THE NEED FOR JUDICIAL REFORMS
Only competent lawyers with integrity should be appointed as Judges
At the opening of the 2025 All Nigerian Judges’ Conference of the Superior Courts in Abuja last week, President Bola Tinubu highlighted the difficulties in accessing justice, delayed judgments, questionable conduct and other issues militating against the dispensation of justice in the country. “Justice must never be for sale, and the Bench must never become a sanctuary for compromise. Corruption in any arm of government weakens the nation, but corruption in the Judiciary destroys it at its core,” the president told the men and women on the Bench. “These perceptions, whether wholly justified or not, cannot be ignored. They call upon us to reflect, to reform, and to restore.”
While the president may have said the right things, Nigerians are tired of sermons that are not backed by any concrete actions. In August last year, Attorney General of the Federation and Minister of Justice, Lateef Fagbemi, said Nigerian courts are no longer for the ordinary people. “Gone were those days when the judiciary was regarded as the last hope of the common man. It is the big people now who patronise the judiciary,” Fagbemi said at a ceremony where several judges and lawyers were present.
For more than two decades, especially since the current democratic dispensation in 1999, critical stakeholders in the justice sector have been calling for transparency and merit in the appointment of judges. To change the narrative, the process of appointing judges must be reviewed among other reform measures. From Customary to the Supreme Court, appointment of Judges is now fraught with controversies and allegations of impropriety. Time has therefore come for the leadership of the judiciary to accept reality that the current system is basically unsustainable.
Section 255 of the 1999 Constitution (as amended) states that to qualify for appointment as a judge of a high court, the person must have been called to the bar for ten years. Meanwhile, the National Judicial Council (NJC) guidelines specifically identify the following as those qualified to be appointed as judges: Legal practitioners in private practice; legal practitioners in public service who are legal officers; chief registrar of court and chief magistrate. Other prerequisites include that the candidates be of good character and reputation, of unquestionable integrity, and possess sound knowledge of law.
However, as lofty as the foregoing requirements may seem, the NJC has consistently breached them when appointing judges by introducing cronyism. Those who make the list now are relations of powerful politicians and prominent lawyers or sitting/ retired Judges. Besides, there are serious questions about some of the guidelines. For instance, at the appellate levels, judges are elevated to higher bench based on seniority and vacancies from geographical zones and not on merit. It is not important if the justice in question is lazy or is of a dubious character. The same procedure is applied in promoting high court judges to the Court of Appeal. With merit sacrificed for seniority, the result has been obvious.
As it is, the president has not said anything different from what other stakeholders have been saying and which judicial officers themselves know to be the situation. But as beneficiaries of the same skewed appointment process, it is not likely that the leadership of the Bench can institutionalise the necessary reforms from within. Yet, as we have repeatedly stated on this page, the function of law as an instrument of social engineering can only be made difficult when judges compromise their oath by acts of omission or commission. There can be no better time than now for a reform of the administration of justice in Nigeria.
