Their lordships saw red

You sure read the news but it bears repeating. On February 26, the Supreme Court of Nigeria, for the first time in my fading memory, laid the cane cross the back of two very senior lawyers, also known as SANs, Chief Afe Babalola and Wale Olanipekun. I had always thought that the men and women who wear the silk and sit in the inner well of the courts were living monuments to the bar and the law and therefore, beyond being chided by judges some of whom were junior to them at the bar before they climbed the bench. I was wrong. The gods too have feet of clay, you know.

Babalola and Olanipekun, two men with good records of legal pyrotechnics, were retained by David Lyon, the man who nearly became governor Bayelsa State on February 14, and his party, APC, to persuade the apex court to review its February 13 judgement and admit that it made a grievous error in the said judgement, over turn it and return Lyon and his deputy to office as governor and deputy governor respectively of Bayelsa State.

Their lordships did not find it funny. They were positively furious. As one of my good friends likes to say, their lordships saw red. I should add that they felt insulted by the two very senior lawyers who asked them to do what is done by the court only in very rare cases and for reasons of justice, not political interests.

Lawyers and judges are in love with adjectives. That often grates on my sensitive nerves. But in this case, I gave the thumbs up to their lordships who described the applications by the senior lawyers as “vexatious, frivolous and constitute a gross abuse of court process.” In case those adjectives did not ring loudly enough, Justice Sylvester Ngwuta said in clear and unambiguous English that their judgement was “final in the real sense of the word, final, and no force can get this court to shift from its decision.”

The posturing by Adams Oshiomhole, APC national chairman, must have withered in the heat of the judicial fury. I am sure he now knows that a ruling party does not own the country and cannot be allowed to bend our institutions to its whims and caprices. It must have pulverised the arrogance of the ruling party whose leaders often behave as if they were gods with feet of Julius Berger-made concrete mixtures.

Justice Amina Augie then put the lid firmly on Lyon’s forlorn hope of ever recovering his victory from his defeat when she said that granting the applications would open the floodgates of frivolous applications in a country where judges are routinely made to swim in the dirty waters of frivolities and diminish the finality of decisions by the apex court and, to put a fine point to it by this old codger, subject court decisions to the approval of senior lawyers.

She regretted that “very senior members of the bar” filed the applications “aimed at desecrating the sanctity of the court.” She would not allow the sanctity of the apex court to be so recklessly desecrated by men who benefit professionally from its sanctity. Her cane then came down heavily on Babalola and Olanipekun as a clear warning that their lordships, the primary custodians of our judicial system, would not entertain now and ever, applications intended to make the court look foolish and its judgements held in contempt by the public. A court cannot afford to dance around with its decisions. If its decisions are subject to reviews on the say-so of senior lawyers, it loses its authority and its decisions blow in the wind. If the Supreme Court had entertained the applications, it would have been swamped by now with cases dating back to the beginning of our return to civil rule in 1999.

Justice Augie did what I never thought would ever be done in our courts. She held the two very senior lawyers responsible for the unholy attempt to force the hands of the court and awarded N30 million costs against each of them to be paid personally by them. I would not know what Babalola and Olanipekun charged their clients, Lyon and APC respectively, but it would seem, on the face of it, that this must be the first time lawyers went to court to swell their purses only to see them short of N30 million. I am sure if our lawyers suffer such loses, they would learn to be less frivolous and vexatious and our judiciary would be the better for it.

This judgement and the chiding of the two very senior lawyers must stand out in the annals of our judicial system. It may be naïve to read too much meaning into its effects on our judiciary but still, it could mark a watershed in how senior lawyers treat judges and their judgements. I have always suspected that the judiciary is the way it is today because lawyers, junior and senior, are part of its problems. If judges are courageous enough not to entertain the sickening antics of senior lawyers, there would be less delay and less denial of justice. A case would not drag interminably through the courts for years and the burden on our judges would be much lighter. Justice Augie’s decision must be the bench mark and should find its way into the rules and orders of the courts at all levels in the judicial chain. If a lawyer tries to dribble the system with frivolity, the cane should come down on him, not on his client.

The senior lawyers are a privileged class in the system. They are treated differently and with genuflecting respect by judges on the lower bench. They take advantage of this and tend to act as if they have the right to stand before judges and browbeat them. Nor should we forget the allegation that EFCC has never been minded to investigate, to wit, that senior lawyers constitute a corrupting influence on judges. Even if we discount allegations that they take Ghana-must-go bags to judges to persuade them to look kindly on the cases of their clients, we cannot be ignorant of the fact that if a court delivers a judgment that makes a first year law student wince, then something must have gone badly wrong with the system and those who operate it. My pet theory, as a man untutored in the esoteric ways of the expert wielders of adjectives, is that crooked lawyers, senior and junior, have the capacity to make crooks out of judges on the borderlines of honesty. The sight of a Ghana-must-go bag could tip the judge over the bench.

There is no denying that there is much that is wrong with the judiciary. This has led over the years to calls for its reforms to make it deliver on its constitutional mandate to be the refuge of the oppressed and the poor and the primary custodian of best practices in the legal profession. It seems to me, however, that it would be futile to reform the bench without reforming the bar and hold both to the highest ideals of legal and judicial practices. The bench is a passive institution. The bar gives it life because the prosecution of cases rests squarely on the shoulders of the men and women who wear black gowns and dog collars.

Such dual reforms must begin with the honest admission that both the bar and the bench have been culpable over the years of desecrating the temple of justice. It should be possible for us to take steps to clean up the temple of justice almost daily desecrated by venal and crooked politicians, venal and crooked lawyers as well as venal and crooked judges. It is not a mission impossible. It is a mission necessary.