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Sunday 3 July 2016

Reforming our Legal and Penal System - Faseyiku

If Nigeria must work, it will only do so if we have a legal and penal system that works. I love the on-going war against corruption and have high hopes that the administration will not be distracted. But we will be undone if we do not address the institutional robustness of the legal and penal system in Nigeria. The framework is currently too weak to sustain us and cope with the myriad of issues that are emerging daily. At the moment, lawyers take us for a ride and that must stop. In the UK, when you have a QC, I mean a single one, arguing your case, it can never get better. You hardly have a situation where 13 QCs (as in the case of PMB's certificate) or 60 QCs as in the Ricky Tarfa matter lining up behind an accussed. A case that one QC cannot argue successfully, a hundred are unlikely to do so. 

Therefore, if we need to pay judges as much as we pay the nation's number one citizen and ringfence the pensions payment system for retired judges to pevent them becoming "legal consultants" so be it. Indeed, we must bar them from any engagement with the bar in any form or shape once they retire from service. We must also make it possible for them to face criminal prosecution for proven cases of misconduct rather than simply retiring the errant ones. It has to be a combination of the stick and the carrot. Another way is to make it possible for them to serve on the bench for life as is the practice in the US. That way, the prospect of them becoming conduits of corruption will be curtailed. Retirement should be completely voluntary or based on health reasons.
Secondly, we need to rebuild the penal system. We need to quadruple the number of physical prison spaces available and invest in them so that criminals would "love" to go there. Those serving term have basic rights that must be upheld at all times. The corruption that has infested the systems has meant many of those we send to prisons die needlessly or are susceptible to developing life-threatening ailments. This does not have to be so. Prisoners must have dedicated facilities to improve their health and well-being especially for serious health issues such as mental illnesses. These are immediate imperatives that the administration must achieve and unfortunately after spending a year it would appear that the Buhari administration are not looking in this direction. Many thought the reforms will come under the Obasanjo regime given his unfortunate experience in prisons but he was consumed by his 3rd term agenda to remember where he had come from.

No one should be deceived that ACJA is a cure-all for all the problems with the criminal justice system. Both the criminal and its civil justice arm are currently undermined, underfunded and underdeveloped. While our legislators are still busy about "juicy" positions we should make the judiciary sufficiently capable of expanding the content and context of our laws through robust jurisprudential activism and engagement. In those days, justices like the late Aguda, late Eso, Tobi, Uwaifo, Nnamani helped to expand the horizon of our legal system through meaningful engagement and informed erudition. It is sad today that even the supreme court cannot be guaranteed to provide a modern direction to legal development as its archaic interpretation of the electoral disputes wherein it unfortunately practically slapped down the card-readers verification system had demonstrated. 

I hope those who are interested in seeing progress can draw the attention of the administration to this. If given us a sturdy justice system is all that the present administration can bequeath to Nigeria, we would have been served well.

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