Withstand the narrative

What They Are Saying

The immigration debate, if there ever was a decent one where polite conversation with a frank exchange of ideas was possible, is becoming so coarse that it is difficult to appreciate whether the utterances have been seriously thought through, or whether this is a race to the bottom in a quest to gain the populist crown.

One Tory MP deemed to be a future party leader suggested at the weekend that legally settled families be deported to make the UK "culturally coherent". Apparently, those with a legal right to stay in the UK might have their status revoked to force them to "go home". [The Guardian: Tory MP criticised after demanding legally settled families be deported]

I am neither shocked nor alarmed; we have heard many variations of the same theme going back to the time of Enoch Powell, whom my father withstood in a Wolverhampton pub soon after his "Rivers of Blood" speech. [Wikipedia: Rivers of Blood speech]

What is evident is that people with influence and a prospective handle on power are putting their thoughts into words, for the record, that we can now read, quote, and choose not to forget. I hope we do not just wring our hands in disgust but work against this narrative as a seed that could become the rallying cry of the unwittingly led to endorse odious views inimical to social cohesion and progress.

What We Must Withstand

The perilous trajectory of these words aims to undermine and erode the foundations of fairness, justice, human rights, and the rule of law in society and the community. We must hold firm to the spirit, the letter, and the defence of the quote often attributed to many great men of the past: "What is morally wrong can never be politically right."

Condemning the viewpoint should just be the beginning, even if the person apologises for their choice of words that convey intent rather than action. The impetus is on us to challenge these narratives with data, facts, the truth, and better-argued points that engage our better nature, rather than appealing to our basest instincts.

We all have the capacity for intelligent conversation; we should resist the inclination of the malevolent to drag it to the gutter of humanity.

LegalNaija: Blogging clarity into Nigeria's legal jumble

Trust but verify

Maybe there is a case for becoming a bit bookish about knowing how to live and work in Nigeria. Possibly making your decisions based on something more concrete than what you heard someone say and that idea has been through so many revisions before it got to you with no semblance to the original thought or import. Rumours should not equate to fact, even if eventually proven true.

If accosted, in a country rife with the abuse of rights and process, would you know your rights enough to fight your corner through the system and expect not to have been persecuted and prosecuted unfairly?

Much as we can be religious and leave much to chance, gut feeling or the sentiment of belief or clan, the many times we have entered into arrangements that fall through because the detail necessary to make binding agreements were not pored over with the necessity such requires.

This blog began on a whim as I asked on Twitter what I should write about and @LegalNaija challenged me to write something about their blog.

Taking you through the minutiae

LegalNaija is hosted at http://www.legalnaija.com/  and they have been active since 2012, they provide a disclaimer on their front page that reads, “Posts and comments by the publishers of this blog do not constitute legal advice or create an attorney-client relationship.”

However, the kind of information you can glean from the many things they write about can give insight into how to ride through much of the Nigerian bureaucracy which at the best of times can be a haunting nightmare, leaving you out of pocket and with nothing to show for it.

Simple things like reading and vetting your contracts before you sign anything; as if we should be told, but in many cases, we rarely ready the small print, it is sometimes suffused with indecipherable legalese leading in unexpected pitfalls when things fall apart. Nothing wrong in reminding us of such simple things.

A tip, an insight or an idea

On the blog, you have explainers on fundamental rights, operating businesses, seeking legal redress, bills enacted, laws and much else that a blog like mine cannot begin to cover.

However, I can introduce you to LegalNaija and ask that you follow their Twitter account @LegalNaija, there is no telling what snippet of information can be that insight or idea to ensure you don’t end up in a needless and expensive legal wrangle – and I tell you, Nigeria is one legal minefield even to the savviest of legal experts. I commend them.

Editorial: Pressing for legal correctness in Nigeria

The Press or the Law?

This calls for a blog because it does beggar belief that matters of serious legal import in Nigeria are probably poorly researched but even more damning is how the press have not bothered to check the detail and correct the information received.

The presidential election results of the April 16^th 2011 are being disputed by the opposition party and its principals at the Presidential Election Petition Tribunal sitting in Abuja and I think that is a healthy development because it would either affirm the free, fair and credible elections or highlight the failings that might lead to a rebuke or even nullification of those elections.

The presiding judge has however decided that the ruling party has a case to answer [1] on the charges of election rigging and election irregularities putting aside the technicalities and making way for arguing the substantive case.

Sunday laws of business

One of the technicalities that ruling party attempted to have the case dismissed on was that the opposition party filed their petition on a Sunday which for all intents and purposes is not a working day in Nigeria.

However, the justice averred that the life-span of the tribunal allowed for its registry to conduct business on Sunday in order to expedite the petitioning process.

As with any legal argument, the use of precedent case law or acts of parliament does help buttress an argument put forward by a lawyer and one would hope that whatever is cited is correct so that it can be referenced for the sake of agreement, challenge or dispute, especially when such case law or acts might have been cited again in other proceedings and the judges have help different views of interpretation or the referenced view has been superseded by event, purpose, thinking, case law or legislation.

Wole Olanipekun (SAN) [2] is a senior advocate of Nigeria, the equivalent of which is Queen’s Counsel in the United Kingdom and he is counsel for the ruling party and the act he cited with regards to conducting no business on a Sunday was as reported by at least 6 Nigerian newspapers is the “Sunday of Servant Act of 1677.”

No such Act

That obviously piqued my curiosity, the phrase just looked too legalese to be passed off as real legalese so I conducted a Google Search [3] which left me less informed of what it really referred to and so I felt something was wrong.

There was a possibility that the court reporter heard him wrong, because there is an act that pertains to not doing business on Sundays but it is the Sunday Observance Act of 1677, in fact, there are 10 Sunday Observance Acts [4], the latest being in 1932 and there are other related Acts that amend or modify the Sunday shopping and business laws of which the counsel opportunistically chose one that would send everyone riffling through dusty legal tomes to ascertain the facts.

The earliest excerpt of the Act I can find is the Sunday Observance Act 1780 [5], the online legislative archive of the UK Parliament does reach as far back as 1267 only selected laws are documented until the 17^th Century and hence the documented laws of 1677 do not include this Act.

Who was wrong?

The issue here has to be one of many from a legal heavyweight using obscure and rare legislation bamboozle the judicial process is laudable enough because it might suggest his chamber’s library is quite extensive and the chambers are given to research.

It the counsel put forth an incorrectly cited case law or Act, then that would be sacrilegious and it is unfortunate that neither the bench nor the reporters determined the citation was valid and applicable.

I however reserve the greater excoriation for the Nigerian press who on hearing the legal arguments did not bother to check the facts before publication if that was what was said at tribunal or if the court reporter did not seek clarification the newspapers either use one source or they plagiarise each other, none of which augurs well for Nigerian journalism.

Demand for improvement

The standards of journalism are just so appalling from the poor spelling, the lack of proofreading, the incorrect use of clichés and the absence of fact checking.

Nigeria deserves a better standard of press media and journalism for its democracy to thrive but it starts with the fundamentals of good copy that demands good writing, information and hopefully a modicum of education.

In the end, one would hope there is a transcript of the tribunal proceedings to correctly apportion blame.

Sources

[1] 234Next.com | Jonathan and PDP must answer allegation of rigging, says Tribunal

[2] The Nation | Chief Wole Olanipekun, SAN The dovish courtroom firebrand

[3] Google Search on Sunday of Servant Act of 1677

[4] UK Parliament Laws - Sunday Observance Acts

[5] Sunday Observance Act 1780

Naijalive: Apology accepted but ...

NBA down again?

As one writes this, the Nigerian Bloggers Aggregator (NBA) brings more grist to the mill of the Naijalive Project which goes by the name of The Nigerian Super Blog (TNSB), such is life in the cut and thrust of Internet businesses or services.

A click on the NBA link from my blog presents this error

Failed to execute the SQL query

update item set unread = unread & 30

Error 1194: Table 'item' is marked as crashed and should be repaired

It makes you wonder what is going on in the Web 2.0 world of NBA that in less than a month we have had two major failures that are taking days to clear up.

Given that the proprietors are busy, this has become a service that cannot be managed with levity anymore, it is a non-profit thing and it is time that the owner got other people involved in some voluntary and community service role to ensure the service continues to function lest these operational lapses contribute to ruining the reputation of otherwise resourceful minds.

Apology accepted

After my last blog on the Naijalive comments , I received another message from the Project Co-ordinator of Naijalive, which summarily was an apology along with an explanation as to why the quality of exchanges had developed into a kind of confrontation.

I accept the apology wholeheartedly, I also reserve the right to use my forum to address the concerns I still have with the Naijalive Project, I might yet ask to be registered in that service sometime in the future, but for now, I have serious concerns.

Cached material or stale material

First, I do not fully understand how their system of aggregation works because it is either caching or saving separately blogs published by others - inconclusive, but the permanent link does not return to source.

We are all aware of how the Web 2.0 phenomenon has exposed people to unfortunate circumstances like universities trawling the web to find ill-disciplined students, employers sanctioning staff for sailing close to the wind with their opinions and so on.

On the 23^rd of July 2007, Chxta posted an article on his blog titled Some UK varsities in critical condition? [Post now removed on TNSB but a link to the captured graphic appears below]. After a few comments, he decided to take it down with a notice Post Goes Down, we, his readers remonstrated strongly about this action and left it at that.

It would appear whilst the post is already down, at least not available for public viewing on Chxta's World , it is quite available on the TNSB but only without the comments that lead to Chxta taking down the blog in the first place, this really bothers me.

Relinquishing control

This presents serious issues of control and informs my concerns on the quality of aggregation, if an item disappears from public viewing at a source, should it not reflect at the aggregator after a refresh of feeds?

Now, I would not know if Chxta moved that post into a draft repository which hopefully is not set to publish feeds or deleted it entirely.

Google does have a feature for caching websites such that the data is viewable long after the source has completely disappeared, but that is a service that should be inherent in sophisticated search engines not aggregators.

Serious legal implications

The more serious implication of this observation is where a legal requirement arises for a post to be taken down completely from a blog site and the litigant still finds traces of the grievance matter linked to the source even though the originator has no control over that "duplicated" material.

Now, I am not sure of full technical scenario of this observation, but it means Chxta either has to do something about it or TNSB needs to introduce some sophisticated code to rid their site of material that has been archived when the source has withdrawn an article.

Now, archiving is another matter but it is important the originators retain control of their material, if we must publish, so be it, but definitely not be damned by the actions of others.

Addendum: Added after Naijalive comment

Naijalive have commented on this matter and this is what they say.

Chxta's post is still showing up because feeds imported into the SuperBlog are automatically cached and archived and unless we remove them manually, they remain there.

They are working on ensuring that posts removed at source are automatically removed on TNSB, I commend them for looking seriously into this, but would having symbolic links to the source not be better than the additional management of cached and archived material?

I worry, I really do worry, but would patiently wait for their solution, I suppose I would be addressing the interface, navigation and user-friendliness when i next touch the topic of Naijalive. They are learning and improving.

References

I love this website

The truncated part of the Chxta's article as it appeared on TNSB - Captured from viewing TNSB as evidence supporting my observation.

I have legal advice too

You don’t fool me.

Many may have thought Mr Kofi Annan, the Secretary General of the United Nations was wrong-footed last week when he was prompted into saying the war lead by the United States in to Iraq did not conform to the UN charter and was hence illegal.

This has always been Mr Annan’s stance even though he has gone out of his way to try and accommodate the belligerents and suffered great losses as a result.

Every supporter of the war expressed incredulity at his comments; especially those who thought those comments would harm Mr George W. Bush’s re-election plans.

One sees fear of being found out by all those who have brought peace, stability, freedom, instability, woe, democracy and destruction to Iraq but dissembling about the presence of weapons of mass destruction as a premise for invading Iraq.

It is arguable that only the ones who had direct contact with Saddam and his henchmen suffered more seriously at his hands.

What the majority suffers now in the continuous bombings, hostage-taking and lack of amenities belies the fact that things were probably a lot better with Saddam.

Basically, the naivety of the US is exemplified in expecting a pliant and submissive public the day after the war only to be greeted by sophisticated insurgents that have claimed thousands of lives from all spectra.

Legal advice

What was most striking about it all was the interview with John Howard the prime minister of Australia who is presently fighting a re-election campaign.

Having tried to denigrate and castigate the Secretary General, probably with the intent to belittle, discredit and besmirch his good name the commented about the fact that Mr Annan’s view was contrary to the legal advice Australia, the UK and the USA had taken before the war.

Wait a minute! What really constitutes legal advice? It is a position in law that you take regarding an issue, situation or circumstance where those topics are presented to give you confidence in the position you have taken.

Legal advice does not suddenly imply you are right; whilst you might want to think you are, it can be challenged by interested parties in the court of law and found to be wanting when an alternative view is offered. This is how the whole court system works.

A lawyer takes a position on an issue and advocates that position in adversarial stance to the challenger of his views with the judge to moderate and the jury to pass judgement.

Mr Howard, your legal advice hardly past the first hurdle of due diligence in having those views challenged in a court of law, they can hardly be used as corroborative facts to support the case for Iraq.

I think we have all grown weary of politicians telling us they about faceless experts who have said food is safe, mobile phones do not fry your brain, genetically modified crops know their place and would never move out of their enclosure and now that the Iraqi escapade was for the war against terrorism.

For now, I have no time to analyse the quality of legal opinion that informed the war in Iraq, but I do wonder what opinions they now have of the precariously life-threatening situation in Iraq that the cost of insurance is astronomical.

By and large, on face value that statement was valid, but thankfully we analyse everything thing we hear, especially from people of Mr Bush’s political persuasion.

No Sir! I am not fooled.