Whoever qualifies should wear Silk – Gadzama

What advice do you have for young wigs?The emphasis should not be on money or being in a hurry to have all the accolades. That should not be the case. The priority is the name, integrity and good practice and clients’ satisfaction. Money comes gradually and when it begins to come it is unstoppable and […]

What advice do you have for young wigs?
The emphasis should not be on money or being in a hurry to have all the accolades. That should not be the case. The priority is the name, integrity and good practice and clients’ satisfaction. Money comes gradually and when it begins to come it is unstoppable and you will now start to run away from cases and you will be choosing as to the kind of people you want to see or the kind of cases you want to handle.
 Lawyers in this part of the world want to become specialists in one or two areas. You cannot be a master of all. You can only master one or two areas, say maritime or aviation, banking law or arbitration but an average Nigerian lawyer wants to do everything. He wants to be a property lawyer, a lawyer to the banks, election petitions expert, he wants to be a maritime lawyer even if his office is in Abuja here where there is no port, rather than having offices in Lagos or Port Harcourt.
 These are the problems, so you must choose one or two areas that you feel you are good at and then specialise. It is only in Nigeria that you find a lawyer who appears for EFCC today and tomorrow he is against EFCC. Today you are prosecuting and tomorrow you are defending. Choose one area and become an expert. Our problem is that we do not rate our lawyers, medical doctors, professionals and universities. I don’t know whether it is time for us to begin to rate. If you go to UK you find that universities are being rated from the first to the last 100 and people believe in the rating system. The problem however is that people may not believe you. If you say that the best university is University of Lagos, people will ask, what are your reasons, the same thing for lawyers? We should begin to rate, even if we don’t rate individuals we should rate chambers in terms of practice area. It may not be individual but group rating. In election matters these are the chambers, in Property Law these are the chambers and so on. That is how it should be and that will encourage the younger ones to begin to specialise in different aspects of practice.
Each Nigerian lawyer aspires to be SAN, what is your take on the rank of SAN?
Any lawyer, who aspires to be Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN) based on litigation, is expected to have appeared before the Supreme Court Justices so that they can have firsthand information, knowledge and facts about you, your personality, oration and how you conduct yourself, your appearance and comportment and so on. Even now over 100 applicants apply to wear silk but at the end of the day some are shortlisted. Right now 45 applicants have scaled through the first and second hurdles. Out of these 45, just about 15 will be awarded. So the idea that you need to scale down the number of appearance before the SC should not carry any water.
This now takes us to another issue. Whoever is qualified should wear the Silk as it is the case in the UK. In UK if 100 applicants qualify, all the 100 will wear Silk. They don’t peg it but in Nigeria, we peg it at a number – 15 out of a hundred or 200 who have qualified. The question that arises is that when 100 qualify, what will be the basis of reduction of the number to 15? If you say someone has qualified and you say he is not wearing Silk, if you say because of other pending cases or issues, fine but if one is qualified, I believe that one should be allowed to wear the Silk. In other words the number of those qualified to wear Silk should vary from year to year. In some years you can even have 100 depending on the requirements and the ability of the applicants to meet the requirements.
The good thing is that the Legal Practitioners Privileges’ Committee (LPPC) looks at these rules every now and then, they kept on amending them. The rules when we became SAN over a decade ago were quite different from what we have today. So the society is not static and law itself is not static. One day we will get it completely right. The rules as we have them now are really good that whoever goes through the filtrations process becomes a SAN carries the respect of everybody both within the rank and file of the profession and members of the public.
What is your take on capital punishment?
I am a Christian and from the Biblical angle I believe that God gives life and takes it. Having said this, I believe that capital punishment is becoming archaic and it will pass with time. We should abolish it since there are many other ways to punish.
The Administration of Criminal Justice (ACJ) Act has been signed into law, how do you react to this?
ACJ is a welcome development and it is something we have all yearned for both members of the profession and members of the public. The focus of the ACJ Act is on victim compensation. We have never had that type of law before but let us see to its implementation. I must commend both the executive arm of government and the legislature for passing the law.
What is your take on the new guidelines on the appointment of judges to the Bench?
One thing we have all fought for during the days of the former CJN Aloma Mukhtar was that these rules were approved to the extent that anybody who is good and has all the qualities to be a judge should be appointed and does not have to go from grass to grace. You don’t have to move from clerk to judge, you can become a judge from your law office, you can go straight to the Court of Appeal or to the Supreme Court, even from the university, that is how it should be and it has happened in this country before – that is the practice in other jurisdictions. In England you cannot become a High Court Judge without becoming a Queens Counsel (QC) so we can have SAN appointed straight to SC. What matters is the ability, performance, integrity and willingness to go and serve at that level.
Do we need a special criminal court to try election offences?
Lawyers must specialize, the same thing as the judge. A judge cannot do every case – criminal matters, maritime cases, Shari ‘a matters, corruption matters, civil cases and so on. Let the judge get a narrow area of the law and specialise, that is how it should be. So there is nothing wrong with having special court to try electoral offence matters.