Judgment discrepancy: Akpata charges A’court president to save judiciary

A former president of the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA), Olumide Akpata has admonished the president of the Court of Appeal, Justice Monica Dongban-Mensem to offer more cogent reasons on the discrepancy in the Kano governorship election judgment to safe the face of the judiciary.

Akpata gave the advice in a statement while reacting to the “error” noticed in the judgment pronounced in the open court and the content of the Certified True Copy (CTC) obtained from the court registry in the Kano State Governorship Petition Appeal.

He stressed that the stake is too high for the issue to be left for the registry.

The ex NBA president linked defective process of recruitment of justices to judicial outputs and recalled his days as a member of the Interview Committee of the National Judicial Council (NJC) during which an interview for prospective justices of court of appeal showed that some of the “candidates displayed a confounding lack of knowledge of very basic legal principles.”

He stated that lethal combination of a shoddy recruitment process and the impoverishment of Judges and the Judiciary by the executive is an insidious attempt by the Nigerian political class and their collaborators to “capture” the Judiciary, which he said constitutes a clear threat to the rule of law in Nigeria.

“I have had cause, at different fora, to revisit and highlight this vexed issue of the sub-optimal recruitment process in the Nigerian Judiciary and what it portends not just for the future of the institution but of the entire nation.

“My position has also been very unfortunately vindicated by recent occurrences in our Judiciary. A case in point being the scandalous and extremely embarrassing report of an apparent discrepancy between the judgment pronounced in open court and the CTC obtained from the Court Registry.

“This rather bizarre incident has further accentuated the crisis in the Nigerian Judiciary, which is exacerbated by the many confounding decisions emanating from our courts that continue to bewilder and befuddle observers of this once revered arm of government,” he said.

According to him, the Chief Registrar of the Court of Appeal, Umar Bangari’s attribution of the discrepancy to a clerical error was difficult to accept and therefore called on the Appeal court to give a more reasonable explanation to save the face of the judiciary.

“With the greatest respect, the Chief Registrar’s approach to this matter is most untenable, as it flies in the face of reason and also does not conform with our extant laws on the subject.

“Whilst, acknowledging the fact of human fallibility and the possibility of mistakes occurring, the fundamental nature of this “error” and the impact it has on such a consequential part of the judgment, make it extremely difficult to accept,” he held.