Judges performance evaluation report: Matters arising

This is partly because judges represent God on earth and should therefore dispense justice without fear or favour.According to a retired jurist, Justice Olufunmilola Adekeye, it takes hardworking people to produce a good judgment and the quality of a judgment depends on research.Another retired jurist, Justice George Oguntade said that Judges should not be afraid […]

This is partly because judges represent God on earth and should therefore dispense justice without fear or favour.
According to a retired jurist, Justice Olufunmilola Adekeye, it takes hardworking people to produce a good judgment and the quality of a judgment depends on research.
Another retired jurist, Justice George Oguntade said that Judges should not be afraid to write their judgments. This is because it will be corrected at the higher bench.
Daily Trust investigation also reveals that some judges are unable to perform effectively due to ill health.
To the Chief Justice of Nigeria (CJN) Justice Aloma Mariam Mukhtar the number of judgments delivered could be one of the basis of measuring whether a judge is hard working or not.
The Performance Evaluation Report (PER) for a judge was introduced to fish out lazy judges. Under the PER, a serving judge must deliver at least four (4) judgments annually to be able to retain his seat.

Ordinarily, the National Judicial Council (NJC) has a monitoring team mandated to visit all the superior courts— Court of Appeal, Federal and State High Courts, National Industrial Court, Customary and the Shari’a Courts of Appeal periodically to collate data on the numbers of civil, criminal and motions assigned each court as well as gathering data on the number of these cases disposed off as well as those pending at the end of each quarter.
The same NJC’s committee on performance evaluation has empirical data bank titled ‘’Nigeria’s Judicial Performance Report’’ which also contains information on the performance of individual judicial officer.
Besides, the report shows the manner in which the cases were disposed off, whether they were cases decided on  merit or they were struck out as non-contested cases. Judges are rated based on the cases disposed on merit.
Hassan Liman SAN believes that judges should not be made to work under any pressure by insisting that they must deliver a number of judgments in a quarter in view of the problem of infrastructural deficiencies already plaguing our courts.  He mentioned the quality of judgments, adding that a serving judge recently slumped and died in office.
Other lawyers pointed out that due to imbalance in cases filed nationwide, a serving judge in a state like Yobe may not have up to three cases per day in his court while a serving judge in Lagos, Abuja or Port Harcourt may have up to 20 cases per day.
Today, the situation in both criminal and civil procedure is scandalous to our notion of justice. To exhaust complete remedy in a case, i.e. from trial court to Supreme Court, could take up to 20 years with the original litigants dead and substituted and in some cases the substitutes also dead and substituted. The process of interlocutory appeals aggravates the situation to the extent that by the time the Supreme Court decides that they be continued in trial court, most of the witnesses might have died or are alive but senile, with documents no longer traceable.
In most cases the parties would have become more miserable than when they submitted their grievances to the court.
One instance that readily comes to mind is the criminal trial of major Hamza Al-Mustapha, which has lasted almost 12 years before getting to the apex court.

While speaking in her office recently, the CJN said that it was highly absurd to observe that some judges can’t even deliver up to two judgments in a quarter.
 ‘’We are now thinking of looking at the performance evaluation of the judges for the purpose of discipline. If a judge cannot deliver three to four judgements in a year, there is no use keeping him on the bench other than to be shown his or her way out,” she said.
Justice Mukhtar also revealed that she had earlier directed judges wishing to travel abroad to seek for her permission through his or her head of court.
Justice Mukhtar said that she didn’t know how bad the situation was until she directed all judges to seek for CJN’s permission through their heads of courts before travelling abroad.
The CJN said that, “The Nigerian Bar Association has also been complaining about the attitudes of judges to work this days. Many will leave their work and travel for days abroad. This is why I insisted they must obtain approval before travelling abroad. Until this directive, I never thought things were all that bad, because some of the judges will be seeking for permission to travel abroad while the courts are in session, despite  the six weeks holiday they are entitled to in a year.”
 These are part of the reasons the NJC undertakes performance evaluation from time to time  both at the trial and appellate courts to determine productivity of the judges and their courts in the states and the Federal Capital Territory.
Under the civil service rule, any worker who is rated poor or unproductive on performance evaluation exercise can be asked to give way for good hands to take his or her place.
In other words, judges would be more apt to effectively and expeditiously prosecute cases in their courts in order to register a minimum of four judgement in a year.
In trying to identify the fault lines of the problem of snail speed justice delivery, the CJN also pointed to the attitude of litigants, lawyers and judicial officers alike.

Her words: “We know that litigants are often not straight forward with their lawyers by not duly perfecting their briefs. This may take the form of neglect to furnish , as at when due, requisite facts for prosecution of cases filed in court or failure to fulfill some other pecuniary obligation without which the lawyer might not be able to continue with the case. Conversely, it is also known that some lawyers unscrupulously devise stratagem for cases to linger in court, through, for instance, their resort to seeking unnecessary adjournment at every turn in court proceedings or failure to attend court for flimsy or unfounded reasons. These unethical practices have been solely attributed to tardiness resulting from laziness, knowledge gap and/or the quest for lucre. Our judicial officers are no less enmeshed in this orgy of laziness and failure to update their knowledge of the law through periodic training and retraining, as our observation has revealed that a plethora of bad judgments and rulings churned out in lower courts contribute to the catalogue of pending cases in courts having appellate jurisdiction over such lower courts.
 “Coupled with the above is the glaring but painful fact that our courts are ill – equipped and lack basic necessities such as verbatim reporters, researchers etc, forcing our Judges to record proceedings themselves in long-hand note taking and later conduct the necessary legal researches prior to writing of rulings or judgements.”
Meanwhile the CJN also has the issue of integrity and judicial corruption to deal with.