Nigeria must solve the problems bedeviling its legal system for there to be development, Deputy Chief of Staff to the President, Ade Ipaye has said.
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According to him, there can be no development without an effective and efficient legal system.
“The state of a legal system determines a society’s development. If the legal system fails, all else will fail,” he said.
He described the judiciary’s present state of affairs as “embarrassing”, adding that the economy has been “constrained” by an extremely slow judicial process.
Ipaye gave the keynote address at the opening of the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) Lagos Branch Law Week technical sessions.
Its theme is: Law and development in an emerging economy.
The former Lagos State Attorney-General and Commissioner for Justice decried what he called “glaring inadequacies in our legal system.”
Among them, he said, are corruption and abuse of judicial processes, in which lawyers adopt “all sorts of tricks to delay cases”.
Unlike Nigeria, such unethical practices lead to severe sanctions in advanced jurisdictions and are never tolerated, Ipaye said.
“The legal system is the key to everything. If we don’t solve this problem, the entire system is open to failure,” he said.
Ipaye cited an instance of criminal cases involving five former bank chief executives whose trials began in 2009, of which only one has been decided through plea bargaining.
To him, the impression is created that people can perpetrate corruption and get away with it because they know the wheel of justice grinds slowly.
“Impunity gives hope to the crooked who believe that they can be in court for decades and nothing will come of it,” he said.
Ipaye called for a focus on the ethical aspects of the profession, adding that more emphasis should be placed on inculcating “a sense of justice” in law students rather than on “content”.
“It seems to me that the profession is going down, so we need a radical shift,” Ipaye said.
Former Lagos Attorney-General Olasupo Shasore (SAN), who moderated one of the sessions, called for “increased investment in the rule of law”.
He noted that countries with high growth rates also have high levels of compliance with the rule of law.
“We need to increase our investments in the rule of law,” he said.
The technical sessions continue today with a Bar and Bench dialogue session on justice administration, a “rainmaking” session, and a young lawyers’ forum.
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