A seasoned legal practitioner, Soronnadi Anthony Njoku, recently was conferred with the Senior Advocate of Nigeria, SAN. In this interview with EMEKA NZE at a reception organised by his Umuowa Community in Abuja in his honour, the silk says it’s difficult to divorce Nigeria’s judicial system from technicalities, however, argues that the peoples will supercedes technicalities. He also speaks on sundry issues
My own intervention about the judiciary independence is the need to begin to question some of the basic assumptions about our judicial adjudicative system. For instance when you talk of technicalities, you cannot really divorce our judicial system from technicalities but you can amend the critical rules to look for justice, instead of strict technicalities.
Let’s take the most fundamental and the most controversial of all our judicial system, that is the issue of election matters; it is my desire to contribute to this new awareness that what should be important in any adjudication or judicial matter is what is the will of the people and how did they genuinely express their will?
Don’t tell me whether the Bimodal Voters Accreditation System (BVAS) worked or not, not to tell me whether any part of the system was right or wrong because those are the stakes created by the system that tend to subdue the substance of the matter.
The process of an election is for a people, be it ward when it comes to councillorship or a local government when it comes to the chairmanship, or a state constituency when it comes to House of Assembly and so on; it is a process of ascertaining the will of the people as to who will represent them between A and B.
Therefore to my mind, we must go to the basis of really on that Election Day, sincerely and truthfully, how did the people cast their votes? And by that process, you now decide who the people really voted and the question of who has votes and who didn’t have, not a question of whether 21 days has expired or not.
The sooner we now begin to root out these things, the more we get to the facts of the matter.
What’s your opinion on the appointment of Kekere-Eku as the Chief Justice of the Federation (CJN)?
It’s quite coincidental that the day she appeared before the senate for her clearance was the day we appeared before the body of Senior Advocates of Nigeria for our induction and also it happened to be that the day we were sworn in as Senior Advocates, was the day she was also sworn in a Chief Justice of Nigeria.
What do you expect from the new CJN?
Sincerely, the first thing that comes to my mind is that she should work in tandem with the National Assembly to, especially, amend the Constitution of the Federal republic of Nigeria and reduce the amount of matters that make their way to the Supreme Court. Nigeria is the only country on planet earth that I know where a matter can originate from the Customary Court, through the Customary court of Appeal or from the Magistrate Court through the High court of a state and to the Court of Appeal and up to the Supreme Court. It is such an irony that it is on record that in Nigeria, we have up to 3,000 cases at the Supreme Court, the American Supreme Court does not handle up to 100 cases in a year.
And that pressure is part of the notion of lack of transparency on the part of the Supreme Court. We must limit these matters, for instance, the Supreme Court should be the Supreme Court and not the court where you go to determine between A and B who is the village head of Nnamawa village in Umuowa, Ngor Okpala, but today that is part of what the Supreme Court does.
What prevents the customary law marriage from ending at the Customary Court of Appeal? What prevents an ordinary civil matter from ending at the Court of Appeal, so that you have a situation where the Supreme Court of a country like Nigeria becomes a court of final arbitration and a court of policies?
That is the starting point. By the time you reduce their workload, you have now reduced the quantity, and you are now looking at quality. You now do a second thing; a situation where, for instance, all kinds of people bring appeals as of right to the Supreme Court of a nation, is also wrong.
Appeals should not be as a fundamental right at the Supreme Court of a nation. For the past two or three years, how many times have you heard about judgements at the Supreme Court of America?, if not for the issue of Donald Trump and you saw how it was done because their process are not as crude as that of Nigeria, the fish begins to rot from the head; so let us look at the structure of our Supreme Court, reduce their workload, reduce the issues that create bottleneck in the system and again, I was advocating at some point for the creation of a Constitutional Court in Nigeria; all the cases that give the judiciary black eyes are usually political matter.
Create a parallel system of court, called the Constitutional Court so that these issues for instance of whether someone was elected or not, whether his tenure has expired or not and everything about the political system would now go in the first instance through the Constitutional Court apparatus.
Do you know that what happens every four years is that the judiciary comes to a halt simply because of election tribunals and by the time they finish with the tribunals, the Appeal Court will stop for the next six to nine months because they are handling appeals from the Tribunals, thereafter the Supreme Court will halt. An average life span of a case at the Supreme Court is between seven and 10 years, it should not be; and the only way out is to reduce the quantum of matters that go to them and then you now begin to talk of matters of substantial justice and so on.
If she does that alone for our judicial system, remove these political matters that clog our process and send them to the Constitutional Court with its own parallel structure, even if matters of who won the governorship election are the final stages, can still go there. The House of Assembly should stop at the Court of Appeal, the House of Representatives should stop at the Court of Appeal, just like Senate, then reform the judiciary to perform optimally.