‘I have robust plans for young lawyers’

What new should lawyers expect from you as NBA President?Can we also look at the possibility to hire medical experts each time our members meet at one forum or the other?  We get these people to go there, evaluate their stress level and see what can be done to help them. Sometime ago I was […]

What new should lawyers expect from you as NBA President?
Can we also look at the possibility to hire medical experts each time our members meet at one forum or the other?  We get these people to go there, evaluate their stress level and see what can be done to help them. Sometime ago I was at one of the divisions of the Court of Appeal. The three justices were in chambers, lawyers and litigants were there and the cases could not go on because two of the justices had received notice of transfer. Generally once you receive a notice transferring you from one division to another, you don’t sit, otherwise it is we lawyers that will raise eyebrows and say what is his interest in the matter.
The question you want to ask is to avoid such disruption, in regular proceedings of the court is it possible to evolve a policy that will affect transfer of our justices from the Court of Appeal during vacation period. We complain of delays and congestions, all these are still with us.
What are your plans for the NBA and specifically in terms of mentoring?
I have very robust plans not only for the NBA but also for the legal profession itself and, using the NBA as a platform, also for this country. I will take the one you have attached a great premium to and that is mentoring. It is on record that I was the first lawyer at the NBA conference to draw attention to the need for us to have an organised method of training for young lawyers when we were all complaining about the fallen standards of ethics. It was at a gathering of the legal session in Kaduna around 2009 when I hammered on the need to have in place a well-coordinated system of mentoring the junior ones, because life itself is a teacher. All of us are climbing the rope which we have never climbed before. So it is normal if you want to make a success of any journey, identify a person that has succeeded and begin to pattern your life after him or her. That is how success is made. It makes it cheaper and faster for you.
Early enough I identified my mentors in the legal profession and without them knowing that they were mentoring one fellow somewhere. Is it in appearance or in presentation? I have mentors. In presentation of my matters in court I took after Chief Gani Fawehinmi and I never spent one day in Gani Fawehinmi’s chambers.  But you cannot see me in court advocating without saying that I am one of the graduates of that chambers. In terms of my appearance I consciously emulated Chief JKO Ajayi now of blessed memory, he never knew.  In my office you can hardly differentiate between the principal and the other lawyers in chambers. Nobody dresses anyhow, whether a man or a woman.
The need for mentoring cannot be overemphasised and I am going to have a coordinated system at the National Secretariat that will oversee these all important aspect of the profession.
I don’t believe that you need to be a millionaire before you dress well. I have a very robust plan for the young and junior members of the Bar and I tag it “from capacity building to economic empowerment”.
Over the years, our past presidents and leaders put in place what was called the Young Lawyer Forum, I thank them for it and through this forum a lot of attempts have been made to build capacity through conferences and seminars. We will take off from there, it is time to translate that capacity they have got into definite economic empowerment. Let them get what they can do to make money. How many of the junior ones know that you can access briefs from ECOWAS? That you can appear before ECOWAS Court, what has been done to ensure that their eyes are opened to that avenue?  Today individuals and banks will find it rather easier to go to EFCC, SFU of the NPF to chase recovery of debts from debtors, criminalising an otherwise civil transaction between two parties. For every brief that goes to SFU or EFCC to recover money, these organs I believe get paid for jobs done and for such briefs they constitute losses to the lawyers outside. When we started our practice, banks found it easy to contact their solicitors outside to recover money so there has been a deliberate plan to hijack the jobs of the lawyers and give it to these commissions or to the SFU.
We will take our job back. Even where some of these briefs go to senior lawyers, when senior lawyers make money they will use that to bring in more juniors into their chambers. And they will be able to pay them and of course some of the briefs will go to junior lawyers also. There is a need to retrieve our job.
Secondly, we also talk about continued legal education and I have a lot of things which we can use to empower the junior ones.
For a long time we have been advocating that all our judges should have the services of research assistance. We have a couple of judges in Nigeria from the High Court to the Supreme Court, imagine a situation where each of them has research assistance.
When I had the privilege of being appointed as member of the Judicial Service Commission in Ekiti State this was one of the first things that we achieved. Every judge in Ekiti State today has research assistance and I don’t see why we cannot duplicate this throughout the federation. There are still courts today in Nigeria where non-lawyers are prosecuting, policemen are prosecuting persons while lawyers are idling away doing nothing. This is what I mean by economic empowerment and l have a lot of programmes like that.
Are you saying that EFCC and SFU are not money recovery agents?
Yes, they are not money recovery agencies; they are to investigate and to prosecute offenders according to their establishment acts. Recovery of debts is purely a civil matter and enforcement of terms of agreement is purely civil but over a period of time some of them may hide under obtaining money under false pretences. How can you tell me that somebody who went to the bank to borrow money to execute a contract , contract was executed but somewhere somehow money was not paid  on time and the customer ran into debt; simple, take him to court. After all, we expect that he will have collateral security to back up the facility. Everything has a reason in law. The reason for collateral security is that when it is time for him to pay and he is unable to pay, you fall on the security and turn it back into cash to recover your money.
What about your plans for the judiciary?
Our EXCO will impact not only our members but also the judiciary. The judiciary occupies a strategic position in any constitutional democracy, particularly a developing democracy like ours. We started this experience in 1999 and this is about 15 years now. There are democracies in the world that are more than 200 years so you will see the role the judiciary has played within the period. They are the only organ that has stabilised the country, that is still within the context of the limitations and problems that they have. We are going to embark on a campaign to better the lot of judges. I have had personal interviews with a good number of them at the High Court and Court of Appeal and I know that a lot can still be done to give more incentives so that they can put in more attention.
What sort of incentives are you referring to here?
One thing that bothers my heart is that I found out that there is nothing like post-retirement settlement for our justices at the appellate level. In Lagos State, judges occupy houses on the basis of owner occupier. So you don’t see a situation where a judge of Lagos State leaves in Ikoyi while in service and upon retirement he or she has to move to Agege to go and live, it does not happen again in Lagos State and this can be duplicated throughout the federation.