JUDICIARY CLEAN-UP: NJC Needs More Sincerity!

By Tonnie Iredia

No one disputes the fact that many problems currently confronting Nigeria’s judiciary are caused by a few bad eggs in the system as it is in many other organizations. If those few bad eggs are not quickly expelled or aggressively beaten into line, the cancer they have attracted into that arm of government in the last couple of years will soon quickly spread all through the system.

What this suggests is that the greatest problem facing the Nigerian judiciary today is not the continuing recklessness of the so-called bad eggs but the apparent lack of courage and sincerity of those at the top to hold the bull by its horn and call everyone to order. The implication of this is that the posture of the National Judicial Council NJC which is empowered to regulate the judiciary is inadvertently increasing the bad eggs.

Mujahid Asari Dokubo And The Life Cycle Of The Law Of Rule

 By Chidi Odinkalu

On a Friday in July 2005, Bayo Ojo, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria, SAN, quietly absconded from work in an office in Victoria Island, Lagos, from where he functioned then as the president of the Nigerian Bar Association, NBA. The next working day, a Monday, he turned up in Abuja as President Olusegun Obasanjo’s fourth Attorney-General in five years. 

Less than three months after assuming office as Attorney-General of the Federation, on October 6, 2005, Mr. Ojo filed a five-count charge before the Federal High Court against Alhaji Mujahid Asari Dokubo, at the time the self-proclaimed leader of the Niger Delta Peoples’ Volunteer Force, NDPVF. Asari was also a leading member of the Pro-National Conference Organisation, PRONACO. The crimes charged included two counts of treasonable felony, two counts of running an unlawful society, and one count of publishing “a rumour…. which is likely to cause fear and alarm”.