NBA Lagos Branch Law Week: No development without strong judiciary, says Ade Ipaye

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.

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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