A former Minister of Justice and Attorney-General of the Federation, Akin Olujimi (SAN), shares his views on the state of the nation, in this interview with David Lawani and Ben Ogbemudia.

On one of his most difficult cases

I remember and incidentally, it was an election petition. That was the time of the National Republican Congress and the Social Democratic Party. When the election to Ibadan Municipal government was held, that year the NRC lost. And then the NRC engaged me to file a petition against the SDP. Then the strong man of Ibadan politics, the late Lamidi Adedibu, was for the SDP and his candidate won. The NRC was not happy and decided to go court.

I accepted the brief and filed a petition. When the trial commenced, the SDP people tried their best to buy me over. They tried to make me compromise the NRC case but I said no. The ground of the petition was non-qualification of the candidate of the SDP who was declared winner of the election. He tendered a school certificate which was forged. It was a Cambridge School Certificate. Beautiful thing. When you see it, you will never doubt its authenticity? But we had information that it was forged.

But, we needed to prove that. On the face of it, they said it was issued by the Cambridge University. So, you will need evidence from Cambridge to prove the falsity of this certificate. I then filed an application and told my client, if you say bring somebody from Cambridge, they may not even come. But you can go to them. Can you pay the cost of our trip to Cambridge? Can you also pay the cost of the defendant’s team to Cambridge? My client said he would pay.

Inside Abuja’s abattoirs another pandemic looms

Then, we contacted the Nigerian High Commission in London and they arranged with the Cambridge officials to receive us. So, when we met, we had representatives from the university, the Nigerian High Commission, the defendants, and their lawyer. Now, we said well, this is the certificate we have come to confirm its authenticity. Did you issue this? The Cambridge officials laughed. They said this certificate purportedly issued in 1965, if you look at the stationery, at that time we were using was .05 milligram but this one is 0.1 milligram. So, this stationery was not the one in use in 1965. The signature you have here of the vice-chancellor came into office in 1975. He was not there in 1965. In 1965, we were using the letters to grade students A, B, C, D. but, the grade here is in figures, 1,2,3. We were not using this figure in 1965. Then the logo. They took all these issues. And of course, it was obvious that the certificate did not come Cambridge.

Then the SDP people called back home to say, things are not well here with us at all. What do we do? Instead of facing the issues frontally, they started planning how to kill me. They did not know I escaped and returned to Nigeria. Then, we just met in the tribunal in Ibadan and it was the Nigerian High Commission that made sure that the report issued by the Cambridge University was delivered at the tribunal in Ibadan. Not through me or through them but through the Nigerian High Commission.

Of course, they knew they had lost the case and somebody must pay for it. That somebody is Akin Olujimi. What is his interest in getting an order of court to go to Cambridge? Does he want to be chairman of the council? We will teach him a lesson. So, they raised thugs to look for me everywhere. I had to approach the Commissioner of Police of Oyo State who gave me six mobile policemen to be following me everywhere.

So, they could not get me to kill. They now said if we cannot kill him physically, you can fight him spiritually. So, all of you who have charms, incantations among others bring them. He must die. They tried everything but I did not die. They now said okay what do we do. Do we have three persons who can go and pour acid on me? Some people volunteered to do that. I got to know of all these because these people later became my friends. When they found that they would not achieve that purpose and they became my friend. They lost that case and we won.

And they now said look, we tried to bribe him and we failed. We tried to kill him and we failed. In fact, we should be proud of him as one of our own who is doing well. He should now become our own lawyer too. Of course, there is nothing ethically wrong in that. After we have finished a case against you, I can become your lawyer tomorrow. And so that was it. Some other lawyers would have chickened out, but I never did. In the course of duty, you can meet challenges. I met that one, it was a serious one. We became good friends. I became their lawyer and they paid me well for the cases I handled for them thereafter.

Way forward on many cases pending in courts

The reality we face today in criminal justice is that we have delay. There is something you need to know. Shakespeare when he was alive wrote about the delay of the law. It is not a sin that it just started happening now, it has always been there. And there are several reasons why this delay is there.

Even when we take steps to reduce the delay, it appears nothing is achieved. You see, there are two sides to this issue of delay of the law. When a policeman is, may be, harassing you on the road, you will say I want fair hearing. But you do not really know what it means. In the marketplace, when you are arguing with a seller, you will say, I want fair hearing.

You see, a judge has a duty to hear both sides to a case. So, we have what is called rules of the court. There are set down rules you see on protocol when you are filing a case, what you should do. For instance, when you serve me, I have some days grace because I must engage a lawyer to respond on my behalf. The law will not say if you have served today, then respond tomorrow. You must engage a lawyer and he needs to look at the papers.

Now, the judge who is sitting there is not sitting on your case alone. There are several other cases in his court. Your case came in today and before it came in, maybe he has had about 50 other cases brought to his court. He is a human being. He must write when you address him. How much do non-judges write individually? That man will sit from 9am and he keeps on writing. At a point he is tired, and the hands are paining him.

That is why we have said several times, let courts proceeding be recorded. Do we have the facilities for that in the country? You can easily go buy a tape recorder there, but you need power to run it. If NEPA strikes, that is the end of it. The recorder will not record anything. Let us say you can buy a generator. If you do not empower the judiciary, that is give them money to be able to function effectively, they will not be able to buy a generator that will run the court.

There are other things that account for the delay. You do not have enough judges. And in these days of technology, there is a lot you can do to empower judges. Are we even doing that? Judges are human beings. There is a limit to what they can do. Writing notes of proceedings and all that. And when we now say we carry out justice sector reform which, of course, you hear about every now and then, we focus on just one area. I have said it we do not have enough judges.

How can a judge handle 50 cases? It is not possible but go through the courts list every day, you find quite a number of cases. A single case may take the whole day.  That means all the other cases in the court will have to be adjourned. And you come back for another day. You will find out that the same thing will happen when you come back again. And that is the story all over the country. So, you cannot really eliminate delay, you can only reduce delays.

But, again, let me say this, in developed countries of the world, I interacted when I was in office with the Chief Justice of England and Wales. They had just carried out some reforms at that time. They gave me a copy of the report of the committee that he set up to investigate the delay of the law which, of course, I brought home. Ten years after they made this reform of the justice sector, he attended a dinner of solicitors in England. And when he gave his speech, he said my regret today is that the reform I made ten years ago, which I had thought had provided a solution to the delay of the law, has not really helped. In the commercial division, cases are still getting delayed because according to him judges will not manage.

Case management involves a judge saying okay, we all go to court, for instance, at 9am, we all crowd in the court there. Nothing stops a judge from saying Chief Olujimi, I am adjoining your matter today, come in at noon on such a date. Chief Lawani, you come at 2pm. Now, I do not have to come and sit down at 9am, I can attend to other matters. When you manage in that manner, you also reduce the crowd you see in the court. Because if I do not have my case coming up in the morning, I do not have to come with my juniors. If all seniors meet and carry all their juniors, the court will be overcrowded. However, these days, COVID-19 has measurably helped to reduce the crowd in the court.

So, judges must manage cases and in various ways too. Nowadays, we frontload evidence of witnesses. At the time you are filing your case, you also put in an affidavit from the evidence the witnesses will give, so when a witness is called, the judge will be writing the evidence of this witness. He may write ten pages of this. He is a human being. You must adjourn though this is out of it now because the witnesses now depose in affidavit form. The evidence is in affidavit form. You serve the other side and their own witnesses. When you go to court you simply say you adopt the witness statement of my evidence in this case. This has eliminated writing long evidence in this case by the judge. You just say I adopt. The judge will simply read it up when he wants to write his judgement but the cross-examination on the witness will now have to be done.

I may cross-examine a witness-on-witness deposition for 2, 3, 4, 5 and so forth. We should also reduce that. Cut down the time I have for cross-examination as it now happens in election petition cases. A judge can say okay, we give you 10 minutes to cross examine. We give you 20 minutes to cross-examine him instead of now spending days to cross-examine.

So, if you have 10 witnesses to call and you must spend days on one witness. You may just be on this one witness for more than a year and you have not finished. But, as I said earlier, the delay of the law is not peculiar to this country. In the UK, South Africa, US, cases also get delayed. Even some criminal cases in the UK and US are not finished on time. But they do not have many cases getting delayed as we do here.

Almost every case in our country is delayed. And that is why people are worried and they complain. It is only pre-election cases now and because they are time bound then they are disposed of. But there is also an issue there, is justice served? We are the one who can say in most of these election cases, justice is not served. You are limited to three minutes to present your case. Five minutes to cross examine. Before you ask two questions and the man answers the two questions, five minutes would have expired. Because the judges are writing. When I ask you a question and you answer it, they will write it. Why they are writing the 10 minutes given to me would have expired before they finished writing the answer to the question. So how many questions can I ask within that time frame that will bring out the merit of my case? This is what we confront in election cases and pre-election cases which are time bound. But of course, we must go on because if that is the law, there is nothing anybody can do about it.

As Minister of Justice and Attorney-General

Well, time changes in the affairs of men, no static situation, things move radically, economically, and socially at any given time. When a government is in place, you have different challenges confronting that administration. It is not as if what we faced when I was in the office is the same thing today. I do not recall, for instance, when we were in office, if the challenge of kidnapping by herders was there, I do not recall.  Today, we have a different scenario completely. In fact, Boko Haram was just beginning to grow, the leader of the Boko Haram who was killed, Mohammed Yusuf, nobody really knew much about him then.

It was after I had left office that I came to know him face to face in the courtroom. They brought him to court, and it was my privilege then to handle the case, his followers were always in court with him. I did not even know the risk I was facing at that time. I just thought it was the normal prosecution, go to court, do the normal cross-examination and all that. That was what I did. It was much later I got to know that I was exposed to serious danger by prosecuting, because his followers were always in court and I didn’t attach much importance to their presence in court when this man Yusuf was charged to court. On an occasion, his lawyer applied for his bail and I opposed the application. But the court in its wisdom granted the man bail pending the hearing of the case.

But it was in the process of his bail that we heard that he started organising his Boko Haram boys again, trying to launch an attack in Maiduguri. It was in that process that he was arrested and got killed. If the court had listened to me, not granting him bail, perhaps he would have been safe in custody. This is one thing I keep remembering all the time. Sometimes, when God is protecting us, we will not know. We keep on following one particular action, thinking it is the best for us. We do not know what is in store for us. That is how this man got killed and thereafter the Boko Haram matter ballooned. We started having killings here and there all over the country. Till date, we have yet to see the end of Boko Haram. Wonderfully, I never received any threat from them, and the case died naturally.

Message to leaders

Well, my message and particularly to our leaders is that there is a need for attitudinal change. We complain every day that this constitution is bad and that it is not working. The real question, we as individuals, are we prepared to change? One writer said, “no constitution was so ever so professionally written that it will work in the hands of wrong men’’. The magic is not in the constitution, it is in you and me. We must change. Many go into the office to make money. It is a place of service to the community. We have a commonwealth; we cannot all be in charge.  Then, when we elect a few hands to manage this wealth for the country, they go in there to serve their own individual purposes. And they are fighting themselves, forgetting you and me. The roads are bad, colleges and institutions are broken down, the health sector is in a shamble, nothing is happening. This country has money which if you deploy it properly and sincerely, it will grow. Go around the country today, you will see evidence of failure of governance. We must change, and radically too. It is not the constitution but we individuals who have to be reformed to make this country great.

A family of lawyers

Well, there are five of them in the law today qualified and then practicing. I have three in my office. And, I have two who are practising in the UK, So, they are five.

Why do you decide to make it that way?

It is not as if I forced them to go into law. It is a matter of choice for them. And maybe as they grew up, they found out that, look, we love what this man is doing. In fact, one of them first read Economics before he went into law and they are all in practice today. So, it is a matter of choice you know. It is not as if I insisted on law. I have two daughters, one is a pharmacist now a doctor, the other one is an accountant. They made those choices on their own. As in the pharmacist, after practicing for some time, in the UK where she lives, she decided to study medicine. It is their personal choice. I did not impose any course on any of them.

Why does the EFCC, ICPC and Office of the Minister of Justice appear to be working against one another?

The need for the Office of the AGF to have full control over the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission and the Independent Corrupt Practices Commission is something that we must fully investigate. We have it set out in the law that even created the EFCC. So, when they are there, they just conduct their proceeding the way they like. Whereas the Office of the AGF must be able to oversee what they are doing when the need arises to take a particular action. They should clear it with the AGF.

Of course, Ibrahim Magu thought well, I am the man in charge here. I am not subject to any control by the office of the AGF. Literally, when you look at the constitution and the law setting up the EFCC, he is right. But you cannot operate that way. That was, in fact, the situation that created this issue between the AGF and the EFCC, because Magu did not submit to the authority of the AGF, yet he is the number one law officer for the country and the one that will answer to Amnesty International and other bodies when they seek clarification on issues of human rights and things. So, it is very essential that with noticeably clear language, the office of EFCC, ICPC be subject to full control by the office of the AGF.