The Great Tyranny

Introduction

The greatest legacy left to humanity by the Romans was not their political organization, military prowess, unyielding spirit, culture, bath tubs and spars, technology, but their law. The authoritative writings of classical Roman jurists as codified by Emperor Justinian in Corpus Iuris Civilis are arguably the basis of many legal frameworks still subsisting in the world today, almost 1,487 years later. However, people should not lose sight of the fact that the refinement of law in cosmopolitan Rome or Constantinople was a progressive process emanating from earlier civilizations. The Roman law itself borrowed heavily from the writings of Greek Philosophers, particularly Socrates, Plato and Aristotle.  It is fundamentally true that Greek civilization itself has its roots in the Egyptian civilization, whose origins were at Kush and the progenitors of such a civilization being Nubians, or blacks of Africa. Those who are too prejudiced to accept these facts should dig into history and they shall found that Plato, at his prime age had travelled extensively and one of his destinations of choice, and chiefly for acquisition of knowledge and perhaps cultural sophistication was Egypt. That history can not be erased or concealed even by resorting to desperate shenanigans of hacking off the heads and/or defacing artifacts and statutes at the Great Pyramid of Giza.

Statute of Great King Khufu who built the Great Pyramid of Giza, with its nose obliterated.

Defaced Great Sphinx of Giza in the foreground and Great Pyramid of Giza in the background

 

Pharaoh Djedefre, son and successor of King Khufu, his nose did not escape the chisel of the racist.

 

Roman law was strict and perhaps harsh, nonetheless Romans believed strongly in the rule of law. Court cases were followed by crowds in Rome both for familiarization with legal processes and also for entertainment. The Romans themselves acknowledged this when they said, “Dura lex, sed lex”, meaning a harsh law, but a law nonetheless.

Emperor Justinian, one of the renowned Roman Emperors

 To graphically put across the reverence and respect of law by Romans, I quote a fellow Blogger, Panagiotis Limnios, “In 280 BC, Pyrrhus of Epirus defeated the Romans in a major battle near Heracleum and captured 2,000 legionnaires as prisoners. This was a massive blow to Rome and during negotiations for peace, Consul Fabricius requested that Pyrrhus release the prisoners and allow them to return home for the holidays so that their families can pressure the Senate to surrender. Pyrrhus agreed on the condition that they return back to the prison camps if the senate voted against peace. 

Philosopher Plato

Consul Fabricius agreed and the prisoners promptly returned home. However, not only did the Senate vote for the war to continue, they honoured their agreement and ordered all 2,000 prisoners to march themselves back to Pyrrhus' camps and imprisonment under the penalty of death is they didn’t.”

However, despite the positives which were brought by law, particularly in the lands of barbarians, savages, bandits, pirates and mercenaries, together with the sophistication of the human race, it is ironic that the same law has taken a new dimension. Today the law is now a tyranny, encroaching on freedoms and civil liberties, practically enslaving citizens who helplessly serve pieces of paper littered with biased, unjust statutes promulgated whimsically by politicians, for purposes of entrenching their positions. This is happening in the poorest and smallest nations of the earth as well as in the most developed and biggest nations of this known universe.

Below we provide hard evidence of the current status quo, which shows how humans are now serving the law.

Police Officers or Revenue Officers

Traffic police officers have ceased to be law enforcement agents in many parts of the world, as governments shamelessly turned these protectors and implementers of peace into a mercenary force brazenly robbing the motoring public on daily basis of their hard earned cash. This is truly unacceptable as it is unjust, unlawful and unconstitutional. 

This also dovetails to the fact that governments now believe that fines can be used as a source of revenue for the fiscus. This at law is very wrong. Fines are not a source of revenue for treasury; rather it is a judicial principle, wherein a fine is a deterrent measure meant to discourage bad behaviour. In fact we can borrow from Roman law where the principle of restitution was a cornerstone of the legal processes, a principle also prevalent in African customary legal practice. The reasoning being that if a crime has been committed, every effort should be harnessed to ensure that the aggrieved party’s position is restored to earlier position before the crime was committed – put simply the perpetrator should compensate the aggrieved party to the extent of the damage suffered. However, revenue officers aka police traffic officers don’t care about that as they are interested in meeting targets set by their senior officials, including mayors and politicians.

According to a research made by Adi Eyal, from Code4SA, the Ubuntu Municipality in the Northern Cape Province of South Africa, strategically located on a major highway (N1) between Cape Town and Johannesburg and includes towns of Victoria West, Richmond and Loxton reportedly issued R52 million in fines in 2014, contributing almost half of its annul total revenue of R107 million. He concluded that this suggests that traffic fines are considered to be a major source of income for the municipality of only 20 000 residents, whose rates base is obviously low.

The main infringement through which revenue officers of Ubuntu Municipality are making a killing is over speeding. Thus, they set speed traps which are obviously engineered to trick drivers instead of aiming to reduce deaths. If the traffic officers were genuinely interested in reducing the road carnage, they will not hide awkwardly on road bends or behind bushes or trees only to emerge triumphantly when ticketing the offenders, but will be visible on the highway so that those motorists who are in the habit of speeding would not dare doing that in the presence of law enforcement officers. 

 

A police officer behind trees with a speed trap

Overall Eyal found that R1 billion ($100 000 000) flowed into the coffers of South Africa municipalities during the financial year ending June 2014. Excessive fines seem to be levied in Western Cape and Northern Cape provinces, while motorists in Eastern Cape and Free State provinces are better off.  Let’s just imagine that if one is driving from Cape Town and your destination is Cairo in Egypt, what kind of fines will you eventually pay, including numerous toll gate fees, initially designed for road funds, but have been shamelessly turned into revenue raising tools by governments, national border charges, some border fees within national borders, numerous illegal road blocks where patently corrupt police officers will extract from you exorbitant illegal spot fines. Surely you will be bankrupted and by the time you reach the shores of Mediterranean sea, you will become a destitute and promptly commence begging on the streets of Egyptian cities and depending on your visa, may be arrested on yet another immigration law infringement and languish in the underbelly of Egypt, where you are likely to die due to stress and thrown in a pit, a mass grave where nameless, unclaimed souls without relatives or friends are “buried” and disappear from earth without trace and forgotten because one thing- tyrannical laws. 

And don’t fool yourself in thinking that you can take a shortcut route, say from the East Coast, as you shall realize that from Mombasa, a port city in Kenya to Kigali, the capital of Rwanda, there will be no less than forty (40) road blocks.

A traditional leader in Zimbabwe’s Manicaland Province intimated that people should not be forbidden from committing crimes in his area of jurisdiction so that the Chief’s court would be able to raise revenue for the sustenance of the court’s operations. He was savaged by the media, supported by feminists as the issue involved child marriages. However, despite the Chief’s misplaced and misguided reasoning, he was honest. There is no difference between the chief’s rationale for revenue collection and that of elected and presumably educated and learned city mayors who prey on unsuspecting residents to collect revenue to fund their excesses. Mayors in Africa pursue ostentatious lives and drive top of the range German saloons and obscenely expensive imported SUVs, putting pressure on municipal coffers and eventually resorting to desperate means of raising revenue, turning themselves into blood thirsty vampires, squeezing all liquidity from households. With the Chief, a special crash programme to bring him up to speed with judicial processes and the rights of children, especially the girl child will suffice but there is no hope with educated mayors who know the right things but proceed to do the wrong things. Of course they (mayors) should be relieved of their duties, for they have failed dismally to discharge their mandate of protecting and empowering citizens.     

A government (central, federal, provincial, municipal) should not focus on revenue collection per se but rather on how to grow the cake - economic growth. Once their economies are growing by attracting and sustaining investment from both locals and foreigners, they will see that their revenue will naturally increase through legitimate revenue collection methods, such as agreed and reasonable rates, fees, levies, taxes, royalties and so on. So one of the most important performance measurement criteria of public servants is how they had fared in generating more revenue through economic growth and certainly not how much revenue they have collected from robbing poor and defenceless Peter, and in this particular case not even bothering to pay Paul. The bottom line is that all these fraudulent, immoral, unjust, illegal and nefarious activities are supported by law. The law has thus been turned into a tyranny, pauperising, tormenting and terrorizing law-abiding citizens.

Road blocks have also taken a racial dimension. Road blocks are mounted as early as 7:30 am in black neighbourhoods, and almost at one’s gate, such that as reverse your vehicle out of your property you are already tormented by revenue officers, whilst there are fewer or no road blocks in predominantly white neighbourhoods. Even in highways white folks are rarely stopped, meaning the burden for funding treasuries of municipalities is squarely on the shoulders of the black community – what an injustice, especially 60 years after Uhuru, when we celebrated the dismantling of the twin evils of colonialism and discrimination. 

Remember, we are not on a crusade of discrediting law enforcement agents, for we are aware that they took an oath of following orders from their superiors. Indeed when I was a young boy I was told sternly by my elders that when you set your eyes on a police officer, you would have seen the head of state. It follows that the officers are merely enforcing instructions which emanate from our esteemed chambers of governance – the legislatures.

The Law Makers

The misleading thing about the aforementioned statement is that parliamentarians or councillors have the capacity to make laws. Surely that is blatantly inaccurate that these representatives of the populace know how to make law, a specialized and scientific area of study. A parliamentarian or councillor just elected to the august house or city chamber suddenly becomes a law expert and thus a maker of laws. From the onset it should be noted that that whilst these elected officials have the mandate to debate bills, the mandate derived from the populace, the law making aspect needs to be approached carefully. 

The parliament, in my considered view, is a cog of governance, which first and foremost should concern itself with counter balancing the excesses of the executive and even the judiciary.

It is therefore a great misnomer if parliamentarians and councillors are called law makers.  It is equally unfortunate that parliamentary and municipal chambers where we have send community representatives have been turned into factories churning out unjust laws day and night. Thus, the developmental agenda has been relegated to the periphery. In Africa the issue is gravely compounded by the fact that parliaments are gravely ineffective. The senior cabinet ministers and even prime ministers and state presidents openly undermine these vital institutions of governance. They, despite ample notices given to them to come to parliament and answer questions affecting the people in their capacity as the executive arm of government, deliberately and persistently abscond on debates, without even bothering to notify the speaker of parliament. That behaviour is totally unacceptable and should not be tolerated. The portfolio committees are toothless bull dogs or even worse, puppies, who continuously bark the right sounds, depending on the dog specie but can not bite, for they have neither the stamina nor the teeth. 

The voting patterns in parliament are also severely compromised because of a bizarre whipping system. Political parties in parliament invest heavily in a whip, which is then handed over to a mysterious party official, whom they call a Chief Whip, and whose principal role is to whip other party members each time there is a controversial bill to be passed in parliament. Thus, the Chief Whip is indeed like a cattle herder, brandishing a long whip, which he unleashes on the beasts of burden, for them to follow his instructions. So now the honourable members of parliament have now been reduced to mere four-legged animals requiring a whip to follow the party line, even if it’s absurd, unconstitutional and illegal. It is clear that politicians are very much capable of making outright lies to the public to get bad legislation passed.

It is precisely due to the status quo that we are burdened by these unreasonable, unjust laws which squeeze people and drive them to desperate situations. In fact this fraud and corruption is the chief cause of poverty in some parts of the world, including Africa.

However, one will be forgiven to believe that this problem is confined to the developing world. In the developed world the situation is even worse. There are about 20,000 laws just governing the use and ownership of guns in United States of America (USA). New laws mean new crimes. In this prosperous country, the laws are so many that even if you ask the most senior legal person to shed light as to actual quantum of laws subsisting in the union  he/she will not give you an answer. It’s like everything has been criminalized. A democracy has indeed become a tyranny. To drive a point home, 1 in 40 Americans is a convicted felon (serious offender). Surely these laws are not legitimate because they are imposed on people and their origins are not the people but whimsical feelings of politicians, who have abdicated their duty of governing but are now specialists in law making.

However President Obama is trying to reverse some of these unjust laws, notwithstanding the resistance he faces. According to Ken Mafuka, a columnist for the Financial Gazette, Zimbabwe, writing from America, “President Obama has released 6,000 prisoners whose sentences were intended to re-enslave blacks and he intends to release 60,000 more.” We applaud this effort and urge him to complete this noble task before he retires from active Presidency.

In 2010 alone the UK passed a whopping 3,506 laws and that was up 41% on previous year, and 1,788 or 51% were introduced by the Labour government before the elections. This is an incredible and alarming amount of legislations and you wonder as to the purpose of such overload. Add this to a plethora of statutory instruments issued by cabinet ministers then you have a real picture of the enormity of the laws in the Isles.  Do the ordinary people aware of these laws which politicians are nicodemously passing in cover of darkness?

There is a truth in the saying that the more corrupt the state the more numerous the laws.

The Prosecution Conundrum

The journey of one’s misery with the criminal justice system commences with an encounter with the arresting officer right to the correctional service. The whole conundrum of the arresting officer, investigating officer, prosecutor, the presiding officer (magistrate) and the correctional officer is ineffective and littered with so much injustice, inefficiency and down right unconstitutional actions. We highlight below the current position regarding this process.

·         For the greater part of their jobs, police officers’ activities are unconstitutional, for example:

     1. The budging of police officers in people’s homes without valid search warrants.

2. The arrest of suspects without ascertaining the reason. It is great injustice and violation of  one’s constitutional rights for police officers to arrest a person without attempting to understand the reason. We then wonder as to whether the police should arrest to investigate or investigate to arrest? If the investigation is not completed by the time the suspect is mandated by law to appear in court, then what happens? In most cases the police officers apply for extension of time for them to finalize the investigation, in the meantime the suspect is languishing in remand prison. Police officers don’t take it lightly if suspects they thought and believe would go to jail are freed by meticulous judicial officers. They should neither be angered nor disappointed because they would not have investigated the cases. So the Policing Curriculum at Police Schools needs to be revamped so that a police officer is that savvy investigating officer able to gather and analyse the evidence and thereafter make conclusions based on solid evidence, not the current state where an arresting officer is like a Robotic Cop, whose role is either to shoot the suspect or put chains on the suspects’ hands and sometimes his legs. If that was the case then we could save billions of dollars if we replace all human police officers with robotic cops, which do not clamour for new vehicles, uniforms, and other fringe benefits.

3. Police Brutality- This is a serious problem when the police force use excessive force against unarmed civilians. Police officers should not be trigger-happy or resort to acts which leave the name of the force in disrepute by becoming tyrannical, abusing vulnerable people like female suspects, foreign nationals or people of colour. We acknowledge that police face increased risk to their lives whilst serving communities. In South Africa, 58 police officers were killed by criminals between January and August 2015. Even if we discount the 34 officers who were killed whilst off duty, the number of police officers killed in line of duty is unacceptable. The solution is not then for police officers to ratchet up brutality against ordinary people. The police leadership should devise better methods of combating serious, violent crimes by sharpening the force's skills in combat, self-defence and gathering intelligence through working closely with community members, who are willing to volunteer important information about the activities of gangs, thugs and habitual serious offenders.  

·         The magistrates are no longer trying any cases. They just listen to the prosecutor, who also has interest in seeing the suspect jailed given the effort he/she would have expended on the case. The prosecutor would have also been impressed by the arresting and investigating officers to nail the suspect. Again it would be unusual for the prosecutor, who works with the magistrate on daily basis to then differ greatly on the merits of the case, thus for purposes of dispensing justice the relationship between the prosecuting office and the magistrate needs to be reviewed with a view of really separating these two offices both in theory and deed.

·     It follows therefore that if a suspect does not have a lawyer; he or she will surely be incarcerated or slapped with a hefty fine. However the whole purpose of building courts is for suspects to be tried in a fair and flexible humane manner, especially following a scientific procedure, a legacy which was left to us by the Romans. The poor are getting a raw deal and the rich are definitely getting away with murder. If an accused person has no legal representation magistrates become virtually sentencing agents, just passing sentences and don’t bother to go through the process of trial. Thus, magistrates are turned into robotic instruments of sentencing without trial of suspects. Again if this remains the case then perhaps we should also consider creating robotic judicial officers, which can replace human magistrates, saving a lot money and time.

·      The system is also clogged by numerous petty crimes which make magistrates less effective. Police officers usually embark on orgies of indiscriminate arrest of people, particularly close to year end when they are due for job appraisals. Fearing a back clash from their commanders for a lousy job because of few arrests, they just roam the streets arresting unlucky victims, with the hope that even if the victims are pardoned later, probably in the New Year, they would have earned higher scores on their job appraisals. The question then is: do we promote police officers on the number of suspects they arrest, or rather on their meticulous investigating capacity such that when the cases get to court they have higher chance of conviction?

·         Trial of cases takes place only in higher courts (High Courts, Supreme Courts of Appeal and Constitutional Courts) while in lower courts there is virtually no trial happening there except for haphazard, arbitrary and clearly guess work.  And even in higher courts there is a terrible trend which will upset the body of jurisprudence, whereby two cases with almost similar facts will receive different judgements by two different judges. This is serious injustice, because the law should be scientific and should uphold the concept of judicial precedent, to the extent possible.

·         Thus the conundrum of the arresting officer, investigating officer, prosecutor and magistrate is highly ineffective and colludes and perhaps conspire to achieve certain unconstitutional decisions, with far reaching repercussions on the dignity and rights of citizens and non-citizens.

A Verdict by the Jury

Trial and conviction by the jury is the most bizarre legal practice I have ever seen. Assembling legal laymen and women, even if they are people of integrity and of higher social standing, to the courtroom to hear trials of the most complicated criminal cases and expect expert judgements is sheer madness. Not only are the members of the jury excessively stretched in terms of legal principles, but they tend to be passionate and emotional, the very factors which should be banished when presiding over criminal cases. We just have to get rid of this judicial practice, and rely solely on the experts through the bench trial process. 

The beheadings

We condemn in the strongest possible terms the relentless beheadings taking place in the Middle East, ironically instigated by judges without affording the accused proper legal representation. The monstrous verdicts are therefore ad hoc, haphazard and clearly arbitrary and definitively illegal, murderous and constitute gross human rights abuses.

 The Hague Curse

The international Criminal Court has lost all its reputation, particularly in the eyes of Africans, and without fundamental reformation it will die a natural death. We shall tackle this curse in future instalments, preferably in the first half of 2016. Justice which is biased and lacks scientific approach and credibility is injustice, and no sane person would want to be party of that charade.

Conclusion

The tyrannical nature of law knows no boundaries, race, class, religion and transcends humanity. However it is perpetrated and cemented by political actors, irrespective of whether the country is governed in any of the following: multi-party democracy, autocracy, monarchy, religious-based rule, socialism, communism, cultural rule or any other sociopolitical structure, they all resort to tyrannical laws for their sustenance, protection, and defending their positions. They hide behind the law to violate human rights, which are sometimes listed in their constitutions. We therefore urge all governments across the face of the earth, from super-powers, emerging powers, developed countries, middle-income countries to developing countries, big nations, small land-locked countries and small Island nations to reflect deeply on the state of laws in their particular jurisdictions and chart a new way forward with a view of repealing draconian laws, and all other laws and statues promulgated to stifle human freedoms and assault on civil liberties and involve the communities in crafting FEW but relevant, legitimate laws to serve communities, and not for communities to serve the law. Lest we forget that God promulgated only 10 laws to multitudes of Israelites at Mount Sinai, who are we to create these kinds of unjust laws, on daily basis to drive the sons and daughters of man into misery and slavery?