to do in the interest of us all but the insecurity stares you starkly in the face and this shows that things are not the way they ought to be.
How do we improve administration of our justice system?
Human progress only comes when you challenge the status quo. It is because Nigerians are satisfied with the status quo that our country is not progressing. There is always room for improvement in any human scene, including in the Administration of Justice because this is not the best system we