Daily Independent Online.
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Thursday, June 17, 2004.
Without pupilage, a lawyer can’t make progress,
says Debo Akande
Chief Debo Akande, SAN, is one lawyer who holds
different attractions to many a lawyer and non-lawyers alike. His style of
formal dressing - in bow tie - which was considered his preserve
and just a few other personalities’, is fast becoming the trend. Then
when the man talks, the smoothness of his speech, especially, in court, when he
espouses legal principles, appears to give the impression that every word he
utters and every sentence he renders are underlined for emphasis. So that by
his unique manner of speaking, one can hardly listen to the learned silk and
not remember all he says. Recently, he got elected as chairman, Body of
Benchers, the legal practitioners’ body entrusted with the responsibility
for calling aspiring lawyers to the Bar. He spoke with Onyema Omenuwa, on some
allegations of acts of illegality levelled against the President, the
activities of the Nigerian Bar Association, being a very active member himself,
and the state of law practice, in relation to junior lawyers. Excerpts:
Lately, certain
developments in the country, which were engendered by certain actions of the
president or the Federal Government have attracted lawyers’ scathing
criticisms. They view such actions as illegal or unconstitutional. Do you agree
that the President has been exceeding the bounds of law in his actions?
You will have to tell me which one,
because you know a statement like this is rather catchy, and I have to be
careful because I am one of the leaders of the Bar association. So, I must not
be seen to be making statements without appreciating the content. So which
particular act do you have in mind?
Let’s
begin with the latest: the proclamation of a state of emergency in Plateau
State. Granted he has the constitutional power to do so…
I
agree with that. He has constitutional power…
But does he also
have the power, constitutionally, to suspend both the executive and the
legislature in a given state when a state of emergency is proclaimed?
Well, you know, that is one of the
reasons why I’m one of the protagonists for a national conference. That
section is rather vague. It is not complete in what it should say. Section 305
gives the President the power to declare an emergency. When you declare an
emergency, do you allow the government to continue? That cannot be so. That is
one area in which the constitution needs some clarifications. As for the House
of Assembly, I do not see any section that empowers the President to suspend
the House. But I guess that he believes that if there is a state of emergency,
and an administrator who is not an elected member is put in charge, can he work
with the Assembly? That is not possible, and that is why he probably went under
another section to also suspend the Assembly.
But these are the reasons why I support
the call for a national conference. Because there are too many ambiguities in
the constitution, and I believe until we settle all these ambiguities
we’ll continue to run into some problems. So, in short I believe he has
the power under section 305 of the constitution to declare a state of
emergency, but the constitution does not go that far to spell out the effects
on the legislature.
Can the
sovereign national conference, which you envisage give birth to an entirely new
constitution for the country?
You see, you have put something that I
have dropped. I used to be one of those calling for a sovereign national conference,
but now I have dropped the “sovereign,” because when you put
“sovereign” it tells the President that he cannot moderate or in
fact, conduct the conference. But if you call it a national conference, then he
can moderate, he can arrange for the membership; how the membership will be
formed and how he can appoint the officers that will service the assembly.
Whether the conference will give birth to a new constitution, that’s the
idea.
When you say you want a national
conference in the light of what is going on, what we are saying is that this
constitution is so imperfect, that mere amendments, ad hoc amendments, cannot
be useful for the country, and that the National Assembly is not suited, is not
the appropriate body that can do the review and produce a complete new
constitution. You need a body, whether you call it constituent assembly, you
call it a committee, you call it a conference, gathering, but you need a
round-table where all the nationalities are going to sit down and look at all
these sections which the army just put together to produce a constitution and
said, “We the people of this country,” when we were not consulted.
So I believe that a national conference
will produce a constitution similar to that of 1963 or 1979, which were near
perfect, and improve on even those two, so that we don’t have to be
amending our constitution now and then. Look at the American constitution, over
200 years. They have been using it and all the amendments they’ve had are
not up to ten, up till today. So we need a conference that will produce such a
lasting constitution, where the membership will show the representation of all
the nationalities. And some top legal constitutionalists will be injected into
that body. Because when all these non-lawyers and some lawyers have debated the
issues and settled the issues, you need the legal experts to do the
phraseology, to do the capping of the sections. So what I’m therefore
saying is that we need a constitutional conference consisting of all
nationalities to which some constitutional experts will be injected for the
drafting of whatever comes of that conference.
Governments
attitude to court orders has also been criticised, with the recent Federal High
Court ruling in the face-off between labour and government as an example. The
thinking is that government has been reluctant to revert to the status quo in
petroleum products prices, because the ruling didn’t favour it. Does a
situation where government chooses which court orders to obey augur well for a
democracy?
I certainly do not agree that government
decides which orders should be obeyed or should not be obeyed. Government is
bound by a court order. In the present situation, it is the marketers that have
been trying not to comply with the court order that said they should revert to
the January status quo. But it is the duty and obligation of the government to
give necessary directive to the marketers. After all they gave them licence. So
they must give them directives that will ensure that they comply with the court
order. For now, not all the marketers have complied, which is bad enough. But
for this, I want to say very loudly that I pay tribute to the labour congress
under the leadership of (Adam’s) Oshiomhole. And I praise them for, in
fact, considering the sufferings of the people after three days, and saying, we
shall suspend the strike and ask government within the next seven days to
direct and ensure that all marketers comply. So with that opportunity,
government should ensure that all marketers comply, so that the rule of law can
be seen to be in place and to be operated even by the government.
Those who
criticise the government also cite the Anambra State instance, where up till
now Governor Chris Ngige’s security details have not been reinstated, in
defiance of a court’s ruling since January. How would you respond to
that?
You know, when you talk of Ngige’s
problem, please note that the Bar Association has taken a stand on the issue,
and the stand of the Bar Association, which I am part of is that it is wrong firstly,
for the judge to have made that order. Thank God we got rid of that judge from
the judiciary. Secondly, in respect of security you’ll recall that even
at that time all the security of even the judges were removed. The Bar
Association fought very strongly for the restoration of the security of the
judges. Now, when you come to Ngige, we sharply disagreed with the government
on this issue. How can you leave a governor open without security? Apart from
the Bar Association, speaking for myself, I personally think it is not right
and that the government should most times mirror the wishes of the people in
the way it governs. The people are very unhappy that a whole governor does not
have his security restored.
And please note that recently when even a
justice of the Supreme Court and the Inspector General of Police made
statements that the immunity of the President and the governor should be
removed, I strongly condemned that call. How can you remove the immunity of the
President and the governor? How are they going to rule with peace in their
mind, that the police are not coming to handcuff them the next moment or that
ten people are not coming with summonses? So it’s a call that I regarded
as misconceived and unwarranted. So I relate it to Governor Ngige’s
situation with security. It’s like removing his immunity, like taking his
cover from him. Suppose they attack him any moment. So I still like to take
this opportunity to plead with the President to review this position, because
that’s not what the court order actually said. And in this regard I also
disagree with the Attorney General’s interpretation of the court order.
As a senior
member of the Bar, do you think the junior lawyers are getting the
encouragement they need to thrive as practitioners, from the Nigerian Bar
Association? I ask this question because I have listened to many of them
complain that law practice is becoming unattractive for them, since they
don’t good briefs.
Very good question. You see, the juniors
who say this should examine themselves. These are the junior lawyers who will
not go to the chambers of recognised lawyers for say 15 to 24 months or 18
months, to understudy. They believe that once you come out of the law school
and they’re given their certificates, they know what it is to practise.
They know nothing. We can tell you that. So when you find lawyers of that
category, what brief can they attract? Even the few people in the magistrate
courts, who give them briefs, like traffic offences or small landlord and
tenant cases, after one case they won’t brief them again. Because
they’re not yet grounded in the procedures in court, so what I think is
important and what the senior lawyers and the Bar Association are doing is to
see that these young lawyers are taken into chambers by senior lawyers, and
that they’re given reasonable allowance to sustain their period of
apprenticeship.
It is very necessary for the new
in-coming lawyers from the law school to undergo some pupilage. Without that
pupilage they can make no progress, unless those that have established chambers
of their fathers, their uncles, their mothers or their aunts, or other
relatives who will take them and from there they will grow. You see, if you
look at most successful lawyers that have been coming out in the last 20 years,
you will trace that they have undergone pupilage, and therefore, they were able
to rise. Some of them have become senior advocates.
If pupilage is
so important, why can’t it be made mandatory and backed by legislation?
Right! You see, that’s another
good question. You see, we have that pupilage thing in the law, but when the
Army came and quite a number of generals, brigadiers, and colonels started to
read law, they thought they could not undergo such thing, that it was an
indignity for them with their ranks. And you know their own is one line of a
law. They just decreed it and abolished it out.
But I can assure you, the Bar
Association is already committed to bringing this pupilage period back. We
won’t make it five years, because the economy has worsened now. We will
like to subject them to two or three years of pupilage when they will be given
some reasonable allowance to sustain them, to maintain them in their transport
and their daily needs, and then they can dress neatly. If they do well, some
chambers will retain them, and if they like they move out and establish theirs.
So I can tell you as an insider, that the Bar Association is planning at its
August annual conference to pass that resolution and then to send it to the
National Assembly to make it as an amendment to the Legal Practitioners Act.
