Bail and the Dignity of the Law: A Call For Judicial Restraint -By Osita Chidoka

In a recent ruling of a High Court in Abuja, the defendant was granted bail, rightly, for the prosecution offered no persuasive reason to refuse it according to the ruling, yet on terms few honest Nigerians could ever meet.

The sureties must be serving federal civil servants of Grade Level 16 or above. Each must own Abuja property worth ₦500 million. One must furnish a bank guarantee of ₦15 billion.

Consider the economics. An officer who enters service at Grade Level 08 and climbs over some twenty-eight years to Grade Level 16 may earn, across an entire career, between ₦80 and ₦100 million. Out of that come housing, the education of children, healthcare, transport, and other living expenses.

By the court’s ruling, we are asking that officer to show assets worth five times his lifetime earnings — and to stand behind a liability of ₦15 billion, roughly 150 times everything an honest career could ever yield.

What message does this send? It says, in the plainest terms, that lawful public service cannot produce the wealth the court now expects of a respectable citizen and that the civil servant worth trusting is the one who has, somehow, acquired what his salary could never explain. In an anti-corruption case, of all places, that is a strange proxy for integrity.

The passport condition compounds the error. Senior officers travel on the nation’s business to negotiations, conferences, training. Stripping them of their passports merely to vouch for an accused person interferes with the very duties the state employs them to perform.

To grasp the scale of it, imagine requiring a British official to own property in Belgravia, Chelsea or Mayfair street before he could stand surety, and to produce a bank guarantee of 8.2 million pounds, (equivalent of 15 billion Naira) Such a proposition would immediately raise questions about proportionality and public outrage.

And the law has spoken. Section 165 of the Administration of Criminal Justice Act commands that bail conditions “shall not be excessive.” In Dasuki v. D.G., SSS, the Court of Appeal held the use of serving public servants as sureties unknown to our law, contrary to the Public Service Rules, and corrosive of the fight against corruption — and struck down a ₦100 million requirement. We have answered that ruling with ₦500 million and a guarantee of ₦15 billion.

There is a final incoherence. A court that finds no real risk of flight cannot, in the same breath, impose conditions fit for a fugitive of vast and unexplained means. Conditions that cannot be met are not conditions; they are a denial of bail by arithmetic, keeping the presumed-innocent in detention not because the law demanded it, but because their freedom was priced out of reach.

The focus remains bail application and not the innocence or otherwise of accused persons. The war against corruption is won by lawful means or it is not won at all. Let the courts secure attendance at trial, that is their duty, and let them stop there.

The purpose of bail is to guarantee appearance. It was never to measure a man’s wealth, to punish him before his guilt is proved, or to make honest public service a thing to be ashamed of.

Time to end this fixation with civil servants as sureties and Maitama and Asokoro as the only measure of value before our courts. It is discriminatory and humiliating for those who do not live in the court sanctioned prime neighbourhood and cast a cloud of corruption on public servants.

On both counts, the law could not have intended or envisaged the weaponisation of wealth over character.

Osita Chidoka, Esq, is a former Minister of Aviation