Access to justice

“The appearance of law must be upheld, especially while it’s being broken.” — Boss Tweed, 1857.

Earlier this week, I joined Gege and Phoenix Agenda on their show, and the four stories we discussed each had an “access to justice” component. I’m not going to bore you too much with, for example, the discussion regarding the seizure of Nigeria’s presidential jets, but I’d encourage you to read SBM Intelligence’s take on the issue in its weekly commentary this morning.

During the discussion, I mentioned Senator Bulkachuwa’s revelation from last year that justice in Nigeria is sexually transmitted as the day I lost hope in the country. It is instructive that since that day in June 2023, there has not been an attempt even to give the appearance of reviewing Justice Bulkachuwa’s judgements. I mean, if William Tweed, who was the MC Oluomo of his day, understood that the appearance of propriety was sacrosanct, then why can the NBA or the NJC in Nigeria, 167 years later, not understand that?

Anyway, two things happened this week that I want to tell briefly and quickly that buttress why fixing the judiciary has increasingly become what I think is the primary thing to fix if we are ever to come out of the morass that Nigeria is in.

On Sunday, I had given my driver the day off, but then something came up, so I had to drive myself to Ipaja. I drove out of Magodo, and upon getting to the exit at Alausa Secretariat, where you join the E1, I noticed buses making u-turns on the highway. Why were they doing that?

The queue at the Mobil petrol station had caused a huge traffic jam. But this caught my attention: buses were making u-turns on the highway and driving against traffic. The one vehicle that was stopped and held by the LASTMA guys, who appeared from nowhere, was a private driver. The danfo guys continued their u-turns and one-way driving like nothing was wrong.

You are going nowhere as a society if justice (or access to justice) is seen as unequal.

The second story happened last week. A couple of months ago, a Nigerian startup approached my organisation for a study. During the negotiations, it became clear that they really did not want the study to be done, but it was a requirement to unlock some funding from a foreign entity, and the foreign guys insisted on being copied in on all the emails. So we were contracted, mobilised, and went to the field. The problem started when the report was submitted, and suddenly, our Nigerian client found every fault in the report. Clearly a ruse to not pay us the balance. Luckily, the funding entity was copied, and their people looked over the report found not a single issue with it (except for the fact that we used UK English and they are an American entity) and so they forced their Nigerian counterparts to pay up.

This kind of bad behaviour is common in Nigeria, and I know that there is hardly any business in Nigeria that has not experienced this kind of behaviour in one form or another from clients. We are a low-trust society after all, but were all human societies not low-trust at one point or the other?

What changed?

Justice, or access to quick justice.

The reason people behave themselves in other societies is that there would be consequences for bad behaviour. Take the example of our recalcitrant client: if they knew that the practical option of a lawsuit existed, they’d think twice before finding frivolous faults with our reporting.

Heck, in the UK (another system I’m quite familiar with), there are financial penalties for delayed payments, and the interests add up. Try refusing to pay a contractually obligated balance of £1,000 and then holding on to it for nine months. By the time court proceedings are over, d pikin wey ya £1,000 go don born go be £551.33, and this is before you pay for the legal costs of your defence, your interlocutor’s lawyers, and for wasting the court’s time. Of course, people would behave given such penalties, but that doesn’t happen here. Heck, on the podcast, I told how I gave up my lawsuit against Aero Contractors some years ago.

I also told the story of a trial that Ikemesit E. and I witnessed some years ago…

If we keep refusing to sort out the law in Nigeria, we’ll keep going round in this unsavoury circle.