Technicalities in the Administration of Justice: Senator Abaribe vs Nigerian Chief Justice Tanko

What A Sad Day in the Nigerian Justice System!

JUSTICE TANKO DOES NOT DESERVE A SIT AT THE NIGERIAN SUPREME COURT. Period.

When the Chief Justice is having difficulties making informed or reasonable distinctions between Legal Technicalities and Grammatical/Semantics Technicalities, then, there is a cause for Nigerian lawyers at home and abroad to cry out loud. You cannot destroy the Justice system by picking as heard of the apex court a justice (qualified or not) who is readily disposed to voting for you or likely to bend the course of justice in your favor in the event that the Presidential Election Petition Tribunal hearing comes before the Supreme Court. That's profoundly asinine. This appointment should be condemned in the strongest term by the Nigerian Body of Benchers and our legal practitioners.

He was so incoherent that the Senate President had to intervene and rescue him from further embarrassment. The appointment of Justice Tanko as the Chief Justice of the Nigerian Supreme Court is nepotism taken to the extreme. He is ill-informed. He is not learned. And he is not fit to be at the Supreme Court. Period.

He had nothing to say about the indiscriminate ruling in favor of ex parte orders and permanent injunctive reliefs by judges. He did not remember the deployment of procedural rigmarole by lawyers to defeat substantive justice in Nigerian courts. Instead, he dwelled unintelligibly on the technical expertise required in flying an aircraft. Alluding to the wisdom of the court in inviting technical experts to interpret technical issues in a given case is a voyage of discovery. That is not the question the Senator asked you to address. To put it in Naija parlance, Legal Technicality relates to winning a case through "mago mago" and "wuru wuru" without following proper legal procedures or rule of law. It has nothing to do with science or technology as a discipline.

I am very passionate about this issue because the question the Senator asked the Chief Justice to address was what prompted me to write the number one essay on this Blog in 2012. An essay that later served as the talking points for those who argued for the retention of the Immunity Clause (section 308 of the Nigerian Constitution as amended), during the 2014 Constitutional Review Hearing. And it is the bedrock of our Criminal Justice Reform based on the judicial lapses identified in the essay. And to be in the wood on issues of legal technicalities that have been so abused by Nigerian lawyers and similarly condemned by lawyers, commentators, and retired jurists shows the level of the disconnect between the Buhari's Tanko and the Nigerian justice systems.

If President Buhari is so bent on appointing one of his own as the Chief Justice of the Nigerian Supreme Court, he can do better than a Sharia Law scholar. If he cannot find a competent jurist from the Bench, he can as well go to the academics throughout the northern region to search for a seasoned legal scholar to satisfy his ethnic considerations. At least, such a candidate would enrich the body of our Bench with his or her sound academic background.

The present administration has destroyed the fighting spirit and strength of our Armed Forces through unmerited appeasement and behind the scene recruitment of captured Boko Haram members into the Military. Today, our soldiers can no longer defend themselves at the battlefronts or in their respective units, because their movement, strategies, and tactics are at the disposals of the enemies as soon as they are made. How can you explain the ambush and killing of a Colonel, a Captain, and a few others on patrol just a few days ago? The Nigerian Judiciary is next in line. He doesn't care as long as someone who speaks like him (the President) and worships like him (the President) is in charge. But we do care, and Nigerians do care.

I have no arms or the political office/power to stop the President or to remove him from office. The best I can do is to express myself and to let the whole world know that this President is driving Nigeria dangerously towards extinction. And I do hope and pray that someone in his inner circle is reading this and be courageous enough to remind him that Nigeria comes first. Not his religion or his tribe. Justice Tanko is not fit and he is not qualified to be at the Nigerian Supreme Court. I expect Nigerians lawyers to take a stand and speak.