Aliyu Dasuki’s estate: Where amicable settlement collapsed – Lawyer

Would you say the process of the appointment of the silk in Nigeria is transparent enough?I have my reservation about the position of SAN. There are SAN and there are SAN. The SANship as we used to know it and the prestige of that position is no more there today. Think about people like FRA […]

Would you say the process of the appointment of the silk in Nigeria is transparent enough?
I have my reservation about the position of SAN. There are SAN and there are SAN. The SANship as we used to know it and the prestige of that position is no more there today. Think about people like FRA Williams, you will know that they really merit the position. But today you go to a court, even as a lay man sitting at the public gallery, and hear them make unguided statements in court then you begin to wonder how they became SAN. So such products will give you the indication that the process of selection of SAN has a lot of flaws.
Also, we turn out SAN on a yearly basis as if it’s a college where when you get to the final year, you must graduate some students. We do it now as if it is a matter of course that we must have SAN every year which should not be like that. It is not every year that some lawyers have excelled in the profession. It should be where someone has really merited it , if it takes two years before you can get one SAN, so be it.
These days you have to apply for SANship instead of been identified by stakeholders in the profession as being very good and then meriting the position. You should be nominated, but now you apply for it and go as far as lobbying for it. So to this extent, I think the process is very much flawed.
Should the death penalty be abolished?
Death penalty is a severe punishment. Apart from that it is the severest punishment, but there are offences where if you abolish death sentences it is a clarion call to commit such offences. Issue of mass terrorism where the suspect is sentenced to some years after a delayed trial; the suspect is still there and been feed by the state while the relatives of the victims are there seeing the same person who had killed about 10 people being feed with state fund.
So the death penalty is not too severe for the kind of offences that it is presently prescribed for in Nigeria. As far as I am concerned, it is a good deterrent for any offence that is commensurate with that punishment and there are very few offences like that and for those offences, the death penalty should stay as a deterrent.
What informed your petition to the EFCC and AGF over the Estate of late Aliyu Dasuki?
Most of us in this country will remember the name Aliyu Ahmed Dasuki. If you cannot remember quickly and you are told about Hold Trade Air which was involved in airlifting pilgrims and some other services like that, you will quickly recall the name. He died about 21 years ago as a practicing Muslim. At the time of his death, he had three children- two females and a boy – who were all minors; he was also survived by a single wife, Jamila Dasuki.

Upon his death the natural thing to do was to find somebody to gather his estate together in a bid to sharing them in accordance with Islamic law and that was exactly what was done. The uncle, His Eminence the former sultan, who was there at that material time, in his wisdom nominated one of his sons, the immediate senior brother to Jamila Dasuki, the wife of the deceased and a cousin to the deceased himself in a close knit family. He nominated him and presented his name to the probate in the court in Sokoto to consider him during the letter of administration and that is the legal instrument that would empower him to go anywhere the world over where his assets are and seek to gather them together and bring them home for distribution. That was done promptly but the events that followed later turned out to be sour.

Long after the letter of administration was given and the administrator started working, after the grieve period, the immediate family did not see how the estate was being administered. In any event they felt that there was no accountability and transparency in relation to the whole exercise.
As a first step, the widow applied for a cancellation of the letter of administration to Ahmed Dasuki. That done, she was now appointed the administrator in his place but a lot of water had already passed under the bridge before that time and there was already distrust amongst the former administrator and the heirs to the estate who did not see that any reasonable part of the estate has been gathered in and made available for distribution. After several entities within the family failed to yield result for the two parties to come together and settle their differences, the new administrator in her position and being responsible for her children now filed an action at the Sokoto High court and judgment was given in December last year.

Before the judgment, several moves were being made for settlement but for Alhaji Ahmed Dasuki it was not normally possible to get him for discussions.
After all caution was over, the heirs now had course to complain first to the EFCC because beyond the issue of simple accounting as a trustee (administrator) we perceived that there were criminal misconduct in the whole exercise and when there could not be an amicable settlement as he was not available we now decided to take over the criminal aspect of the whole business.
We file direct criminal complaint before the Upper Sharia Court Sokoto, criminal breach of trust, destruction of evidence and a summons was served on Ahmed Dasuki but he still refused to attend court.
After several adjournments, the court was constrained to issue a bench warrant for the arrest of Ahmed Dasuki, and soon after the bench warrant was issued Ahmed Dasuki took to not being available at all in the country; he took to being outside the country most of the time.
At that time he became out of reach both at the Upper Sharia court, Sokoto and other law enforcement agencies in the country.
My clients were aggrieved because a bench warrant was issued and he was not available. Each time we go to court it was just another adjournment. So we filed a petition to EFCC hoping that with their international connection they will apprehend him.
After a long time and the EFCC did not act, we now filed another petition to the Office of the AGF to intervene and the AGF constituted a committee headed by very senior lawyers in the ministry. The committee took the trouble of going to Ghana to meet him and they came back with their report.

Is this not what lawyers call abuse of court process, when there is a case at the Upper Sharia Court and at the Sokoto State High Court?
There is no abuse of court process in this case. What we have at the High court is a civil action for account. A trustee is being asked to account for his stewardship for the period when he was an administrator. If he gives us an account and we are not satisfied then we are at liberty to ask for specific remedies. Judgment was delivered in that case last December and the court felt he was not obliged to account. There is an appeal on that right now. The High court judgment was the first so we still have Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court, so it is too early for anybody to celebrate right now.
What we have going into in the Upper Sharia Court was a criminal proceedings. When you are prosecuting the civil and the criminal aspects it is not an abuse of court process, it is only when we are asking for account at both the Sokoto High Court and at the Upper Sharia Court on the same subject matter. That is when it becomes an abuse; that means you want to vex your neighbour.
In the Sharia Court we are asking for criminal proceedings to be instituted against Ahmed Dasuki; certain conduct we consider to be criminal breach of trust in his dealings with the estate; in the other case we are asking for account of everything he did.