I believe that the regular readers of the articles I post in different social media platforms must have observed that I post each part of the series every four days. It is also pertinent to point it out that while the articles always bear the dates they are posted, they are normally written one or two days before they are posted. On January 27, 2025, I posted my article, Nigeria and Its Criminal Justice System: The Book That Made Dele Farotimi an Epic Celebrity. About two hours later, I read on the social media what I am in the best of dispositions to describe as a Happy Coincidence. It is this: Afe Babalola Withdraws Suits Against Farotimi. The first paragraph of the article explained:
“Aare Afe Babalola SAN, the Founder of Afe Babalola University in Ado Ekiti, announced in the early hours of Monday his decision to withdraw the legal actions against activist and lawyer Dele Farotimi…Farotimi faced trial for alleged criminal defamation at the Ekiti State Magistrate Court and for alleged cyber-bullying at the Ado Ekiti Division of the Federal High Court. However, following the intervention of the Ooni of Ife, Oba Adeyeye Ogunwusi, and other prominent traditional rulers during a midnight meeting, Babalola declared at ABUAD that he would instruct his lawyers to withdraw the criminal case.”
The journalist who reported the incident gave the names of many prominent and respectable Yoruba traditional leaders who prevailed on Babalola to withdraw the suits. Other people who are also reported to have persuaded him to settle the case out of court include former President Olusegun Obasanjo and the man that every peace-loving Nigerian would be happy to associate with and to listen to, Matthew Hassan Kukah, the Catholic Bishop of Sokoto Diocese. Among other reasons, having been disposed to withdraw the suits, the legal luminary, Afe Babalola, SAN, is reported to have given the following as his reasons for the withdrawal:
“There is nothing I am going to gain from his imprisonment. There is nothing I am going to gain from so-called damages. I am not in quest of more wealth, rather how to spend what I have for the benefit of others. The only time I am happy is when I give. The request is simple; take away this criminal case in court. When Obasanjo wrote, he came here, I said no, when Kukah phoned and came I said no, but on this occasion, I say yes. Thank you, Kabiyesis. I will speak to my lawyers to withdraw it.”
This is good news. Many thanks should go to all the prominent Nigerians who brokered peace by making the withdrawal of the suits from the court possible. Many thanks should equally go to the legal luminary, Afe Babalola, SAN, for being modest enough to accept the appeal made by a horde of respectable Yoruba and other people. The Yoruba traditional leaders have sufficiently displayed the wisdom for which they are known. Afe Babalola has equally proved to Nigerians that he deserves all the respect given to him. The decision to withdraw the suits clearly demonstrates his wisdom.
However, in addition to the reasons Babalola declared I am more inclined to believe that there are more fundamental reasons for his decision to withdraw the suits. In my first article on this issue, Dele Farotimi: A Martyr For Truth And Justice, I recalled the warning that was given to the British by Prof. Gilbert Murray of Oxford University which was cited by Louis Fischer, an American journalist, in his book, Gandhi: His Life and Message for the World. Winston Churchill who was then the British Prime Minister and Gandhi’s chief antagonist in his fight for the freedom of his people from British oppression was warned that he would lose the battle because he was fighting with a man who did not care for anything in the world except for what is right and just.
Gandhi did not care for sensual pleasures. He did not care for comfort. He did not care for praise. He did not care for slander. He did not care for adulation. He did not care for insult. He did not care for demotion. He did not care for promotion. Above all, he was a man who, once he made up his mind to do what he believed to be right only death could stop him. The only thing he feared on earth is moral transgression. For this reason, the British were warned that Gandhi was a dangerous and uncomfortable person to deal with by any enemy because he had crossed the Rubicon of fear. Gandhi eventually won. He single-handedly secured political independence for India.
Anybody who carefully listens to Dele Farotimi each time he talks about the endemic decay in Nigeria, the hopelessness that decay spreads through the very essence and foundation of our being, and his readiness to surrender his life, if the need arises, in his battle against the decay, should understand that he is not a man to be taken for granted. In my first article mentioned above, I recalled certain statements of his which should have informed whoever decided to deal with him that he was dealing with a man who had conquered fear and so should have been circumspect. Let me refresh the reader’s mind with those statements once more. He said:
It is alright to have fears, what is wrong is to receive the fears in one’s spirit, and to then allow these fears to dictate your actions and inactions. When fears stand in the way of your purpose, you must find the grace to discount such fears, except reason advises otherwise.
Fear narrows perspectives and thereby limits your capacity to see your options clearly, enforcing tunnel vision on the afflicted; flight or fight. Look again; those are only two of the several options available to the unafraid. Get rid of you fears, your fears, fear you.”
Tyrants do not scare me, and I am completely unfazed by their kept dogs, be those in uniform or out. Faced by those shorn of fears, they are naught but scarecrows. Men of straw in need of darkness to be men!
For those who have not seen and have not read the controversial book, it has only 96 pages in all. This must have accounted for its description as pamphlet by Afe Babalola during his meeting with the Yoruba leaders. All the same, the contents of this pamphlet have shaken the nation’s judiciary to its foundation and made every corrupt judge in Nigeria jittery. The book is small but mighty. It is a small axe that has felled a mighty and dreaded Iroko tree.
Anybody who carefully listens to Dele Farotimi each time he talks about the endemic decay in Nigeria, the hopelessness that decay spreads through the very essence and foundation of our being, and his readiness to surrender his life, if the need arises, in his battle against the decay, should understand that he is not a man to be taken for granted. Granted that what he has been saying about his readiness to surrender his life and everything in the cause of truth and justice if the need arises were not enough to convince his detractors that he was not playing on words, he reiterated the same in the book in the following two remarkable statements:
I have absolutely no problem with meeting every single writ that anyone might care to issue for libel and the evidence of the truth that I have told are largely in the courts’ records.
There are times in the history of men and nations when the purpose, personal or corporate, becomes more important than our own lives. The truth of the putrefaction of our country as typified by the stinking corruption of the judiciary is urgent and by far more important than my personal convenience and or life. If I must self-immolate for you to behold the extent of the rot, so be it. But I urge you, my dear audience, not to allow my sacrifice to be made in vain.
Irrespective of the reasons given by Afe Babalola for withdrawing the suits, a more critical assessment of the situation persuades me to believe that these two statements and the following other factors constitute the real reason for the withdrawal.
We saw the moving video where Dele Farotimi was overwhelmed by emotion and cried in appreciation of the breathtaking solidarity he got from Nigerians during the 21 days when he was incarcerated in Ekiti prison. We saw how he thanked Nigerians for not minding his ethnicity and religion but stood with him and spoke for him. We heard him speak about the chains which corrupt judges and corrupt politicians have fashioned to hold us down as their helpless victims while they continue their insatiable plunder of the country’s wealth to our collective detriment. He said:
“We stopped being humans because we became Nigerians. They divided us and we fell for it. Because you would not see me as a Yoruba man, you spoke for me. You would not see me as a Christian, you spoke for me. Because you spoke, Nigeria could not happen to me. You found your voices, I became you and in our collective, we could not be silenced.”
Meanwhile, Emmanuel Champers, Afe Babalola’s law firm, wanted the Legal Practitioners Disciplinary Committee (LPDC) to disbar Farotimi from legal practice for their so-called unethical conduct. But the LPDC refused, assuring his detractors that the allegations against him had to do with the book he wrote and not with his practice as a lawyer. Farotimi is a lawyer who is committed to using the instrumentality of the law to dethrone injustice and enthrone justice. Why should he be debarred? Like the Socrates of old, he is the stinging gadfly that Nigeria needs most if she must ever come out of the current asphyxiating criminal justice system. Instead of debarring the only one we currently have, more Dele Farotimis are urgently needed to sting back to life the dead consciences of corrupt judges and politicians who in all vanity imagine Nigeria to be their personal property while the rest of us are mere slaves labouring to maintain their luxury.
These are the real reasons Babalola had to withdraw the suits. He is a big fish. But he discovered that it is dangerous for him to swallow Dele Farotimi. Farotimi made a mockery of fear. He became so daring in the face of threat that fear began to fear him. The worst thing anybody can do to a man who feels that he is so powerful that people must either praise him or keep their mouths shut even when he is wrong is to confront him squarely with his wrongdoing. A small fish like Dele Farotimi publicly declared that tyrants do not scare him, that he is completely undeterred by those in uniform who play the role of personal watchdogs to tyrants and terrorise innocent Nigerians. Farotimi is so daring over the issue at stake that any reasonable person engaging him in a battle, no matter how powerful he is, should learn to apply all the brakes.
Whether one has read law or not, the basic meaning of libel as defined by the English dictionary is that it is “a false and published malicious statement that damages somebody’s reputation.” Let us break down this definition to see if it can help us understand what has happened between Afe Babalola and Dele Farotimi. The keyword in the definition is False. If it is true that what Farotimi published in his book about Babalola is false, he would be charged as guilty in the court for damaging his reputation. In that case, the court would determine the amount of money he would pay as reparation to the man whose reputation he damaged, or how long he would be jailed. On the other hand, if it is discovered that what Farotimi wrote in his book about Babalola is True would Farotimi still be considered as being guilty? In that case, my layman’s understanding of the law tells me that Farotimi would not be said to be guilty in that case since what he said in the book is true. In other words, if what he said is true, if there is any damage of reputation emanating from that, it is the person who did what he should not have done, which is written in that book, that damaged his reputation and not the person who told the world what he truly did.
The truth is that the withdrawal of the suits is not an act of magnanimity on the part of Afe Babalola. Knowing that Farotimi would have exposed him more in the court and seeing how determined Nigerians, irrespective of religion and ethnicity, were in their solidarity with Farotimi, he had no option than to look for a way to wriggle out of the battle he suddenly discovered he was bound to lose. He certainly crashed against a formidable rock in the person of Dele Farotimi. But the Yoruba leaders in their wisdom rallied round in the nick of time to save whatever vestige of his reputation that had not been destroyed by the controversial book. He is very lucky. As the saying goes, the reader should use his tongue to count his teeth.
Corrupt judges and corrupt politicians have destroyed Nigeria. But as Martin Luther King Junior said in his book, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? “When evil men combine, good men must unite. When evil men plot, good men must plan. When evil men burn and bomb good men must build and bind. When evil men conspire to preserve an unjust status quo, good men must unite to bring about the birth of a society undergirded by justice.”
Dele Farotimi has demonstrated to good people in Nigeria that there is an urgent need for them to unite; that they must plan to thwart the evil plot of corrupt judges and politicians; that they must unite to fight the conspiracy of corrupt judges and politicians that are bent on perpetuating the preservation of unjust status quo; that they must unite and fight the endemic decay in the judicial system in order to bring about the Nigeria of our good dreams where truth, justice and peace will reign.
Nigeria needs two-pronged battle, the battle of wits and the battle of courage, to pull her out of the judicial putrefaction where corrupt judges and politicians have lured it into. By combining wits and courage, Dele Farotimi has shown us that Nigeria is not beyond redemption. But the battle is too cumbersome for him alone. I want to believe that the unprecedented solidarity that Nigerians have been giving to him since December 3, 2024 when he was arrested in Lagos and extradited to Ekiti State is a proof that many people, particularly legal representatives, are prepared to fight the battle with him. We pray let it be so.
By Rev. Fr. John Odey
