When your legislators are corrupt, you should be worried.
Corrupt lawmakers sell your budget. They trade oversight for contracts. They turn the people’s House into a marketplace. That is bad. You can vote them out, protest, or recall. The door is still open.
If your executive is peopled by crooks, you should be afraid.
A crooked executive steals with both hands. It raids the treasury, weaponizes agencies, and turns government into a gang. That is dangerous. You can still run to the courts, to the press, to the streets. One door remains.
But when the judiciary stops being a court of law, the people should be alarmed. Because that is the last door.
When judges sell judgments, when courtrooms become cash rooms, when justice has a price tag, then where do you go? When the interpreter of the law becomes the violator of the law, tyranny is complete.
Legislators can make bad laws. Executives can break good ones. But only the judiciary can say what the law is. If that voice is bought, democracy is deaf.
Nigeria is testing this formula in real time. Cases are won in the media and lost in chambers. Injunctions are traded like shares. Justice delayed is now justice auctioned.
Catastrophe is a parliament for sale.
Affliction is an executive without shame. Ruination is a judiciary without conscience.
When the gavel goes silent, the gun starts talking. When courts fail, anarchy begins.
We must fix the legislature. We must restrain the executive. But above all, we must save the judiciary. It is the last wall between us and the Banana Republic.
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bcradle@ymail.com
