THE appointment of women in 2012 as heads of the nation’s appellate courts for the first time in Nigeria’s history was seen in judicial circle as a major lift in the country’s judiciary. But many stakeholders in the judiciary still believe that the appointments of Justice Mariam Muhktar as the first female Chief Justice of Nigeria and Justice Zainab Bulkachuwa as the acting President of Court of Appeal, have done little or nothing to enhance the performance of the judiciary especially in the technology delivery platform of the court. In this interview, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN) and one of the nation’s brightest lawyers, Chief Anthony Idigbe, feels a lot of reforms still need to be done to make the judiciary the last hope of the common man.

ON his assessment of the judiciary in 2012, Idigbe said the activities of the judiciary started on a slow pace last year but recorded a lot of progress towards the end of the year.

Buttressing this point, the renowned lawyer said there were a lot of on-going trials and appeals at both the High Courts and the various divisions of the Court of Appeal, especially during the last third quarter of 2012.

“If that is a sort of barometer to measure the performance of the judiciary in 2012, then, progress has been made. But I think much more can be done in the judiciary to make it more efficient. For instance, on a few occasions, you get to the court and find out that your case has been adjourned. You get to court, the judge is not sitting and you were not previously informed, notwithstanding that in the new rules of court, you are required to include your email addresses and telephone numbers in your processes.

“ I think that the court still has not found a way of communicating with lawyers. Much still needs to be done on efficient service delivery and the technology delivery platform of the courts.

According to him, the orientation of the court system should be re-organised in such a way that the lawyers should realize that they are rendering service to the people.  I strongly believe that we need to strengthen the court system by improving the platform for its service delivery to the public.”

Explaining further on why courts should function as service providers, he said: “There is a need to make it clear that the service delivery system of the court is critical to the sustenance of peace, security and democracy in Nigeria. This is virtually so, because the impunity within the entire system such as kidnapping, the Boko Haram insurgency, terrorism, armed robbery and abductions, is basically because of the collapse of the rule of law.

Although the court is only one of the agencies responsible for guaranteeing the rule of law, as the Police and other security agencies are also there, the court has a lot to do with rule of law because it is the last bus stop.

“If the court system is able to deliver justice irrespective of who is involved and if the people know that they will eventually pay the price of their wrongdoings, it may act as a check on their excessive behaviour or conduct. I think the courts play a major role in maintaining and preserving peace and security”.

On the judiciary’s role in protecting the nation’s democracy, Idigbe was of the opinion that the courts have always been the arbiter in the maintenance of the nation’s democracy and should thus continue to play that role in both constitutional and election matters.

According to him, there is a laid-down jurisprudence that should guide our judicial system in those areas, even though there is always competition as to which among constitutional, commercial and criminal matters should take precedence.

“Criminal, constitutional and commercial cases are all important and as such, none of them should be placed on top of the other. They should run in different trials. They should be handled efficiently with the right platform”.

In his opinion on the overall performance of the judiciary in the year under review, the learned silk acknowledged that justice was delivered in some cases in 2012 by the courts, while there were some bad decisions, which many people had raised issues on.

He also regretted that many expected decisions were not given owing to delays in adjudication of cases.

“There are also a lot of complaints about the quality of judgment delivered but then, it all depended on what you put in, especially on the issue of appointment of judges, the quality you get depends on the issue as I mentioned, the quality of judges.

“ We can only look forward to the future but there are some structural problems in the system and the former Chief Justice of Nigeria, Justice Dahiru Musdapher in the paper he delivered at the second National Mirror’s lecture raised some of those challenges.

He also offered some very good suggestions for reform, in the manner of regulations within the judiciary, the need for separation between the regulators of the Bench and the Bar from the participants or the operators of that sector, that is the judges for the Bench and lawyers for the Bar.

“This suggestion is very important, because what we have seen over the years is that since the regulation of the Bench has been captured by the same operators (the Judges), they only look at their own interest in the future of the Bench.

“They don’t have a broad view of the issue. This has affected many practices. We now have all sorts of ideas entrenched in the system like in promotion.

The truth is that when you run a system purely on promotion, incompetence will be encouraged or will remain in that system and you will not have the vibrancy that may be needed for the system to thrive. So, there are structural and operational efficiency issues that we need to look at and even some constitutional issues of which,

I think that our courts are presently over burdened.

“Some of these issues are understandable. For instance, you can appeal almost at every point of trial to the Supreme Court level, this leaves the Supreme Court with too much to do. We are really forced to deal with procedures rather than principles most of the time and I am much concerned with the fact that actual justice is not being delivered in a good number of particular cases both at the lower and appellate courts.

Why don’t we have the Supreme Court focused on the binding principles of law and jurisprudence and the lower courts focused on implementing them in particular cases as seen in other places? Why do we have a Court of Appeal that is inconsistent in its approach amongst its different panels and divisions and that refuse to follow principles clearly established by the Supreme Court?   Why does the Supreme Court disregard principles clearly established by it previously simply because it was set by different judges and without any explanation as to why there should be a departure? So we still need to do a lot of work to reform our system and improve our justice delivery system.

On what form the reforms should take, Idigbe said he agreed totally with Justice Musdapher’s ideas that when you restructure the regulatory framework for both the judiciary and the practice of law in Nigeria, you lay the foundation and eventually all the rest would fall in place.

“Some of this restructuring requires some form of constitutional amendment. There are actually some proposals on that. I cannot be more specific than this because when you talk about process improvement, for instance, you change the platform for justice delivery, the technology that is used and the law. It is like technology design in a market setting, our courts do not know that they are in a market, they still function based on the concept of the government as sovereign; that is the power of the judge as the king of his court and whatever he says goes. This is still very strong in the justice system in Nigeria but the constitutional rule says that the judge should provide service to the public in the determination of his rights and obligations. In doing this there are key operators the court system has to interface with in order to be able to provide the service to the people. “A lot of the key people that are easily seen include the lawyers who advocate on behalf of their clients. It is important that the courts recognise the place of a well-designed communication platform in order to ensure that they don’t have service failures and deliver justice consistently. Apart from a communication platform it has to have a document management platform that will eliminate current inefficiencies.

For instance, I am surprised that at this age when we have achieved online registration of companies, we cannot file a Writ online in Nigeria, which is more important to be invested in? Why is it that we do not have a platform for pre- trial conference to be taken electronically with the judge in the comfort of his or her chambers and the lawyers in their offices and the transcript distributed within one hour thereafter? I currently work at that level now with some of my clients and organizations that I am involved with.

What is it that is holding back innovation in service delivery in the judiciary? Why is it that there is not calendaring systems deplored by the courts to help avoid or management service failure resulting from conflicting appointments, etc?

On the appointment of women as head in the appellate courts in 2013, Idigbe is of the view that the most important thing is appointing competent people in position of authority and not on gender basis because of the importance of leadership in every system.

“For us in Nigeria, we should try to make sure that the best gets to the top position. I am just worried about looking at issues from only such basis because the same argument that we used to say that female should head agencies is the same way we would argue that Igbo, Hausa or Yoruba should be the head. It has become an issue of orientation, the argument is not just right, whether, it is rotation or sharing because it is your turn as Bola Ige described it, “Come and Chop’ mentality is bad for us a people. I have the same issue against the promotion argument. We have to be very careful in projecting some of these issues. Of course, it is good and I am happy with the fact that women are rising to the top level of the profession but I do not think that it is really the high point. The fact is to ensure that the leadership is competent.''