Alhaji was not a poor man. He could afford to travel by air—he could even afford to travel business class. But after Dana flight 992 crashed on a Lagos suburb on the 3rd of June 2012, he had grown distrustful of planes. He decided never to board one again if he could avoid it.
So when he was due to appear in the Magistrate’s Court in Ikeja on August 15 that year, he went by road. Near Okene, about 270 kilometres from Abuja where Alhaji’s journey to Lagos had begun, an oncoming truck ran into his car, killing Alhaji three days before he was due in court.
The Magistrate, who heard the story three days later from Alhaji’s lawyer, was suspicious. Maybe he thought Alhaji’s departure, just before he was to be on trial for the alleged embezzlement of billions of naira, was a bit too coincidental. Maybe he suspected Alhaji of pulling a disappearing act on justice. In any case, the fact that his lawyer declared he had seen the body, had mourned with the family and had attended the funeral, was not enough. The judge wanted to see a notarised death certificate, and adjourned the case until the lawyer could come up with one. And then the Magistrate got transferred to another court.
Since then, Alhaji’s lawyer had been trying to get the court to confirm his client’s passing. He had been to court three times in vain, finding neither the prosecution nor any judge willing to close the case. On this Wednesday morning, well over a year after the fatal road accident, the lawyer tried again.
Why would a solicitor go to such lengths for a deceased client who cannot even pay his bills? After all, just like a dead man cannot come to the dock, he cannot be thrown in jail either.
The problem though was not so much with the accused, as with his sureties: the people who vouched for him when Alhaji made bail. They were the ones paying the price when the accused did not appear in court. Alhaji was a respected man, and his sureties were obas and other traditional Lagos rulers. Not people who would want their name connected to a fugitive from justice.
This time Alhaji’s lawyer brought corroborating evidence. The Chief Magistrate looked at the obituary for at least a minute: it was a glossy poster with a portrait picture of the late Alhaji wearing a white and red keffiyeh on his head, and printed underneath was text that said he was ‘survived by wives and children’. As the Magistrate folded the obituary to pass it on to the Registrar to put into the case file, she glanced at the copy of the death certificate the lawyer had also provided.
What she saw there made her raise her eyebrows.
‘This isn’t notarised,’ she said, addressing the lawyer in the bench about five metres away from the bar. The lawyer raised his hands in a helpless gesture. A death certificate, officially certified by a notary, is an extremely valuable document: in a situation where the inheritance is disputed, it can mean the difference between poverty and wealth for the deceased’s family.
‘This is a complicated family situation, Your Honour,’ the lawyer finally said, hinting at the wives and children Alhaji left behind. The Chief Magistrate had been working in the Lagos judiciary for seventeen years and had seen enough to know how protective polygamous families like Alhaji’s can be about such official documents.
Following the lawyer’s statement, it became quiet inside the courtroom for minutes, with only the sound of honking cars and an occasional rooster seeping through the windows, as the judge scrutinised the documents and made some jottings. Then she looked up and gave her verdict. Especially since the prosecution seemed to have lost interest in the case entirely – they hadn’t showed up in court since Alhaji passed away – the Chief Magistrate decided to strike out the case, over a year after the unfortunate road accident.
Whether or not Alhaji really forged his board members’ signatures in order to steal money from their company, as they claimed, we will never know. And as everyone is assumed to be innocent until convicted, as his lawyer states afterwards outside the courtroom, Alhaji died an innocent man.
But undoubtedly he would have preferred to have lived to clear his name.