Can we just pause and reboot?
Nigeria has marked her 61st Independence anniversary and I’ve been wondering if it’s possible to pause this nation and do some resetting.
I started thinking about this after spending three hours at a Federal High Court in Lagos on Wednesday.
While we were waiting for the arrival of the Judge, one of the senior lawyers in the courtroom started lamenting.
“There are over ten thousand pending case files at the Supreme Court. How many judges do we have there to treat them? When are they going to treat them?” he said. Anger was written all over his face, the kind of anger that triggered young Nigerians to take to the streets in October 2020 to demand an end to police brutality.
10,000 case files? Well, that was not the high point of my three hours at the court.
I’ve always heard about how cases drag unnecessarily in Nigerian courts for too long, and I had a first-hand experience on Wednesday.
The Judge was supposed to attend to more than 20 cases on that day. Two of the first five cases on his list were criminal cases; the suspects were brought to the court from the prison. When their cases were called, the prosecutor (lawyer to the government) in the first case told the Judge to step down the case because the government official bringing the exhibit to court was stuck in traffic. Wahala? I could imagine what was running through the mind of the suspect.
When the second criminal case was called, the other prosecutor also told the Judge to adjourn it because the three witnesses were writing promotional exams and couldn’t make it to court. It was adjourned for two months. In July, the same case was adjourned till September because the witnesses didn’t appear in court.
The suspects, guilty or not, will spend another two months in jail, and two months may turn five years. So if the penalty for the crime is six months imprisonment, the slow grind of the wheel of justice may have kept the suspect behind bars for five years awaiting trial.
That’s how the circle of adjournment continues for thousands of cases. And the prisons? They become overpopulated with prisoners awaiting trial. In 2020, the World Prison Brief said the proportion of prisoners awaiting trial is 72.2% in Nigeria.
These are just a few of the myriad of issues that confirm that something is fundamentally wrong with this 61-year journey.
In whatever you do, stay away from anything that will cost you your freedom. It is costly in Nigeria. If you’re in doubt, ask Herbert Macaulay, Obafemi Awolowo, Anthony Enahoro and others how they got Nigeria’s independence. Nigeria is not Norway, where prisoners lounge and chill in private rooms.
After leaving the court, I studied how the prison system works in Norway and concluded that Nigeria needs a reboot. We can’t just continue driving on this road that appears to lead to nowhere.
Maybe we could pause and refresh. Is it possible?
