Golden Mgbemene And 2 Ors Vs Inspector General Of Police (1963)

LawGlobal-Hub Lead Judgment Report

BAIRAMIAN, JSC

This appeal is from the judgment given by Savage J. in the High Court of the Eastern Re¬gion on the 4th December, 1962, reversing the decision of the Magistrate, who had acquitted the appellants, and sending the case back to him with a direction to convict and sentence the appellants.

The charge against them is in these terms:

“That you, Golden Mgbemene, Okwara Emole and Agu Okoroji on the 24th day of April, 1962, at Mile 2 Diobu in the Port Harcourt Magisterial District, being members of the Port Harcourt Municipal Council, did accept for yourselves a bribe of £60 from Benedict Agba and Samuel Ogaju that their conservancy contracts may not be terminated which favour you are to show in exercise of your function as Councillors of the said Council and thereby committed an offence punishable under section 43 (1) of the Eastern Region Local Government Law No. 17 of 1960”.

The subsection last mentioned reads as follows:

“A member of a council, member of a committee of a council or servant of a council who accepts, claims or obtains or agrees or attempts to accept or obtain for himself or for another person a gratification, advantage, bribe or reward, whether in money or otherwise, for doing or forbearing to do an act which he is authorized or required to do in the exercise of his authority or function as a member of a council, as a member of a committee of a council or as a servant of a council, as the case may be, or for corruptly showing favour or disfavour to a person, is guilty of an offence: Penalty, imprisonment for three years or a fine of two hundred pounds’.

The learned Magistrate found on the facts against the appellants, but for sundry reasons acquitted them.

The foremost of them is that in his view the offence contemplated in section 43(1) is that of a gift in consequence of the Councilor having done something already, not of a gift for the sake of something to be done by him later. For his view he relies on the decision in R. v. Ibrahim, 20 N.L.R. 137, on the meaning of section 115 of the Criminal Code, which provides that:

“Any person who accepts, or obtains, or agrees to accept or attempts to obtain, from any person for himself, or for any other person, any gratification or reward whatever, whether in money or in kind, for inducing by corrupt or illegal means, or by personal influence, any native tribunal or any member thereof, to do or forbear to do any act which such native tribunal is authorized to do in the exercise of its jurisdiction or to show favour or disfavour to any person is guilty of a misdemeanour, and is liable to imprisonment for two years.”

The interpretation in Ibrahim was that the wording meant a reward for actually inducing the tribunal or for the act of inducing as an act already done. It relied on the words “gratification” and “reward” in that section as indicating a return for something done already; it also compared that section with other sections of the Code. That decision was a decision at assize; it is not binding, and remains open for argument in our court when a case under that section arises. It may be right in the light of its own wording and in the context of the Criminal Code: it is not a safe guide in interpreting the subsection under which the present charge was laid. This must be interpreted in the light of the Law in which it is found and of its own wording and, as Savage J. pointed out, with due regard to the word “bribe”, which does not occur in section 115 of the Criminal Code.

“Bribe” is defined in the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary in the words of Dr Johnson’s Dictionary, as “a reward given to pervert the judgment or corrupt the conduct”, which means that it is a gift for the sake of something to be done by the recipient afterwards. In the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English, “bribe” is defined as –

“Money etc, offered to procure (often illegal or dishonest) action in favour of the giver” -which, again, means future action. It becomes imperative to understand the words-

“bribe ………….. for doing …………an act”

in the subsection under discussion as meaning a corrupt gift for the sake of an act to be done afterwards.