December 2019

As you know, DPA has been helping prisoners for sometime now. We've done it in Keffi. We did it in Lagos, Badagry. We did it in Kuje. Our Enugu State members are doing it in Enugu tomorrow. Since our Founder has been in Kuje prison, we have helped Kuje inmates in many ways - fed them, organized sporting competition, fashion competition, free legal representations for then, etc. The Founder has done so much to help a lot of inmates. For some strategic reasons, we have not publicized our charitable activities in Kuje prison.   Now,  DPA wants to feed 1000 Kuje Prison inmates on the Christmas Day. It will cost N400 to feed each inmate. So, we need to raise N400k. This figure is easy for us to raise if everybody here can donate N500 today. You are welcome to donate more than N500. But indeed your N500 will be enough. Don't be left out of the important gesture.   Send your N500 to: DPA INT'L FOUNDATION- LEGAL DEFENCE ZENITH BANK, NO.1015702400

  Ghana's Supreme Court just rendered a far reaching but straightforward judgment, declaring that the 48 hours allowed the police to detain a person without court order shall now include weekends, holidays and even periods of civil unrest. A similar development in Nigeria will significantly improve the human rights situation in Nigeria, which is currently deplorable. The Nigerian police organizations have abused the constitution by always excluding weekends and public holidays in the computation of the 48-hour period, similarly provided for in the Nigerian constitution. The effect of this wrong computation method is that it became an instrument of corruption and abuse. The police will prefer to arrest people on Fridays so they can detain them over the weekend without consequences. For instance, in this Christmas period, assuming that Nigerian Government declares Friday 27th December a public holiday, Nigerian police can arrest a person on Tuesday, 24th December 2019 and detain him till Friday, 3rd January, 2020, and the period of such detention will be calculated as not exceeding the 48-hour period of discretionary police detention. The absurdity and injustice in such a system is glaring and highly intolerable. DPA has for some time now been seeking for ways to challenge that unjust practice. The aforementioned development in Ghana will help DPA in that it sets a precedent of how another country on the same developmental plain and within the same geopolitical zone as Nigeria has handled the same problem. DPA will be instructing its legal team to file an action in Nigerian courts by January of 2020 to obtain a judicial interpretation of the relevant constitutional provision. We shall be setting up a team of lawyers to study the Ghanaian case very closely and make recommendations to our litigation team.   DISCLAIMER: The Due Process Advocates Foundation (DPA) is an international human rights and humanitarian organization, founded by Ephraim  Emeka Ugwuonye

This is exactly the difference between the method used in the case of Emeka Ugwuonye and that of Omoyele Sowore. The reason people are protesting over Sowore more than they do in Emeka's case is because the DSS did not bother to get the judge to join them in abusing Sowore or to do so through the court. And this is where the Police Commissioner for Abuja, Mr. Bala Ciroma, showed more cunning. The police knew that if they detained Emeka without a court order, there would be consequences. So, they had to do it the 'smart' way, which was to get a judge that would agree to do them a favor. They tried three times before they got a judge that was willing to work with them. The work of the judge was to deny Emeka bail. The calculation was simple: to deny Emeka bail, cause him to go on appeal over bail and at the least, he would spend 3 months in detention. To make sure this would work, they had to allege a capital offence so that the deal with the judge would not look obvious. But they miscalculated so badly. Their entire assumption was that detaining Emeka in prison would hurt him so badly and ultimately force him to give up the fight. What they did not know was that the method they used would trigger an unexpected consequence. That consequence was that it showed Emeka that the Nigerian police commanders like Ciroma had been framing up people to get rid of them, and that the courts are involved in the racket. And thousands have suffered even loss of life from such abuses, aided by courts. There is no better place to study and track these abuses than from within the walls of the prison. So detaining Emeka Ugwuonye in Abattoir was like giving DPA a desk in Abattoir, and as you could see, just about one year after his detention in Abattoir, Abattoir is no more. Today, nobody will be detained in Abattoir for more than one month because DPA will pressure the office of the Chief Judge to visit Abattoir at least once a month. And we will tell the Chief Judge how the police hide detainees from judges and human rights agencies. Also, they have started giving some food to the detainees because DPA exposed how the police embezzled the money allocated for feeding of detainees and thereby causing deaths by starvation. Now, detaining Emeka Ugwuonye in prison is like giving DPA a desk in the prison. Can you imagine the reforms in our justice system that will result from that? Emeka did not have to rush to come out, as there is more to gain from spending up to a year there. This is the message we have been trying to pass on to those of our members who constantly lamented the detention of our Founder. Having said that, it is time for him to come out and steps can now being taken to achieve that. The lesson we have learned, which most people don't have yet is that judicial corruption is the greatest threat to liberty and human rights in Nigeria. It doesn't matter what the law says about your rights, as long as there are judges that can be bought with a bowl of porridge, those rights mean nothing. Therefore, DPA shall target some of its effort at judicial corruption and we have done a lot of work, yet to be published. The Nigeria prisons are the great unknown about this country. We now believe that the detention of our leader is a big blessing in disguise. Nigerian judges are closing their eyes and sending underaged people to prison just because the police suspected them of belonging to groups - IPOB, Shiites, cults, etc. So, back to the comparison: what would have happened if Justice Ojukwu had been induced to deny Sowore bail? What would have happened if the DSS Director had paid the judge a visit and requested a favor, and the favor being to deny him bail? DSS did not bother because of two things: (1) they assumed that once treason was mentioned, bail would be denied or (2) they are so arrogant that they felt they could detain Sowore regardless of what the court says. In this regard, the police were smarter. They figured a way to have Emeka in detention without triggering public outcry. But they still made a big mistake.  

DPA is faced with a delicate problem right now. A lady met a man here in DPA forum. Because she met him here, she assumed he would be a good man that would respect his wife. But two days after their traditional marriage, he started beating her and never stopped. Meanwhile they both remained members of this forum. Apart from the beating, he abused her in every other way imaginable. The beating lasted through a pregnancy period. They had one child, which they lost. The woman was employed at the time they met and she worked throughout the period until she resigned after giving birth to their child. But the man never worked even till today. All the above were what the woman told us. So let us assume that she might have exaggerated the story or lied against him. But I have something in my hand right now which cannot be a lie. I have two marriage certificates showing that the man had registry marriage with another woman and still had another registry marriage with this DPA lady. He never even bothered to get a divorce from the first marriage. That is bigamy.  And we have the two certificates in our hand. Because this man is a DPA forum member (not a registered member), we are going to approach him carefully. We will talk with him before we determine how to teach him some lessons. For a DPA man to do this is a big disgrace.

The court found that Orji Uzor Kalu (OUK) embezzled 7.3 billion. That is the amount of public fund the court said he embezzled. The court then ordered for one (only one) of OUK businesses (SLOK HOLDING) to be liquidated and the proceeds of the liquidation sale forfeited to the Federal Government, and nothing more. You don't really need to be a lawyer to challenge the reasoning behind such judgment. Now, let's consider the following questions that the court ignored: (1) How much will SLOK be worth after it has been liquidated? What is the fair market value of its assets? Will it be exactly 7.3 billion or will it be more or less? (2) If it is more (like 10 billion), what happens to the 2.7 billion excess? And if it is less (like 5 billion) what happens to the 2.3 billion deficit? (3) So, does it not mean that after the liquidation of SLOK, there has to be an accounting in order to determine whether the proceeds of the liquidation sale is more or less than the 7.3 billion? (4) Without providing for an accounting to be done as to the value of SLOK, it means that the court has awarded an unknown and unknowable amount of money (the proceeds of  the sale of SLOK) against a known amount of embezzled funds (7.3 billion). (5) Is OUK the only shareholder of SLOK? If even his wife or mother holds even 1% share in SLOK, the court can only sell the shares of OUK, and not the entire company. In other words, the court cannot sell anything in SLOK that doesn't belong to OUK. (6) Based on that flawed judgment, EFCC has sealed off the Sun Newspaper, which is an entity on its own. There are many questions: (a) Is the Sun Newspaper wholly owned by SLOK and is therefore covered by the judgment? (b) If anybody else, including OUK in his personal capacity, owns even 1% of the shares of Sun Newspaper, then the judgment does not cover the Sun Newspaper company, but only the shares of SLOK in the Sun can be attached. So, you can't be sealing the company. This is because the court limited the judgment to SLOK. (c) EFCC knows that OUK is going on appeal. The judgment is only one week old. The judgment has not even been enrolled and the EFCC is wasting effort even though it knows there will be an order of stay. Why the gragra? (d) Of all the businesses controlled by OUK, why is his newspaper the first to seal? Is it not to prevent him from using his paper to counter some of the lies peddled against him? (7) Based on the judgment, EFCC is sealing the houses of OUK. But the order is limited to the interest of SLOK. Unless those houses can be said to be owned by SLOK, they cannot be sealed based on the judgment because the judgment did not send them after the assets of OUK, but rather the assets of SLOK. The judgment of Justice Idris is a travesty and it will be set aside on appeal for many reasons.

DPA deliberately runs a two-step membership program. In the era of social media, it is easy for people to pose to be who they are not. This has been very devastating in a country like Nigeria with poor personal identification system. It is difficult to know a person based on his or her social media profile. We therefore, almost by default, created a two level identification system. First, we allow a person to join any of the DPA social media forums - Facebook, Twitter or Instagram. It is relatively easy to join. All you need is to have a social media account that is at least 6 months old, with some evidence of genuine activities or you need to be invited. Once you join our forum, you are expected to learn more about our programs and our discussions and to meet, interact with other forum members. Eventually, a forum member has to determine how to move to the next level. If you want to expand your engagement with our organization, you will need to become a registered member. Given, that you have been a member of our forum, you are pre-qualified to become a registered member. This two-layered membership system has helped us. But no system is fail proof. So, we do make mistakes. Once in a while, we let into the forum very toxic people with the capacity to pollute anything they touch. We had such experience yesterday. One lady recently invited by a member to join the forum went wild today. Out of the blues, she claimed she was an original member of this forum, but she left when she found that the Founder was a fraudulent man. She claimed that this forum has 2 million members but only 100 people comment on posts. She claimed that the Founder is not awaiting trial, but has been convicted of murder. Of course, other forum members who read her outrageous claims were surprised how such a person was allowed in here. But that is our system. We screen backwards. That is, we give you chance to show that you can't belong here before we take you out. At the same time, we are not really threatened by such behavior because the person is not a registered member. That's the beauty of the double layer system of membership.

In a piece shared with its forum members, the organization differentiates itself from other popular social media groups. The piece titled "DPA does not measure membership participation by comments to posts" which was posted on the organization's Facebook reads as follows: DPA DOES NOT MEASURE MEMBERSHIP PARTICIPATION BY COMMENTS TO POSTS December 15, 2019 Once in a while, you come across critics who try to measure DPA Forum membership engagement by the number of comments to our posts. But that is a very wrong approach that reflects ignorance of what DPA is and how this forum works. Such critics are basically comparing DPA to Igboist or Rants Headquarters and such other groups. In those other groups, their goal is to excite reactions from as many as possible members. They do so based on the type of topics they discuss. For instance, a member of Igboist may make a post of just one sentence such as: "Have you ever been disappointed by someone you loved?" If you publish that as a post, everybody has something to say. So you can expect 90% of their group members to have an opinion or experience to share on the subject. However, it is different in DPA. For instance, if a law professor posts a professional or scholarly article on Prenuptial Agreements, you don't expect a lot of people to have experience or opinions to share on the subject. Yet 99% of the group members learned something from the post. DPA aims to discuss serious subjects and to teach law and related subjects to our members. Indeed, it will be abnormal for us if 2000 people were to express an opinion on any of our posts. The reason is that we take time to go through people's reactions to our posts in order to address any issues and clarify points raised by them. What we expect from our members most of the time are questions, not their own opinions on the subject matter of the post. And to minimize the questions, we try to use simple language and straightforward illustrations to discuss the subject matter. Take for instance the first post yesterday on prenuptial. We deliberately used the illustration of a tailor, custom-made or ready-made clothes in order to make easy for an average person to reason along as he reads the post. We were just trying to reduce the number of people who would have questions based on the fact that they did not understand the post. When we make a post, we measure participation in three different ways: (1) How many people learned something new from the post? We estimate that 99% of members who read a typical post would have learned one thing new or the other from it. (2) How many people had questions on the post based on comments received? We are disappointed when many people have questions based on comments because it means we did not explain the subject thoroughly. (3) How many people came to us inbox with requests for our help with the personal problems they have had on related issues? For instance, over 20 people have contacted us privately with personal questions on prenuptial, after reading our post yesterday. Another thing to bear in mind is that over 75% of DPA posts are done by professionals who have formal training on the subject of the post. So, most of the time if you react to a post on DPA, you are reacting to a post by a professional. It is not like in the other groups where anybody can post on any subject. In those groups, a shoemaker can post his views on constitutional law and all the shoemakers in the world will join with their own opinions on constitutional law. Yes, certainly we encourage more engagements from our forum members. But bear in mind that we are not like other groups that measure progress by the number of people they have talking at the same time. We prefer that our members read 50 quality comments than to have to wade through a thousand comments that are meaningless beyond their comic value.

Minutes after the conviction of Senator Orji Uzor Kalu by a Lagos based Federal High Court on December 5, 2019, Nigerians showed mixed reactions. Some people saw the conviction as justice done. Others saw it as a selective and politically motivated legal outcome. And both sides have good reasons for their different positions. Without a doubt, every Nigerian political office holder, particularly the Governors and the Presidents, since 1999, has engaged in one form of corrupt enrichment or another. The Governors were handed huge unaccountable funds and allowed unconstitutional control over the budgetary allocations meant for local governments and the state judiciary. Lawmakers were allowed to allocate to themselves irrational amounts of allowances and control over what has been described as constituency projects. There was no restrictions on campaign financing. Thus the Nigerian politicians were handed a cart blanch to steal as much as they could, and everyone of them stole a lot. Along with the new era of unbridled corruption came a unique system of selective and politically motivated enforcement of the criminal laws of the country. The major agencies to fight corruption and economic crimes in Nigeria turned out to be mere instruments of control of any political opposition. The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), the leading agency to fight economic crimes (not necessarily corruption, as that was meant to be the responsibility of the Independent Corrupt Practices Commission (ICPC)) targeted exclusively opponents of the President. When the EFCC realized that the constitutional immunity from prosecution while in office granted the Governors some temporal protection, it aimed at initiating impeachments of those Governors, even if it meant violating the constitution. With such a terrible record of impunity, Nigeria's war against corruption lost much credibility and remained perceived as a system of selective justice and instrument of political control. With this in mind, many view the occasional conviction of a politician with a justified degree of scepticism. Applying such scepticisms to Kalu's conviction, the question is: What really is the political motivation for the development? People may point to the fact that the trial lasted for twelve years in order to exclude any sudden game. However, sound logic suggests the opposite. When a criminal trial lasts for a long time, the prosecution serves as a ready instrument of all manner of political control. This is particularly so in the face of judicial corruption and the absence of independence of the judiciary. Thus, a phone call from the Presidency to the judge can achieve any outcome the caller intended. Why would Kalu be a good target for such political game at this time? The only but quite crucial motive has to do with Orji Kalu and Igbo presidency in 2023. If the ruling APC were to commit to Igbo presidency in 2023, Orji Uzor Kalu would be one of the most viable presidential candidates. Kalu knew this and had carefully positioned himself in the ruling party. If there were a powerful enough splinter force determined to frustrate the idea of Igbo presidency or any ambition on the part of Kalu come 2023, the 12 year old pending trial is the best means of accomplishing that. Call the judge from the presidency. DPA does not by any means impugn the judgment of Honorable Justice Idris. However, the following statement in the judgment remains susceptible to various interpretations. The judge stated as part of his judgment: “No gaps were left unfilled. This is the acceptable standard. I hold the view that the prosecution has established its case against the defendants; it did not fall short of the standard required by law in money laundering offences. It is clear upon the facts before this court that the prosecution had this case conclusively investigated before opting to bring this charge against the defendants. In other words, the prosecution did an in-depth and conclusive investigation". The charge was actually brought 12 years before the conviction. This statement can reasonably be construed as a political statement that was calculated to preempt any complaint of ulterior motivation or corruption against the judge or the EFCC. Indeed, such statement is unnecessary and need not be included in a judgment that has gone in favor of the prosecution. Ordinarily, a conviction would have been sufficient to show that the court accepted that the prosecution met the requisite standard of proof. The needless effort to uphold his own judgment is suggestive of discomfort on the mind of the judge.

Whether we agree or not, it is inevitable that the society will be worse off, if there is no consequence for false statements calculated to destabilize and unsettle the society. I just have an example of such statement in the screenshot here. Somebody made that false statement without caring how it affects the members of the Catholic faith. In fact, the maker of that statement calculated to hurt and offend the Catholics for no just cause. To say there should not be consequence for such statements is to place the society in danger. Yes, we suspect our government people and we fear that any move against hate speech only serves to protect officials from public criticisms. But in truth, anti-hate laws will protect the vulnerable poor from manipulative media contents the more. That is to say, hate speeches hurt the poor more that they can hurt the rich, who are less dependent on other's approval, more able to counter manipulative contents, better educated to resist the influence of false stories, and better able to purchase goodwill where it has been dented by false manipulative contents. So, anti-hate laws should be supported by all, but with more efficient sanctions. It is thus inevitable.  

ORJI UZOR KALU BACK IN ABUJA He was convicted in Lagos. He was ordinarily meant to serve his 12-year sentence in Lagos, either at the Kirikiri Maximum Custodial Center or the Ikoyi Medium Correctional Center, where he has been since his conviction. But Orji Uzor Kalu, a serving Senator, shall be serving his sentence at the Abuja Medium Custodial Center. The official reason for this prison transfer is because Kalu is standing trial in another case in Abuja. But beside this justification, Kalu would like to stay in Abuja so he would be closer to Abuja political power base. He remains a Senator and would like to participate as often as possible in senatorial proceedings. All it takes for him to attend senate proceedings is a production warrant signed by the Clerk of the Senate and served on the Officer in Charge of the prison facility. Even though two other former Governors are currently serving their prison terms in Kuje, keeping a man like Kalu in prison is quite a task for the prison authorities. So, extensive arrangements was made to move Kalu from Lagos to Abuja in a private jet, and the Kuje prison was actively preparing to receive him. Many Senators and top politicians were in Kuje on Sunday to visit with him. No doubt that his conviction has significantly dislodged him as a major political persona in Nigeria, but it is still too early to tell the extent.