Yesterday’s Assizes came and went. The dais was full, the Bench was full, the Bar no less. The speeches were earnest, and the air carried a renewed joy; that quiet we-have-got-back-our-judiciary feeling. The Chairman of the Nigerian Bar Association Owerri, Chief Chris Ihentuge, spoke with candour and courage, urging the repeal of a law that, by design or neglect, shrinks the space of judicial independence and hands the mechanics of case assignment to an office that ought not to perform them. That appeal was not a parochial outcry; it was a constitutional entreaty. He highlighted the problems in the Imo State justice sector, which need very urgent attention.
Yet the invitation to take that entreaty seriously arrived in a plain, unmistakable gesture: His Excellency the Governor, whose resplendent and exuberant presence the legal community has genuinely missed, and which presence could have set the tone for optimism, sent his deputy in his stead. The Deputy Governor stood in for him.
Actions speak. The absence of the principal and the presence of a proxy are not, always, scandalous. But they are signals. Where words could have assuaged fear, where presence could have inspired confidence, absence performs the opposite office: it tells the public and the judges themselves where the heart of power truly lies.
What made the silence more telling was that, even in the remarks delivered on behalf of His Excellency, nothing was said in direct response to the clear and specific demands made by the NBA Chairman — demands that spoke to the decay of judicial infrastructure, the welfare of law officers, JUSUN members, members of the lower bench, members of the higher bench, and the unconstitutional interference with judicial powers. The speech contained no pledge, no acknowledgment, not even the faintest assurance that these matters were on the government’s agenda. That silence, dignified as it appeared, was in truth deafening; a silence and absence that reaffirmed the widespread impression that the administration neither feels nor fears the pulse of the justice sector. It spoke of neglect by omission; a kind of indifference that injures more deeply than hostility ever could.
In the not-so-distant past, it was otherwise. During the administrations of Achike Udenwa, Ikedi Ohakim, Rochas Okorocha, and Emeka Ihedioha, the governors attended the Assizes in person, sat through the solemn proceedings, and responded from the podium to the speeches of the Bench and the Bar. Those exchanges, often spontaneous yet dignified, assured both the legal community and the citizenry that the Executive understood the moral weight of justice and saw the Judiciary as a co-equal arm, not a subordinate department. That tradition of presence and response quietly affirmed that governance still had a conscience, and that the robe still commanded respect.
If the Executive treats the concerns of the Bench and the Bar as matters to be delegated, then the Bench will, slowly and almost imperceptibly, learn to defer. If the highest citizen in the Executive lives by a posture of delegation on questions of justice, he teaches a lesson that will be imitated in quieter rooms: that the substantive decisions of the temple of justice can be left to those more convenient to the political master. That lesson corrodes faster than any rust.
There is another lesson the Bench must reckon with; one the Bar has repeated and which I have experienced harshly recently. When a court allows itself to be the passive echo of what is whispered in an office elsewhere, it sacrifices dignity and public esteem. When remands are rubber-stamped because a voice from outside the courtroom directs so; when bail is treated as gift that must be approved from outside the courtroom; when magistrates and judges behave like administrators of an instruction rather than adjudicators of fact and law, the people see it. And when the people see it, respect drains away. Nothing drains repect for the judiciary more than judicial _see-finishism._
I speak not in the spirit of accusation for its own sake but in the language of cause and consequence. My 28 days behind the walls of the Correctional Centre were, among other things, a close-up lesson in how perception hardens into practice. A remand prolonged beyond the humane limits set out in the statute; a lawyer denied bail in a bailable matter when the formal charge papers are wanting; court business redirected by administrative fiat rather than judicial determination – these are not abstract grievances. They are the raw materials of public scepticism about the impartiality of our courts.
When once a man sees that, from a distant office, the course of his case can be reordered, he no longer approaches the court with the reverence once reserved for the robe and the bench. He understands that the robe, in effect, can be dressed and undressed at will. That is the most effective teacher of contempt. It is not the single dark act that destroys confidence; it is the accumulation of small acquiescences, the routine of convenience that trains judges and court staff to look outwards for direction rather than inwards to the Constitution and the oath they swore.
Dear judgesand magistrates: this is a gentle, urgent summons. Guard the sanctity of your independence not because someone else will guard it for you, but because no one else can. Independence is not a title; it is a practice. It is enforced daily by decisions taken in open court, by refusal to be hurried into shortcuts, by the courage to say, “My duty is to the law, not to the office that appointed me.”
To the judiciary as an institution I say this: your dignity is not the product of ceremony alone. It is manufactured, painstakingly, by the refusal to be instrumentalized, by the insistence that procedure be followed even, especially when expedience offers an easier path. The people need to feel, tangibly and repeatedly, that their day in court is their day in court, not an adjunct of some political timetable.
To the Bar I say: keep your vigilance. Speak when necessary; litigate when the Constitution is slighted; model the behaviour you ask of the Bench. But temper your zeal with the temper of persuasion, for persuasion built on reason endures longer than rhetoric built on rancour.
And to the citizenry I say: demand of every arm of government the humility to respect another. An Executive that treats the judiciary as a department to be managed will, in time, find all departments weakened. A people with a weakened access to justice is a people whose rights have been quietly diminished.
This is not the moment for theatrics or for personalised invective. It is the season for sobriety and for sturdy action. Let the assemblies that make our laws remember that constitutional fidelity is not optional. Let the appointing authorities remember that judicial office is a sacred trust, whose currency is the public confidence it earns and keeps.
Finally, let the Bench reclaim its quiet power. Let it sit in its dignity; let it decide; let it be seen to decide uncoerced. If the court returns to that posture, the people will return their reverence. If it does not, the tents in which the people once sheltered the ideal of justice will be emptied, and those tents, once empty, are easily folded and taken away.
To your tents, oh Imo Judiciary; not to hide, but to assemble, to reflect, and to return to your calling with the steadiness the times require.
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