Prof. Ernest Ojukwu, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria,
is the immediate past Deputy Director General and Head of Campus,
Nigerian Law School, Enugu. In this interview with OLADIMEJI RAMON,
he argues that education is a more potent weapon against corruption
than prosecution
A recent survey you conducted suggested that bribery of
judges or corruption is the biggest problem of the judiciary; yet a
few judges have been taken to court and some have been exonerated.
Will you still say corruption is a reality in the
judiciary?
Prosecution is not the evidence of the existence of corruption,
and it is also not the evidence of a serious programme for the
eradication of corruption; prosecution is the last and the least
process of an anti-corruption war. In fact, if you graduate
anti-corruption war, prosecution will take less than 10 per cent.
And unless a regime or leadership understands that focus, it will
never seriously fight corruption, because prosecution, sanction
accounts for only about 10 per cent of the anti-corruption
fight.
An anti-corruption programme is in education, orientation;
that’s where 90 per cent of the job is. The Nigerian Bar
Association is not leading in that. There is a five-year university
programme but there’s no course on ethics in most universities.
Meanwhile, our graduates learn what they do from the university;
everything we do now as practitioners is learnt from the university
– shunting, bribery and corruption, bribing of teachers,
molestation of students by teachers, using money to campaign for
election into the students representative council, is all there and
it is growing in trend. So, we are training Nigerians from the
university to become Nigerians. Unless we redesign our programme,
we can’t handle it.
We must set the rules and enforce them. And then, there is a
need for publicity on actions taken on anti-corruption; the more
people learn, the more they are deterred and vice versa. Public
disgrace is one major area. Discussion is another. In those days
when I was the chairman of the Bar at Aba, we had magistrates who
were accused of one or two acts of corruption; we’d take one or two
lawyers and pay a courtesy visit to the magistrates and in the
course of discussion we would confront the magistrates with the
allegations. This person said they gave you so-so amount of money;
I can assure you, one or two of the magistrates have become judges
and I know the change of attitude. They may not be 100 per cent
clean, but it affected them positively. Just a discussion. This we
don’t do at the Bar. What we do is that someone writes a petition,
and in some cases the petitions against lawyers and judges don’t
see the light of the day, no discussion with the person who has
been accused, and no serious or active ethics workshops for many
years.
The Bar itself voted bribery of judges as their number one
problem; they were not voting against judges, they were voting
against lawyers who bribe judges. Judges were not the focus but the
bribing of judges by lawyers. So, it is an inside problem.
Is there any hope that the Nigerian Law School might
reconsider its decision on the admission of Law graduates from the
National Open University of Nigeria?
Those who go to Open University to read Law know that they have
no right to go to law school; Nigerians generally know the right
thing, but there is a belief that at some point, things will
change. The system is not transparent, so, nobody can say, exactly,
what the result will be. We are misled by our own growing way of
life that rules and regulations would not be obeyed or
enforced.
However, there is nothing conclusive to say that if you study
through the Open University, you can’t be a lawyer. Based on my
experience as a Law teacher in the university for 15 years, and
nearly 15 years as a teacher in the Nigerian Law School, I know, as
a fact, that if we continue training our students on a traditional
syllabus and traditional methodology, as we are doing, Open
University is as good as any other LLB. You don’t need students to
be in your class to pass exams, because that’s my experience. And
when I was a young teacher I never insisted on students taking
attendance. They were always enforcing attendance but I refused to
enforce attendance because I refused to teach traditionally. If you
engage students they would attend your classes but if you teach
traditionally they would only attend out of compulsion. To that
extent, Law students in Open University are not worse trained than
those under our LLB programme.
But there is a policy problem. We had part-time legal education
at some point in our universities and experience showed that some
graduates did not actually take part in the training but had
degrees. There is also the policy problem facing every profession
relating to numbers. You must have heard from the current President
of the Bar when he was inaugurating the Legal Profession Regulating
Committee in January 2017 relating to admitting more lawyers than
we can accommodate. That’s a policy problem. If the professional
body feels that we have too many lawyers, they will do everything
to tighten it up. Already, we are quarreling with the number coming
from the full-time programme, so why open another floodgate?
If the Nigerian Law School continues to be run the way it is,
then we can’t have more admissions, because there will be no place
to manage the students. But if you change the tenor of the law
school, as I have proposed many times before, where you deregulate
the law school and allow private service providers, then you can
admit more. In that situation there would be a central body that
sets the curriculum, teaching method and the examination for
all.
A situation where the Nigerian Law School houses students beyond
its capacity and sets the examination for the same students itself
creates pressure for the law school. The law school and any school
in the country that has that kind of tenor will run into a pressure
problem. But if you extract the examination from the law school and
hand it over to an external body – the Council of Legal Education
just like JAMB – there will be less pressure. Nobody pressures
JAMB, but if your school sets the exam by itself, they pressure
you. It is until that happens that we can allow anybody to read Law
from anywhere and face the exams; train yourself and face the
exams. And by that time you can still keep the policy of the
profession, with low number, yet giving everybody an
opportunity.
Despite being in the academics, you are also an active
member of the Bar. The NBA is returning to the polls this year to
choose a new set of leaders. How can the electronic voting system
introduced two years ago be strengthened?
The world over, electronic voting is still a challenge and
that’s why many nations have not moved to full-blown electronic
voting; it is still a work in progress. One of the things that we
need is a transparent or open system that people will understand
primarily; that’s the first thing. There should be some form of
demonstration on how what we want to deploy will work, some form of
public demonstration. Secondly is that the system must
technically give us the result in real time. One minute after the
close of voting we should know the results, not one hour; because
it is straightforward. If you are in a class and you are voting
electronically, you should see the result immediately. If it’s
timed for five minutes, after five minutes it stops and the result
shows. We’ve seen electronic voting in the American Senate, once
they start clicking, if it’s 10 minutes, after 10 minutes they stop
and the result shows. That’s what we need, real time totaling of
results.
Money has become a prominent feature of the NBA
elections in the recent pass. Is there likely to be any difference
this year?
I don’t know. You should ask the Bar, not me.
There is a committee set up by the NBA to look at the
welfare of lawyers; among other things, the committee is proposing
a minimum wage of N50,000 for young lawyers. Do you think that is
enough?
The minimum wage is not for young lawyers; it is for all lawyers
but the younger ones benefit more because they form the bulk of the
employees. I will not like to comment on the exact amount of
minimum wage because I will like this to be a decision of the Bar
but people like me support to the highest level a prescription and
an enforcement of a minimum wage for lawyers but the actual amount,
we should discuss it and agree.
In what more ways can the NBA respond to the needs of
lawyers?
First, the NBA should embark on a robust capacity building for
lawyers; continuing legal education programme for lawyers, that’s a
major vehicle to create a relationship with the Bar. Every
professional body in the world, 80 per cent of their work is
capacity building. Very few lawyers, for example, have an idea
about Bitcoin. Meanwhile, it is a money-making venture; even
carpenters are doing it now. The Bar should run workshops on it.
The Central Bank of Nigeria recently said they are not going to
make rules for Bitcoin because they are still studying the field.
This is where the Bar should take leadership; run a workshop on it,
look at what is happening in other countries, agree on whether or
not we should have rules; if we agree, produce a rule and send it
to the Central Bank, this is the job of the Bar. If you have
something like that, lawyers will be interested as it primarily
opens job spaces for lawyers; and, of course, welfare.
Apart from insurance for death, we should have insurance for
health. If you have that, people will want to belong to the Bar
because health care is expensive.
Talk about young lawyers; between 5,000 and 7,000 lawyers are
graduated from the law school every year; the only obligation the
Bar has is to push them to the Supreme Court to go and enrol, after
that they disappear into the cloud. There’s no induction for them,
there’s no transition programme, there’s no incubator, no canopy,
no discussion about them, no career planning and counseling
programme, not one single seminar. And so, they just push 7,000
people out there. If we have these activities people would yearn to
belong.
There is no single competition run by the Bar for the growth of
law faculties and development of law students in the country. In
other places, the Bar runs such competitions in several aspects of
Law. By the time Law students are leaving the law faculty in many
parts of the world, they already found a career path, because it is
through those platforms that students are mentored into careers and
people come out of the university knowing already where they are
going to.
There are hundreds of activities that the NBA can embark upon
that will attract donors. Access to justice, human rights are open
areas. What about our ethics; are there are any discussions?
Meanwhile, if you ask 50 lawyers what the major challenge of the
profession is, they will say ethics, corruption, but the Bar has
not run active workshop on ethnics for many years.
Culled from Punch
Prof. Ernest Ojukwu, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria,
is the immediate past Deputy Director General and Head of Campus,
Nigerian Law School, Enugu. In this interview with OLADIMEJI RAMON,
he argues that education is a more potent weapon against corruption
than prosecution
A recent survey you conducted suggested that bribery of
judges or corruption is the biggest problem of the judiciary; yet a
few judges have been taken to court and some have been exonerated.
Will you still say corruption is a reality in the
judiciary?
Prosecution is not the evidence of the existence of corruption,
and it is also not the evidence of a serious programme for the
eradication of corruption; prosecution is the last and the least
process of an anti-corruption war. In fact, if you graduate
anti-corruption war, prosecution will take less than 10 per cent.
And unless a regime or leadership understands that focus, it will
never seriously fight corruption, because prosecution, sanction
accounts for only about 10 per cent of the anti-corruption
fight.
An anti-corruption programme is in education, orientation;
that’s where 90 per cent of the job is. The Nigerian Bar
Association is not leading in that. There is a five-year university
programme but there’s no course on ethics in most universities.
Meanwhile, our graduates learn what they do from the university;
everything we do now as practitioners is learnt from the university
– shunting, bribery and corruption, bribing of teachers,
molestation of students by teachers, using money to campaign for
election into the students representative council, is all there and
it is growing in trend. So, we are training Nigerians from the
university to become Nigerians. Unless we redesign our programme,
we can’t handle it.
We must set the rules and enforce them. And then, there is a
need for publicity on actions taken on anti-corruption; the more
people learn, the more they are deterred and vice versa. Public
disgrace is one major area. Discussion is another. In those days
when I was the chairman of the Bar at Aba, we had magistrates who
were accused of one or two acts of corruption; we’d take one or two
lawyers and pay a courtesy visit to the magistrates and in the
course of discussion we would confront the magistrates with the
allegations. This person said they gave you so-so amount of money;
I can assure you, one or two of the magistrates have become judges
and I know the change of attitude. They may not be 100 per cent
clean, but it affected them positively. Just a discussion. This we
don’t do at the Bar. What we do is that someone writes a petition,
and in some cases the petitions against lawyers and judges don’t
see the light of the day, no discussion with the person who has
been accused, and no serious or active ethics workshops for many
years.
The Bar itself voted bribery of judges as their number one
problem; they were not voting against judges, they were voting
against lawyers who bribe judges. Judges were not the focus but the
bribing of judges by lawyers. So, it is an inside problem.
Is there any hope that the Nigerian Law School might
reconsider its decision on the admission of Law graduates from the
National Open University of Nigeria?
Those who go to Open University to read Law know that they have
no right to go to law school; Nigerians generally know the right
thing, but there is a belief that at some point, things will
change. The system is not transparent, so, nobody can say, exactly,
what the result will be. We are misled by our own growing way of
life that rules and regulations would not be obeyed or
enforced.
However, there is nothing conclusive to say that if you study
through the Open University, you can’t be a lawyer. Based on my
experience as a Law teacher in the university for 15 years, and
nearly 15 years as a teacher in the Nigerian Law School, I know, as
a fact, that if we continue training our students on a traditional
syllabus and traditional methodology, as we are doing, Open
University is as good as any other LLB. You don’t need students to
be in your class to pass exams, because that’s my experience. And
when I was a young teacher I never insisted on students taking
attendance. They were always enforcing attendance but I refused to
enforce attendance because I refused to teach traditionally. If you
engage students they would attend your classes but if you teach
traditionally they would only attend out of compulsion. To that
extent, Law students in Open University are not worse trained than
those under our LLB programme.
But there is a policy problem. We had part-time legal education
at some point in our universities and experience showed that some
graduates did not actually take part in the training but had
degrees. There is also the policy problem facing every profession
relating to numbers. You must have heard from the current President
of the Bar when he was inaugurating the Legal Profession Regulating
Committee in January 2017 relating to admitting more lawyers than
we can accommodate. That’s a policy problem. If the professional
body feels that we have too many lawyers, they will do everything
to tighten it up. Already, we are quarreling with the number coming
from the full-time programme, so why open another floodgate?
If the Nigerian Law School continues to be run the way it is,
then we can’t have more admissions, because there will be no place
to manage the students. But if you change the tenor of the law
school, as I have proposed many times before, where you deregulate
the law school and allow private service providers, then you can
admit more. In that situation there would be a central body that
sets the curriculum, teaching method and the examination for
all.
A situation where the Nigerian Law School houses students beyond
its capacity and sets the examination for the same students itself
creates pressure for the law school. The law school and any school
in the country that has that kind of tenor will run into a pressure
problem. But if you extract the examination from the law school and
hand it over to an external body – the Council of Legal Education
just like JAMB – there will be less pressure. Nobody pressures
JAMB, but if your school sets the exam by itself, they pressure
you. It is until that happens that we can allow anybody to read Law
from anywhere and face the exams; train yourself and face the
exams. And by that time you can still keep the policy of the
profession, with low number, yet giving everybody an
opportunity.
Despite being in the academics, you are also an active
member of the Bar. The NBA is returning to the polls this year to
choose a new set of leaders. How can the electronic voting system
introduced two years ago be strengthened?
The world over, electronic voting is still a challenge and
that’s why many nations have not moved to full-blown electronic
voting; it is still a work in progress. One of the things that we
need is a transparent or open system that people will understand
primarily; that’s the first thing. There should be some form of
demonstration on how what we want to deploy will work, some form of
public demonstration. Secondly is that the system must
technically give us the result in real time. One minute after the
close of voting we should know the results, not one hour; because
it is straightforward. If you are in a class and you are voting
electronically, you should see the result immediately. If it’s
timed for five minutes, after five minutes it stops and the result
shows. We’ve seen electronic voting in the American Senate, once
they start clicking, if it’s 10 minutes, after 10 minutes they stop
and the result shows. That’s what we need, real time totaling of
results.
Money has become a prominent feature of the NBA
elections in the recent pass. Is there likely to be any difference
this year?
I don’t know. You should ask the Bar, not me.
There is a committee set up by the NBA to look at the
welfare of lawyers; among other things, the committee is proposing
a minimum wage of N50,000 for young lawyers. Do you think that is
enough?
The minimum wage is not for young lawyers; it is for all lawyers
but the younger ones benefit more because they form the bulk of the
employees. I will not like to comment on the exact amount of
minimum wage because I will like this to be a decision of the Bar
but people like me support to the highest level a prescription and
an enforcement of a minimum wage for lawyers but the actual amount,
we should discuss it and agree.
In what more ways can the NBA respond to the needs of
lawyers?
First, the NBA should embark on a robust capacity building for
lawyers; continuing legal education programme for lawyers, that’s a
major vehicle to create a relationship with the Bar. Every
professional body in the world, 80 per cent of their work is
capacity building. Very few lawyers, for example, have an idea
about Bitcoin. Meanwhile, it is a money-making venture; even
carpenters are doing it now. The Bar should run workshops on it.
The Central Bank of Nigeria recently said they are not going to
make rules for Bitcoin because they are still studying the field.
This is where the Bar should take leadership; run a workshop on it,
look at what is happening in other countries, agree on whether or
not we should have rules; if we agree, produce a rule and send it
to the Central Bank, this is the job of the Bar. If you have
something like that, lawyers will be interested as it primarily
opens job spaces for lawyers; and, of course, welfare.
Apart from insurance for death, we should have insurance for
health. If you have that, people will want to belong to the Bar
because health care is expensive.
Talk about young lawyers; between 5,000 and 7,000 lawyers are
graduated from the law school every year; the only obligation the
Bar has is to push them to the Supreme Court to go and enrol, after
that they disappear into the cloud. There’s no induction for them,
there’s no transition programme, there’s no incubator, no canopy,
no discussion about them, no career planning and counseling
programme, not one single seminar. And so, they just push 7,000
people out there. If we have these activities people would yearn to
belong.
There is no single competition run by the Bar for the growth of
law faculties and development of law students in the country. In
other places, the Bar runs such competitions in several aspects of
Law. By the time Law students are leaving the law faculty in many
parts of the world, they already found a career path, because it is
through those platforms that students are mentored into careers and
people come out of the university knowing already where they are
going to.
There are hundreds of activities that the NBA can embark upon
that will attract donors. Access to justice, human rights are open
areas. What about our ethics; are there are any discussions?
Meanwhile, if you ask 50 lawyers what the major challenge of the
profession is, they will say ethics, corruption, but the Bar has
not run active workshop on ethnics for many years.
Culled from Punch
Read more https://nairalaw.com/lack-of-convictions-doesnt-mean-judiciary-is-corruption-free-ojukwu/