FBI FILES MY FOOT – JESUTEGA ONOKPASA.

FBI FILES MY FOOT – JESUTEGA ONOKPASA.

Certain “reports” are presently circulating on social media claiming that the American Federal Bureau of Investigations, FBI, has released files linking President Bola Tinubu to narcotics investigations in the United States.

Similar to everything that has been regularly emanating from “Obidients” and “Atikulates” throughout the just rested election cycle, they are pitiably unprofessionally slanted, filled with unfounded conjectures and baseless innuendos, quite apart from being completely unbecoming of professional journalism.

Nothing in the material I have seen, howsoever, even remotely links President Tinubu to any kind of investigation much less one that has to do with drugs!

In fact, at least one of the reports exhorts readers to read Tinubu’s name into what it refers to as “blank spaces” in the documents it claims are the long awaited FBI files!

I could not help but chuckle at the tongue lashing a lawyer would receive from absolutely any court anywhere in the world if you presented such “documents” before a judge and invited him to read someone’s name into blank spaces within them.

In short, as far as the law is concerned, the purported documents, assuming they are even real, have absolutely nothing to do with Bola Tinubu.

It would appear that, once again, Tinubu’s enemies have laboured in vain.

In any case, I must insist that an FBI, or any similar file, for that matter, cannot be the subject matter of a freedom of information law request because it is clearly not the intendment of the law that persons who have not been charged to the court of law may alternatively be dragged before the court of public opinion with the assistance of government agencies.

The law stipulates that persons shall only be subject to the rule of law and the administration of justice as dispensed by the courts according to law, even as it strictly forbids that anyone be subjected to mob justice or howsoever be liable to being defamed by the government or by their political opponents by a misapplication of legal provisions.

If the FBI files say that I stole a chicken drumstick from Madam Koto’s pot of soup, then it is for the FBI to charge me to court or shut up and certainly not then proceed to facilitate defamation by handing my files over to election losers and other categories of the bellicose.

If it had charged me to court, my defense could have been that I was the one who actually gave Madam Koto money to buy a full chicken and cook a pot of soup for me, so how can I steal my own pot of soup, similar to the exceedingly dimwitted idiocy of Atiku Abubarkar suggesting that someone could possibly forge his own degree?

If you seriously believe a crime has been committed, you charge the suspect so he can have his day (and say) in court.

That is what is called “fair hearing”.

Handing his file to any third party, purportedly pursuant to a freedom of information request, while having not charged him to court, is tantamount to handing him over to the mob when it is your duty as law enforcement to bring him before a judge and ensure he is never taken before anyone else.

Yet, if only for the purpose of argument, what would be the probative value of entries in an FBI file that might even be actually detrimental to some determinate person, clearly and unambiguously, identified therein?

Funny enough, it amounts to absolutely nothing in law.

Indeed, assuming, without conceding, that the FBI has any such file on President Bola Tinubu, it wouldn’t even had been accounted any consequence in law had it been released long before the election petitions where tried and been part of the petitioners’ cases right from the start!

Entries in FBI, police or similar files are of no consequence, in and of themselves.

What truly matters is the judgement of a court of competent jurisdiction with respect to an adversarial process of trial in which they were tendered as evidence, admitted as such, and believed by the court.

Therefore, until you charge someone to court based on whatever files you have on them, those files are not really worth more than mere toilet paper.

That is besides the fact that whatever might be contained in an FBI file is most likely to be the result of an investigation in America.

Sorry Tinubu haters but a Nigerian court cannot assume jurisdiction over something that occured in another country unless it is for the purpose of upholding the judgement of a court of that other country and certainly not for the purpose of admitting an investigative file from a foreign agency into evidence for the private prosecution of your political opponent to whom you lost an election.

I guess when some people hear “FBI” they quake just as many catch cold when they hear “EFCC”.

When a lawyer hears either, it is no different from hearing someone say “Good morning, Barrister.”

Police forces and investigative agencies are just police forces and investigative agencies and no more.

They cannot be what they properly are, according to law, and then also be judge, jury and executioner rolled in one, at the same time.

The FBI is a police force and not a court.

Indeed, a pronouncement, on one sheet of paper, by a customary court in the most remote and inaccessible village imaginable, still carries far more weight than all the FBI files, CIA files, Metropolitan Police files, Interpol files and absolutely every other investigative file kept by all the police forces and investigative agencies in the entire world combined!

That’s just how the law works absolutely anywhere in this world.

I saw one of Atiku’s lawyers on television saying they are eagerly waiting for the FBI files and I wanted to ask him “if they give you the FBI files, what will you do with it? Even if they had given it to you four or even twenty years ago what could you had done with it? Absolutely nothing, you charlatan!”

It is the gullible members of the public that I rather sympathize with in all this.

If you don’t know law, be humble enough to ask those who know (and are honest enough) to teach you and tell you the truth.

Please bring me the FBI files so I can give them to Iya Basirah to sell guguru and groundnuts.

Onokpasa, a lawyer, was a member of the All Progressives Congress, APC, Presidential Campaign Council, and writes from Abuja.