Challenges Of The Judiciary In Contemporary Nigeria (3): Judicial Corruption And Transactional Justice https://tribuneonlineng.com/challenges-of-the-judiciary-in-contemporary-nigeria-3-judicial-corruption-and-transactional-justice/

 I N recent times, the Nigerian Judiciary is increasingly being perceived as corrupt. The judiciary is composed of judicial officers who are human beings and therefore subject to the vagaries of human nature in its insidious form. While there are good, intellectually sound and upright judicial officers of impeccable character and integrity in Nigeria, it is sad to say that a very tiny percentage of judicial officers in Nigeria fall below the standard expected of judicial officers in the area of intellectual capability, uprightness, character and integrity and this reflects in the poor quality of judgments delivered by the various courts in Nigeria and the growing problem of conflicting judgments and the attendant confusion it brings in the legal system in Nigeria.

In my article on Transactional Justice published sometime in February, 2020, I took the honourable position in admitting that there is a growing disposition to purchasing judgments of judges by the highest bidder. My personal view is that most judges are incorruptible, above board and they decide cases according to law and their conscience, but the things that we hear about some judges are very troubling. In my aforesaid article I described Transactional Justice as follows:

In Transactional Justice, there are lawyers involved as couriers of monetary offers to judicial officers and it is prevalent mostly in election petition cases. The politicians have become so desperate that they will do just anything to cling on to power, by all means necessary. The ugly side of this is that once it is possible to influence a judge in a particular judicial transaction, then the door is open permanently for other subsequent influences, as for instance once you are able to sway a judge to tilt the even scale of justice in an election petition, then that judge becomes a permanent customer even in other regular cases, whenever the need arises. This is how it goes:

“The litigant hires the very best lawyers in the field of his case, pays them well to handle all legal issues in the open court and then turns around to hire other lawyers or individuals in the background, purely for networking. These latter set of people have no business in the preparation of the case on the merit, they are not involved in the settlement of pleadings or briefs of arguments and they care less about the knowledge and erudition of counsel on record, but to work to secure victory for the paying litigant at all cost, while innocent lawyers sweat themselves out in the courtroom on legal jargons. They know the text of the judgment well ahead of time.”

How does it sound that the judgment of a court is no longer based on law or precedents? Or that law has become totally unpredictable, even for the same set of facts? As such, lawyers are unable to properly advise clients who approach them for legal counsel, as we now have different decisions, even of the Supreme Court, in the same set of facts and circumstances. Whereas this can be due to human error precipitated by the workload of judicial officers based on the volume of cases that they handle daily, it is also said that it can be the result of Transactional Justice. Part of the Judicial Oath goes thus:

https://tribuneonlineng.com/challenges-of-the-judiciary-in-contemporary-nigeria-3-judicial-corruption-and-transactional-justice/