About Buhari’s judicial utopia (1)

Barometer

After disinviting Kaduna State governor, Nasir el-Rufai, from its virtual 60th annual conference, and receiving mixed but generally positive reactions from the public, the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) went on to successfully conduct the conference last Wednesday. It was during the conference that President Buhari decried the “terribly slow pace” of justice administration in Nigeria and urged the judiciary to complete all its criminal cases in twelve months. He also chipped in that it would not be a bad idea to round up civil cases within fifteen months. This was an astute observation and an excellent suggestion.

Displaying sagacious curiosity, the president sought to know why there could not be a time limit for criminal and civil cases as there already were for electoral cases. “Why can’t we have a rule that will say a criminal trial all the way to the supreme court must not exceed 12 months? And why can’t we do the same for civil cases? Even if we say that civil cases must not go beyond between 12 and 15 months. I think that for me is stepping forward.”

There are a number of factors militating against the president’s wish; some of them, analysts say, his fault. Criminal cases often begin at the scene of the crime. How are crime scenes secured in Nigeria? In a police force that has complained of being so grossly underfunded that it often was incapable of performing its sworn duties, it would be building castles in Spain to hope for efficiency in investigating crime and acquiring evidence. Police stations are poorly equipped, and police vans continue to provide humour to Nigerians minded to see the sunny side of life in all things.

The police themselves have been accused of leaning towards training methods that focus more on the use of brawn. The reason is they have no access to sophisticated forensic science, which is all they need to move to the next level of police investigations. It is alien to hold the title of detective; sleuths are otherworldly  unicorns even  in Nigeria. It is the work of a minute for crime scenes to be contaminated by the citizenry and the police themselves, due to lack of proper training and equipment for gathering necessary data for forensic investigations.

Accounts abound in the media of how the police conveniently arrived at crime scenes well after the perpetrators of a crime would have bidden their victims fond farewells and packed up shop, rounded up innocent civilians whose ill fortunes stationed them around the crime scene, summarily locked them up and commenced torturing them into confessing to crimes they have not committed.

The police cannot give what they do not have. As it stands, they are short on the expertise and competence needed to conduct proper investigations into crimes; and they will never acquire that expertise until they are retrained, restructured and retooled. It is unfair and immodest to therefore push the onus of rapid and efficient administration of justice on the judiciary, which is trained to determine guilt or innocence on the balance of probabilities based on proof. The law cannot divine without evidence, and judges cannot judge based on mere intuition, especially when they are overstressed, overworked and also poorly equipped.

They often have to endure complacency and abuse of court proceedings from both the police and the Nigerian Correctional Services, who are themselves victims of the federal government’s permissiveness. The police, unable to perform their duties due to underfunding, have been known to display a devil-may-care attitude towards criminal proceedings with repeated failures to appear in court while the correctional service, even more underfunded, has been known to refuse to produce an accused person in court because there were no vehicles for transporting the suspect(s) to the court rooms. Blissfully screened from this reality, the presidency went on to portrait other parts of its judicial utopia, particularly the small matter of technicalities and appointments of judges.

On technicalities, he preached that, “Justice must make sense to lawyers and non-lawyers alike; as a matter of fact, more to non-lawyers because we are in the majority. Triumph of technicalities opens a door for all sorts of speculations about the true motives of the court and can only detract slowly but surely from the authority of our courts.”

There is more to technicality in law than the concept immediately offers. It is true that artful and wily lawyers enjoy exploiting loopholes in the law, some for personal gain, others just to demonstrate their enterprise. But technicalities cannot be separated from the law. The interpretation of the law itself is governed by its own law, often called principles, rules and standards. Sometimes, these principles may seem unfair to the layman. Sometimes these principles may appear to fly in the face of equity. These principles are, however, necessary as they protect a greater interest.

• Continued next week