Justice Amina Augie, the sixth female justice of the Supreme Court, retired from the apex court on September 22, 2023 having attained the mandatory retirement age of 70. While on the bench, she was a no-nonsense jurist whose judgments have been described as not only incisive but equally analytical and rich in content and context by the former Chief Justice of Nigeria, Justice Olukayode Ariwoola.
Justice Augie was one of the speakers at an event hosted recently by the Aig-Imoukhuede Foundation where she lamented the seeming collapse of the judiciary. She also spoke of her experience while she was the Presiding Justice of the Court of Appeal, Lagos Judicial Division where her staff threatened to kill her and how she was able to outsmart them. She expressed indignation at how judicial officers who have no passion for the job and have not been trained for it, now find their way into the judiciary courtesy of the political elite. She declared that Nigeria needs justice sector reforms as badly as any other sector.
How my registry staff in Lagos threatened to deal with me.
“Nigerians are very good at assessing their bosses. If you want to go straight, they would go straight with you as long as they know you’re straight. And once they see that you want to go the other way, you may do it one yard, but they would do ten miles depending on you. My reputation would precede me I would say. So, everybody would behave themselves once I’m there because the first people I deal with are those in my office. You mess up, I deal with you.
That’s when they realized that if she could touch her personal staff, she won’t spare others, then everybody would behave well. After being moved around the various judicial divisions across the country, I was then posted to Lagos as the Presiding Judge of the Court of Appeal. After a few months of trying to put things in order, they sent me a message that if I think that I can come and touch them here, then I’m joking, that they would deal with me.
They sent me a message threatening me five months after I got there. And I keep telling the story of how I looked at myself that year. First day of Ramadan of 2013 and I am like, these people are threatening me, what do I do? When you’re so used to people obeying and then somebody decides to take you on, you could imagine how I was feeling in my chambers and at a loss of what I could do. Fortunately, the President of the Court of Appeal, Justice Bulkachuwa was in town and she left a message that I was the only one who could see her. So, I went to see her and narrated to her the whole story of what was happening to me and the threat they had given me.
I took the Registrar there who told her exactly what was happening. After I spoke to her, I went back to my chambers. One thing they don’t tell you about the civil service is that as long as it is not in writing, nobody is going to do anything about anything. And we don’t report, nobody wants to be the one to bell the cat, to actually put things in writing to complain about one thing or the other. So, when I got back to my chambers, I asked for the files of all my staff, which department they were in and how long they had been there. It was at the Registry where they sent me this threatening message that I discovered that more than twenty of them had been in the registry for 36 years. They were there for 36 years, changing jeeps and everything.
The role of the godfathers
“I now attached all of my findings and wrote a memo that my registry had collapsed, this is what has happened there, they’ve been working there but they don’t have any digital sense, that 23 people have worked for 36 years in that place, 20 people worked for 34 years. About 100 of them had been working there between 20 and 34 years in the registry. So, I wrote this, attached everything and sent it to the President of the Court of Appeal who acted on it. And before you knew it, 16 of them had been transferred from Lagos to Yola, to Ilorin, to Gombe, to wherever. They were all thrown out.
I later saw the head of Admin and I asked him, ‘how did you know the 16 people that you removed?’ And he said, ‘we’ve always known them, we’ve always known the ringleaders but they had godfathers, we couldn’t touch them but now that you have put it into writing like that, we had something to act upon’. So these 16 were thrown out and guess what happened to their godfathers. I was the Presiding Justice in Lagos, Justice Zainab Adamu Bulkachuwa, a woman, was President of the Court of Appeal and Justice Aloma Mariam Mukhtar, another woman, was the Chief Justice of Nigeria.
And these 16 registry staff who were thrown out of Lagos, moved but their so called godfathers were now rendered powerless, they couldn’t do anything as they couldn’t approach any of us. That was the end of it and before you knew it, everybody had fallen in line. A year later, there was a bus load of all these people who came to my house for a naming ceremony and I was surprised. I remember telling a friend that a year ago, these people wanted to kill me and he said ‘what do you mean they wanted to kill you, you were the one who came here to destabilize all their businesses and after some time they discovered that, if they couldn’t kill you, they might as well join you to do things’.
Corruption in the court registry
“When we are talking of the judiciary, everybody looks at the judges, they look at the judicial officers, they forget the staff that run the whole place, that the lawyers have to file processes in court, that everything has to be done before we would then come to sit in court. So, they blame the court, they blame the judges, they blame everybody without looking at the staff that have to run the place to put things together before those files are put there.
Can you imagine young lawyers who had met young registry staff in the registry where they filed their papers, and 36 years later, these lawyers are Senior Advocates of Nigeria, they are big men. But these registry staff are still seated there. So, when they want a case to go on, they would know how to do it and if they don’t want a case to go on, they would just hide the file or the papers are not there. Now, we’re overworked. I go into court and we have so many cases to do, then a lawyer says he has an application to make but it is not in the file.
Why is it not in the file, the bailiff has not served or if the bailiff has served, we can’t find it. What do we do, we’re overworked, it is therefore a case of taking an adjournment and an adjournment can take you another two years. And what has happened? One of the lawyers on the other side has bribed the staff there to remove the process.
How we have judges who don’t fit-in for the job
“For now, there are too many godfathers, putting people that don’t fit-in into the place and now we are having round pegs in square holes. I was on that Supreme Court panel that removed Chris Ngige and put Peter Obi there at that time. That was the first time in the history of this country that the court acted and removed a governor. Before then, the politicians didn’t really know the power that the court had until that case came up and then after that, come and see floodgates. And then what do we have? Politicians are very strategic, what they do now is to look at the young persons and they begin to put them there as judges, not just at the High Court but move them up. They say we need to have our people that we can call to go. This is where the whole thing started. This is how judicial officers are put into such positions who don’t have the passion for the job, who are not trained for the job. To be a judge takes a particular mindset, it’s not anybody who can do that job.
Desperation to become Senior Advocates
“And then, you have the Senior Advocates of Nigeria. To be a SAN in this country, you need to have a certain number of cases at the High Court, the Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court. So, cases that shouldn’t even be in the system are now piled up, the courts are overworked because these lawyers want to be SANs and need to have cases. So, even if their clients can’t pay, the SAN is ready to pay all the way there as long as he would have the required number of cases, so we do have a problem.
Need for judicial reforms
“So, we are wonderful people. Anyone who has ever worked with staff that are hardworking, they know what to do, it all comes from leadership, it’s all about doing the right things and being able to report them, being able to take the civil service rule and act upon it. Therefore, for reforms to happen, we need to have a paradigm shift, we need to be able to train our people. We need to have specialized schools, judicial colleges just like we have a TV college. We need to have our young ones know right from secondary school that they are going into the judicial sector, that they need to be trained whichever way it is, to be able to do that. We need justice sector reforms as badly as any other sector”.
VANGUARD
Comment here
You must be logged in to post a comment.