The group said adequate funding of the ACJL implementation would accelerate judicial processes, reduce backlog and ensure that litigations are not unduly prolonged by intermediate appeals.
The CLEEN foundation Executive Director, Mr Peter Maduoma disclosed this while presenting a report of its survey on the states.
The survey understudied the defections and functionality of the criminal justice system.
Maduoma said there is a need for increased budgetary allocation for the ACJL.
He listed the states under study to include Bauchi, Jigawa, Delta, Cross, River, Edo, Kwara, Sokoto and Katsina and stated that the report showed low efforts towards tackling issues affecting the effective implementation of the criminal justice law.
Maduoma said 35 states allocated over N245 billion to establish local guards, purchase of weapons and uniforms in the 2025 budget, but didn’t try to ensure functionality of the criminal justice system.
He described the situation as a big deficit on the part of the states, adding that the implication is that they were starving the criminal justice system of funds to continue to wield political influence on the judiciary.
He decried the situation, pointing out that the government likes to put money in construction of bridges and roads which they will later inaugurate to make people see them as working.
In addition, the group demanded effective police reform as it lists findings on stakeholders’ compliance with the Police Act.
“So, you have the monuments, but the people’s lives are not secure. The people’s lives don’t have any social change, and then there is also this problem that people now react and begin to take law into their hands, like what we’ve seen happen in Uromi, Edo State,” he said.
He also decried the plea-bargaining practice recognised by the criminal justice system, stating that it has been bastardised to become a cesspit of corruption, extortion and miscarriage of justice.
Also, the group’s Programme Director, Dr. Salaudeen Hashim, said the Federal Government provided a paltry sum of N73 million for the implementation of ACJL in the 2024 budget but set aside over a billion naira for the renovation of offices and procurement of vehicles.
He said: “So, one of the things we have also discovered across the board is that politicians will rather put money into capital projects that they know has some element of back door, in terms of what they get out of it, rather than putting it in programmes that reforms the entire system. This in itself calls for serious concern.
“I believe it is very important that we raise some of these observations for the states. As a matter of fact, in some states, we noticed very clearly that the setting up of the Administrative Criminal Justice Monitoring Committee that should actually monitor compliance of all the criminal justice actors within the value chain is entirely missing. Some states don’t even have them set up.
“For states where you have them set up, they are not being operated. For some states where you have them in operation, some of them don’t even know where their offices are, and some of them don’t even know what their rules should look like.
“We think this is a very big issue that needs to be spotlighted, especially the inadequacy of funding for purposes of promoting judicial activism.
“So, the deficit in the implementation and the functionality of this law has actually put justice up for sale, and this in itself is one very key gap that we have actually seen.”
According to him, one of the reasons the entire independence of the judiciary has become very difficult is because people have some level of weapon, which is actually funding.
He lamented that they regulate funding into the judiciary just to limit its level of independence and self-control.
