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Theo Ikes Ogune International Lawyer and Public Policy Analyst Chevy Chase, Maryland, USA send email, more articles by Ogune

 

My Welcome Address to the Honorable Chief Justice of Nigeria   Tell a friend:	Along that line, the judiciary would avoid the erratic and disastrous incompetence of its election petition tribunals.  It would assure Nigerians that justice is not a thing that we can afford to compromise in a democracy. It would assure Nigerians that § 36(1) of the Constitution is not there for levity but as one of the cornerstones of Nigerian democracy, where the rule must be the law and the law the rule.  At the end, you would have continued the legacy you started long ago as the first in what you do -- particularly in what should matter most to you as the Chief Justice of the Federal Republic of Nigeria: justice!   Again, I am hopeful in welcoming you to your seat of first impression.  Thank you for listening.
They say that the world would be a better place if women ruled it.  Let me not bore you with the science of it all or even focus on whether women use a different part of the brain from the part that men use.  Either way, today, I am going to wish it were true -- that women made better managers than men.  If I were to go by the likes of Farida Waziri, however, I would be in for a long haul!  I also was going to be bothered by your answer to the question of corruption in the judiciary, whereupon you were quoted as simply responding that “there is corruption at every level,” but I am brushing that aside as quoted out of context.  I am also brushing aside the recent report of you saying in a BBC interview that the reinstatement of Justice Salami, a clear victim of corrupt politics, “is not [your] matter.”  Today, I am remaining hopeful.
After all, you also deserve a chance.  At the same time, we have gone so low in Nigeria that we have no choice but to go up.  Otherwise, if it turned out that there was no additional context to your answer, I must say that you gave the wrong answer.  Whether corruption is everywhere is not the correct answer to the question of what you believe about corruption in the judiciary or what you would do as the CJN to curb it.  Clearly, you do not actually believe that the issue surrounding Justice Salami “is not your matter” as the CJN.  But, as I said before, today is a day for hope.  So, today, I am hopefully welcoming you as the Honorable Chief Justice of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, the first in your class.  Congratulations! As the first in your gender, clan and, accordingly, nation, you would agree with me that, once you settle down, there is a lot of work ahead for someone like you, if God were to grant my wishes -- I am counting on Him to do so.  My wishes are two-fold: one is general and ideological while the other is more specific, real, and really personal.  Both are wishes that, if granted, would transform a first like you into a true legend, not the fake prestige that cover up, or are used to reward, poor performance in Nigeria.  Yes, I would respect that your legend more than the GCON award or any other award that you received recently from the President!    I begin with the specific and personal prong of my wishes.  Several months ago, your court, the Supreme Court, gave an opinion in the case of Great Ogboru v. Emmanuel Udughan, SC. 18/2012, SC 18A/2012.   As the CJN, one sign of your great things to come is to revisit that case.  That case is one stain on your judiciary that you cannot afford to let stand if we were to believe that your ascension to your current position would make a difference.  This wish is personal to me on two levels.  First, as a lawyer, it is difficult for me to believe in a judiciary whose Supreme Court would issue such a tortured and senseless opinion, but I must believe in the Nigerian judiciary as a Nigerian lawyer.  Second, I am from Delta State and the consequences of that poorly decided opinion have been far-reaching on people that I personally know -- peace-loving people who have been marginalized for too long.  Indeed, despite my terming it “personal,” what has happened in Delta State is actually farther-reaching than Delta State, as it captures the true problem of the nation -- our broken electoral system.  For me, it is not so much as who eventually wins if the Constitution and law are applied, it is the psyche of a people’s disappointment in a system that would deny them the right to a fair hearing and progress. When you revisit that case, you would find that the Justice Mohammad-issued opinion ignored the Constitution when it allowed the clearly unconstitutional child play of the Court of Appeal to dictate the day.  You cannot possibly chair a court and a judiciary that would tell a Nigerian citizen “tough luck” because the Court of Appeal failed to follow the law.  How can you chair a Supreme Court that would say to a citizen in a very relevant political situation that he lost his right to be heard on the merits of his case because the Court of Appeal used an obvious gimmick to issue its judgment out of time?  If anything, the Court of Appeal is the entity that deserves punishment, not the clean-handed citizen.  This is one opinion that would ruin any legacy that you wish to leave as the CJN if you allowed it to stand. The second part of my wishes -- the more general and ideological one -- is the general state of the Nigerian judiciary.  It is poor.  I know you know because you must have heard the calls from Nigerians since even when you were just a lawyer, unless you now live in the same corrupt and convoluted bubble as some in your midst.  My wish then is for you to be the first CJN to make it a priority to clean up the judiciary.  I do not want to just say the obvious -- that corruption in the judiciary is a primary threat or that lack of professionalism fatally permeates the judiciary.  If I were you, there are certain things that must be done to change the situation. First, you must push to separate the judiciary from the executive and legislative arms of government -- more from the executive than the legislative because that is where we have more of the problem here in Nigeria.  This is absolutely important, as all who care about democracy know the importance of separation of power and checks and balances in a democracy.  The executive should not be allowed to hire and fire the judiciary at will.  Obviously, your focus here is about balancing the need for accountability against the necessity for the independence of the judiciary.  For both are necessary and not mutually exclusive.  Accountability should be left to the impeachment of the judges by the people, and, similarly, independence should remove judicial dismissal matters completely from the executive arm while making it clear but rigorous to impeach a judge in the National Assembly.  That is the area in which you can prove your worth as a better CJN than your predecessors -- the poor male managers! Second, you must revamp the regulation of judges.  The old regime has not worked either because no one has properly and consistently exercised oversight over the judges or the system of oversight is irretrievably broken such that no one can properly and consistently exercise it.  The National Judicial Council is a joke as it is presently constituted; its rules are outdated, toothless and/or without any constitutional bites.  For instance, why is there no requirement or the enforcement of that requirement, if one exists, that judges must fill out a Financial Disclosure Statement every term and year they sit on the bench?  The old regime is why this question is part of my wishful thinking in welcoming you to your new position.  In a normal judiciary, it is elementary to know the sources of all revenues or monies received by judges.   The reason is obvious: such across-the-board and objective demand on judges leaves no wiggle room for corruption.  In that regime, anyone who cannot explain a truly extra source of income is automatically subject to discipline, and whether or not they stole that extra money is irrelevant to such discipline.  The rules would be clear also that you could not sit in judgment of your friends in politics -- you must recuse yourself.  Therefore, the rules must be written with automatic triggers to ensure consistency and absence of discretion in enforcement.  Third, you have to revisit the Nigerian legal system as a whole.  The system is not more than a badly transported copycat in a political vacuum.  So, notwithstanding the push to separate the judiciary from the executive or the revamping of judges’ regulation, you must rethink the whole system.  Once you decide, as I have decided, that the current system is not built for justice, you must drop the blind homage to it, because it is still a foreign system that has not changed much or has changed for the worse since colonial days.   For example, you must agree with me that a system that allows almost eighty percent of the court’s time to be spent on trivial things such as the requests for postponement (“adjournment” in legalese) is a broken system.   It is an inefficient system that is overloaded with numerous ways to deny the citizen his or her right to a fair hearing, which § 36(1) of the Constitution otherwise guarantees.  You must change the system from one of tricks, games, and ambush to an open and a substantive one geared towards the practical application of the law, not the gimmicky use of poorly manufactured technicality (including padded submissions) to circumvent the goal of the court, which must be justice.  In that vein, you must stop teaching future lawyers in your law school, for instance, to memorize trivial things such as the language of a writ of summons, which, in a developed judiciary, is only but a simple form that makes absolutely no sense to memorize if not for rigid and distracting formalism.  So you must revamp the rules of practice to push lawyers to abandon frivolity for a focus on law practice and its development. Because this is a twenty-minute welcome address, and I hope not to lose your attention span at this point, I must restrict myself to only these basic pointers as my best wishes for your legacy.  I have no doubt that with them you can make the Supreme Court undo what it did in Ogboru v. Uduaghan.  With them, it would be harder to retain the obvious misjudgment of judges like Justice Mohammed of the Court of Appeal, whereupon no judge is ever allowed to use an elementary and otherwise laughable trick to nullify his own judgment.  In that situation, the Supreme Court would avoid the disgrace that it must have suffered when James Ibori went to prison in Britain for what the Nigerian judiciary could not handle.  Along that line, the judiciary would avoid the erratic and disastrous incompetence of its election petition tribunals.  It would assure Nigerians that justice is not a thing that we can afford to compromise in a democracy. It would assure Nigerians that § 36(1) of the Constitution is not there for levity but as one of the cornerstones of Nigerian democracy, where the rule must be the law and the law the rule.  At the end, you would have continued the legacy you started long ago as the first in what you do -- particularly in what should matter most to you as the Chief Justice of the Federal Republic of Nigeria: justice!   Again, I am hopeful in welcoming you to your seat of first impression.  Thank you for listening.

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