Having been called to the Nigerian Bar 40 years ago, members of
the 1977 class of the Nigerian Law School have undoubtedly seen the
best of the Nigerian legal system. In the last 40 years, they have
climbed up the rung in their profession — at the Bar to become very
senior lawyers and on the Bench as judges from the high courts to
the Supreme Court.
The class boasts of four Justices of the Supreme Court, two
serving Justices of the Court of Appeal, several judges of state
high courts across the country — among them many Chief Judges,
including the Chief Judge of the Federal High Court, Justice
Ibrahim Auta — while a good number of legal practitioners among
them have earned the prestigious rank of Senior Advocate of
Nigeria.
There was, therefore, hardly any room for debate when they
declared last Friday that despite having a judicial system in
place, “there is no justice in Nigeria.”
According to a member of the class, Boma Ozobia, who is a former
President of the Commonwealth Lawyers Association, as long as
Nigeria is still grappling with the problem of delayed justice,
there is no justice in the country.
“Justice delayed, is justice denied,” Ozobia said.
Members of the class had converged on the Lagos campus of their
alma mater on Victoria Island, to commemorate their 40 years of
being called to the Bar with a lecture entitled, “We are lawyers,
we are judges: Now justice.”
The lecturer was one of them — Dr. Olanrewaju Onadeko (SAN), who
is now the Director General of the Nigerian Law School.
Onadeko delivered the lecture under the chairmanship of a former
lecturer at the law school, Dr. Kole Abayomi (SAN), who led a panel
comprising a professor of International Law and Jurisprudence, Akin
Oyebode; Prof. Ameze Guobadia of the Nigerian Institute of Advanced
Legal Studies; a former President of the Commonwealth Lawyers
Association, Boma Ozobia, Lagos-based human rights lawyer, Ebun-Olu
Adegboruwa and Mr. Yomi Orimobi, to discuss the paper.
In his lecture, Onadeko had posed the question whether legal
practitioners, both on the Bench and at the Bar — who had the
privilege of controlling one of the three arms of government — were
awake to their sacred duty of ensuring that the societal aspiration
for substantial or real justice as opposed to “technical justice,”
was met.
The lecturer wondered whether some of the tactics employed by
lawyers in the courtroom were not rather specifically calculated to
delay or defeat justice than promote the course of justice.
Onadeko had posed, “From the perspective of non-lawyers, can we,
lawyers, comfortably say that we have earned the reputation of
reasonable compliance with promoting and fostering the course of
justice?
“Is it not correct to assert that many of us have
‘commercialised and monetised’ the course of justice? In my early
years of practice, I often wondered if some of the pursuits of
lawyers, especially in courtrooms, were in consonance with the
doctrine of and the quest for justice.”
Among common tactics used by lawyers to deny the society of
substantial justice, Onadeko noted, was delay tactics, including
unmeritorious requests for adjournments by lawyers, which
ultimately lead to a situation where cases last for decades in
court.
The panelists could not agree less with the lecturer.
Ozobia’s reaction, when she took the stage to comment on the
lecture, was more like an outburst.
“We do not get justice in Nigeria!” she said, noting that, “If
justice is delayed, it’s denied! I tried to get some cases at the
Supreme Court but I couldn’t, but we know that they are still
dealing with cases from 10 years ago. Whatever the judgment, that
is not justice!”
Driving the graveness of the problem home, the panel chairman,
Abayomi, turned to the cross-section of the lawyers and judges and
retorted in a solemn tone, “Your profession is hanging in the
balance. The common man does not even understand whether there is
justice in this country anymore. People have refused to go to court
and they prefer to settle disputes in other manners or ways.
“There’s an interesting case that I just concluded, I started it
in 2007 and this is 2017. Yesterday, I was to adopt my written
address and the judge said, ‘sorry, I have had enough cases that I
set down to write judgments on during the vacation. Therefore, I’d
not ask you to adopt; I’d adjourn this case until October’. Of
course, you know what she’s trying to avoid, just not to be caught
by the three-month rule. So, I have to go back in October and say
My Lord, I rise and I adopt. My client couldn’t understand it and
the public do not understand most of the things that you do. What
are we going to do about it?”
Adegboruwa, in his comment, told the audience about a case he
just concluded at the Supreme Court after 33 years, concluding that
the problem of delay in justice dispensation was blamable on the
executive arm of government, which had ensured that the judiciary
was starved of funds.
He said, “I just got a judgment in the Supreme Court on Friday,
23rd of June; the case started in the high court in 1984, that’s 33
years ago; by the time the judgment was delivered it was 33 years,
all the litigants had died. Fred Agbaje did everything possible to
have the appeal heard before he died, but we were told every time
we filed an application for accelerated hearing that they were only
treating 2003 appeals. And so, it got to our turn this time because
they were now treating 2006 appeals. So, by next year, they will be
treating 2007.”
But apart from the problem of delayed justice, there is also the
problem of inequality or double-standard and corruption in the
judiciary, Oyebode, a professor of law, noted.
He said it was perhaps time that the veil covering the face of
the statue of the Lady of Justice at the Nigerian courts be
unveiled so that “she can see that people are not equal and tilt
the scale in order to ensure that people get the justice that they
deserve.”
Warning that the public should not raise their hope too high as
to what to expect from lawyers, Oyebode quipped, “Lawyers really
are not interested in justice; they are interested in law. There’s
a rigid dichotomy between law and justice.”
For him, it beats common sense how the courts arrived at the
decision, discharging some of the accused persons in the current
anti-corruption fight by the government.
He said, “I don’t know how the court found the grounds for
discharging and acquitting those that, shall I say, admitted their
guilt and that’s why I believe the Federal Government is proceeding
on appeal in certain matters and we are awaiting with great
anticipation for what the highest court in the land will say in
terms of the sanctity of the judicial process.”
According to him, recent happenings in the judiciary are
testimonies to the rot that has crept into the judiciary.
He said, “The Nigerian judiciary today is at crossroads, we are
witnesses of recent happenings in the Nigerian judiciary and some
of us wonder if gold rusts what should iron do? Because when you
enter a courthouse, the architecture itself that the judge sits on
a higher pedestal vis-a-vis the rest of the court and the judge
hands down judgments which are binding on lawyers, clients, and the
society at large suggests something. But what we are seeing today
are instances of judges announcing their daughters’ weddings or the
burial of their parents and some very highly celebrated lawyers
trying to offer, shall we say, gratification so that the scale of
justice can be tilted in their favour.”
But Adegboruwa would have none of it that lawyers are only
interested in the practice of law and not in justice.
He said, “I just want to disagree with the view that lawyers are
interested in law alone. A lot of lawyers are interested in justice
but the society cannot expect the justice that it is not investing
in.”
Adegboruwa said the reason why some of the high-profile accused
persons, including some judges being tried for corruption, were
being discharged was not far-fetched, because most of the cases
filed in court by the anti-graft agencies are poorly
investigated.
He argued, “Our system is adversarial. If you are accused of
corruption, it’s not your responsibility to prove your innocence.
It is the person bringing you to court that has the onus of proving
the facts. So, I don’t accept that judges should be condemned when
the matter has not been tried. And if the person who brings the
judge to court to say they are corrupt cannot marshal sufficient
evidence to justify that corruption, the judge must be
acquitted.
“I followed the case of Justice Ademola, and I read all the
facts. The sole witness they brought could not link the money
collected or given to him to any case that was pending before him.
So, the problem we have is not about lawyers are not fighting
corruption.”
But Abayomi had an answer for Adegboruwa. He said may be it was
time that the law should be reviewed to put the onus of proof on
the accused person rather than the prosecution.
He said, “Gentlemen, you have a judge, whose salary is N9m a
year, you found out that he has in his possession, about N150m that
year; it’s difficult to prove corruption cases, but I’m just
saying, why don’t you do it the other way round?
“If you are found with some amount of money that cannot be
sustained by your earnings, the onus is on you to prove how you got
it. We do it for people who receive stolen goods. So, if you do it
that way, a judge with plenty of money and you charge him to court,
then he should now prove the source in court. He could have got it
by inheritance, by other means, but let’s him prove it.”
In the audience was retired Justice Adesuyi Olateru-Olegbegi,
who shared the story of what Cameroon had done to bypass the
problem of “burden of proof” that Nigeria was still battling
with.
He said, “Dr. Abayomi spoke about the burden of proof. When we
are trained the way we are in this jurisdiction, we assume that the
burden of proof as we know it is eternally settled, that a person
is presumed innocent until the contrary has been proven. I used to
imagine it as being fundamental to our philosophy or jurisprudence
here, which it is, but it doesn’t have to be.
“I was at a seminar, when a colleague at a time who was
representing the Cameroonian Bar, in a paper he presented, showed
that in Cameroon, the presumption is of guilt, that a person who is
accused of a criminal offence is presumed guilty unless he proves
otherwise.
“I’m not advocating it but I merely mention it that we have to
examine the system that we have and ask ourselves whether indeed it
serves the end of justice in this country. And I think it
doesn’t.”
But for Justice Abdu Aboki, a member of the class, who sits on
the Court of Appeal bench, there was no greater worry than the
media attack on the judiciary.
He said, “One most worrisome thing is the attack, the press
attack, on the judiciary. That is a constraint because even before
we make our decisions, the press will give their decision in the
matter and the Nigerian society is so gullible, the common man on
the street is willing to take anything that is said from the
press.
“We know, as a fact, that not all of us are corrupt, not all of
us are perverted. The issue of corruption in Nigeria, in the
judiciary is at the lower ladder, the lower strata of the
judiciary; that is, the lower courts — the magistrates’ courts, the
area courts and the customary courts.”
To address the problem of delayed justice, Adegboruwa prescribed
the abolition of stay of proceedings in civil cases, Justice
Olateru-Olagbegi prescribed a law limiting the kinds of appeal that
could be taken before the appellate courts while Ozobia canvassed
for sanction for lawyers whose irresponsible behaviours lead to
delay.
She said,”I will give you an example of what happens in England
because we have Dr. Onadeko talk about the frustration of the
judges to the extent where they admonished counsel not to appeal a
judgment. An admonition is insufficient! Actions have consequences.
In other jurisdictions, you will not be admonished, you will be
sanctioned. It is commonplace for judges to award costs against
counsel because they know that you are the professional, the bad
behaviour is coming from you and not from the client.”
Punch
Having been called to the Nigerian Bar 40 years ago, members of
the 1977 class of the Nigerian Law School have undoubtedly seen the
best of the Nigerian legal system. In the last 40 years, they have
climbed up the rung in their profession — at the Bar to become very
senior lawyers and on the Bench as judges from the high courts to
the Supreme Court.
The class boasts of four Justices of the Supreme Court, two
serving Justices of the Court of Appeal, several judges of state
high courts across the country — among them many Chief Judges,
including the Chief Judge of the Federal High Court, Justice
Ibrahim Auta — while a good number of legal practitioners among
them have earned the prestigious rank of Senior Advocate of
Nigeria.
There was, therefore, hardly any room for debate when they
declared last Friday that despite having a judicial system in
place, “there is no justice in Nigeria.”
According to a member of the class, Boma Ozobia, who is a former
President of the Commonwealth Lawyers Association, as long as
Nigeria is still grappling with the problem of delayed justice,
there is no justice in the country.
“Justice delayed, is justice denied,” Ozobia said.
Members of the class had converged on the Lagos campus of their
alma mater on Victoria Island, to commemorate their 40 years of
being called to the Bar with a lecture entitled, “We are lawyers,
we are judges: Now justice.”
The lecturer was one of them — Dr. Olanrewaju Onadeko (SAN), who
is now the Director General of the Nigerian Law School.
Onadeko delivered the lecture under the chairmanship of a former
lecturer at the law school, Dr. Kole Abayomi (SAN), who led a panel
comprising a professor of International Law and Jurisprudence, Akin
Oyebode; Prof. Ameze Guobadia of the Nigerian Institute of Advanced
Legal Studies; a former President of the Commonwealth Lawyers
Association, Boma Ozobia, Lagos-based human rights lawyer, Ebun-Olu
Adegboruwa and Mr. Yomi Orimobi, to discuss the paper.
In his lecture, Onadeko had posed the question whether legal
practitioners, both on the Bench and at the Bar — who had the
privilege of controlling one of the three arms of government — were
awake to their sacred duty of ensuring that the societal aspiration
for substantial or real justice as opposed to “technical justice,”
was met.
The lecturer wondered whether some of the tactics employed by
lawyers in the courtroom were not rather specifically calculated to
delay or defeat justice than promote the course of justice.
Onadeko had posed, “From the perspective of non-lawyers, can we,
lawyers, comfortably say that we have earned the reputation of
reasonable compliance with promoting and fostering the course of
justice?
“Is it not correct to assert that many of us have
‘commercialised and monetised’ the course of justice? In my early
years of practice, I often wondered if some of the pursuits of
lawyers, especially in courtrooms, were in consonance with the
doctrine of and the quest for justice.”
Among common tactics used by lawyers to deny the society of
substantial justice, Onadeko noted, was delay tactics, including
unmeritorious requests for adjournments by lawyers, which
ultimately lead to a situation where cases last for decades in
court.
The panelists could not agree less with the lecturer.
Ozobia’s reaction, when she took the stage to comment on the
lecture, was more like an outburst.
“We do not get justice in Nigeria!” she said, noting that, “If
justice is delayed, it’s denied! I tried to get some cases at the
Supreme Court but I couldn’t, but we know that they are still
dealing with cases from 10 years ago. Whatever the judgment, that
is not justice!”
Driving the graveness of the problem home, the panel chairman,
Abayomi, turned to the cross-section of the lawyers and judges and
retorted in a solemn tone, “Your profession is hanging in the
balance. The common man does not even understand whether there is
justice in this country anymore. People have refused to go to court
and they prefer to settle disputes in other manners or ways.
“There’s an interesting case that I just concluded, I started it
in 2007 and this is 2017. Yesterday, I was to adopt my written
address and the judge said, ‘sorry, I have had enough cases that I
set down to write judgments on during the vacation. Therefore, I’d
not ask you to adopt; I’d adjourn this case until October’. Of
course, you know what she’s trying to avoid, just not to be caught
by the three-month rule. So, I have to go back in October and say
My Lord, I rise and I adopt. My client couldn’t understand it and
the public do not understand most of the things that you do. What
are we going to do about it?”
Adegboruwa, in his comment, told the audience about a case he
just concluded at the Supreme Court after 33 years, concluding that
the problem of delay in justice dispensation was blamable on the
executive arm of government, which had ensured that the judiciary
was starved of funds.
He said, “I just got a judgment in the Supreme Court on Friday,
23rd of June; the case started in the high court in 1984, that’s 33
years ago; by the time the judgment was delivered it was 33 years,
all the litigants had died. Fred Agbaje did everything possible to
have the appeal heard before he died, but we were told every time
we filed an application for accelerated hearing that they were only
treating 2003 appeals. And so, it got to our turn this time because
they were now treating 2006 appeals. So, by next year, they will be
treating 2007.”
But apart from the problem of delayed justice, there is also the
problem of inequality or double-standard and corruption in the
judiciary, Oyebode, a professor of law, noted.
He said it was perhaps time that the veil covering the face of
the statue of the Lady of Justice at the Nigerian courts be
unveiled so that “she can see that people are not equal and tilt
the scale in order to ensure that people get the justice that they
deserve.”
Warning that the public should not raise their hope too high as
to what to expect from lawyers, Oyebode quipped, “Lawyers really
are not interested in justice; they are interested in law. There’s
a rigid dichotomy between law and justice.”
For him, it beats common sense how the courts arrived at the
decision, discharging some of the accused persons in the current
anti-corruption fight by the government.
He said, “I don’t know how the court found the grounds for
discharging and acquitting those that, shall I say, admitted their
guilt and that’s why I believe the Federal Government is proceeding
on appeal in certain matters and we are awaiting with great
anticipation for what the highest court in the land will say in
terms of the sanctity of the judicial process.”
According to him, recent happenings in the judiciary are
testimonies to the rot that has crept into the judiciary.
He said, “The Nigerian judiciary today is at crossroads, we are
witnesses of recent happenings in the Nigerian judiciary and some
of us wonder if gold rusts what should iron do? Because when you
enter a courthouse, the architecture itself that the judge sits on
a higher pedestal vis-a-vis the rest of the court and the judge
hands down judgments which are binding on lawyers, clients, and the
society at large suggests something. But what we are seeing today
are instances of judges announcing their daughters’ weddings or the
burial of their parents and some very highly celebrated lawyers
trying to offer, shall we say, gratification so that the scale of
justice can be tilted in their favour.”
But Adegboruwa would have none of it that lawyers are only
interested in the practice of law and not in justice.
He said, “I just want to disagree with the view that lawyers are
interested in law alone. A lot of lawyers are interested in justice
but the society cannot expect the justice that it is not investing
in.”
Adegboruwa said the reason why some of the high-profile accused
persons, including some judges being tried for corruption, were
being discharged was not far-fetched, because most of the cases
filed in court by the anti-graft agencies are poorly
investigated.
He argued, “Our system is adversarial. If you are accused of
corruption, it’s not your responsibility to prove your innocence.
It is the person bringing you to court that has the onus of proving
the facts. So, I don’t accept that judges should be condemned when
the matter has not been tried. And if the person who brings the
judge to court to say they are corrupt cannot marshal sufficient
evidence to justify that corruption, the judge must be
acquitted.
“I followed the case of Justice Ademola, and I read all the
facts. The sole witness they brought could not link the money
collected or given to him to any case that was pending before him.
So, the problem we have is not about lawyers are not fighting
corruption.”
But Abayomi had an answer for Adegboruwa. He said may be it was
time that the law should be reviewed to put the onus of proof on
the accused person rather than the prosecution.
He said, “Gentlemen, you have a judge, whose salary is N9m a
year, you found out that he has in his possession, about N150m that
year; it’s difficult to prove corruption cases, but I’m just
saying, why don’t you do it the other way round?
“If you are found with some amount of money that cannot be
sustained by your earnings, the onus is on you to prove how you got
it. We do it for people who receive stolen goods. So, if you do it
that way, a judge with plenty of money and you charge him to court,
then he should now prove the source in court. He could have got it
by inheritance, by other means, but let’s him prove it.”
In the audience was retired Justice Adesuyi Olateru-Olegbegi,
who shared the story of what Cameroon had done to bypass the
problem of “burden of proof” that Nigeria was still battling
with.
He said, “Dr. Abayomi spoke about the burden of proof. When we
are trained the way we are in this jurisdiction, we assume that the
burden of proof as we know it is eternally settled, that a person
is presumed innocent until the contrary has been proven. I used to
imagine it as being fundamental to our philosophy or jurisprudence
here, which it is, but it doesn’t have to be.
“I was at a seminar, when a colleague at a time who was
representing the Cameroonian Bar, in a paper he presented, showed
that in Cameroon, the presumption is of guilt, that a person who is
accused of a criminal offence is presumed guilty unless he proves
otherwise.
“I’m not advocating it but I merely mention it that we have to
examine the system that we have and ask ourselves whether indeed it
serves the end of justice in this country. And I think it
doesn’t.”
But for Justice Abdu Aboki, a member of the class, who sits on
the Court of Appeal bench, there was no greater worry than the
media attack on the judiciary.
He said, “One most worrisome thing is the attack, the press
attack, on the judiciary. That is a constraint because even before
we make our decisions, the press will give their decision in the
matter and the Nigerian society is so gullible, the common man on
the street is willing to take anything that is said from the
press.
“We know, as a fact, that not all of us are corrupt, not all of
us are perverted. The issue of corruption in Nigeria, in the
judiciary is at the lower ladder, the lower strata of the
judiciary; that is, the lower courts — the magistrates’ courts, the
area courts and the customary courts.”
To address the problem of delayed justice, Adegboruwa prescribed
the abolition of stay of proceedings in civil cases, Justice
Olateru-Olagbegi prescribed a law limiting the kinds of appeal that
could be taken before the appellate courts while Ozobia canvassed
for sanction for lawyers whose irresponsible behaviours lead to
delay.
She said,”I will give you an example of what happens in England
because we have Dr. Onadeko talk about the frustration of the
judges to the extent where they admonished counsel not to appeal a
judgment. An admonition is insufficient! Actions have consequences.
In other jurisdictions, you will not be admonished, you will be
sanctioned. It is commonplace for judges to award costs against
counsel because they know that you are the professional, the bad
behaviour is coming from you and not from the client.”
Punch
Read more https://nairalaw.com/trouble-with-nigerian-justice-system-lawyers-judges/