Judge alleges plot by lawyers to destabilise judiciary
From Emmanuel Onwubiko, Abuja
COURT of Appeal President, Justice Umaru Farouk Abdullahi at the weekend accused lawyers of plotting to destabilise the nation's judiciary.
Abdullahi made the disclosure at the valedictory session for the retired Appeal Court Justice, Sule Aremu Olagunju. He called on serving and retired judges across the country to organise prayer sessions for the nation's judiciary.
Abdullahi, who also heads the presidential election petition tribunal said: "The turbulent period which the Nigerian judiciary is currently passing through may be likened to what happened to us in 1994 which drew an important comment from my learned brother and predecessor in this office, Hon. Justice Mohammed Mustapha Adebayo Akanbi at the opening of a special session of this Court at Ilorin when Kwara State was under the Kaduna Division of this court where I was then the presiding justice. This is what he said:
"It is indeed a paradox that while the Bar is facing the problem of a 'divided house', the Bench is sailing in "trouble waters". One does not require a prescient eye to know that uneasy calm pervades the judicial atmosphere. Judges have been accused of corruption, laziness, ineptitude and what have you. I do not think it is in the interest of the judiciary or indeed of the nation to make wholesale condemnation of judges. Some of us who had good practise at the Bar are beginning to wonder whether this was what we bargained for when we decided to accept invitation to serve on the Bench. Certainly not one advocates that judges should be treated as men from the planet Mars. Nor is any one saying that a corrupt judge should be shielded. A judge must be seen for what he is: What is abhorred is the tendency to paint the entire Nigerian Judiciary black or drag everybody down the slippery road".
Abdullahi said that some members of the legal profession both at the Bar and the Bench had allowed themselves to fall into the hands of desperate litigants who were bent on destroying the hard earned and long established image of the judiciary.
The Appeal Court president said: "Such members of our honourable profession who allow themselves to be so used must realise that where the image of the judiciary is destroyed and discredited as the third arm of government, the nascent democracy would have been put in jeopardy".
Calling for prayers by judges to save the judiciary from the plot to destabilise it, he said: "The situation indeed calls for restraint and above all, prayers from all of us".
