Firing wide on the absurdities in Kano court: A response to Haruspice
By Habibu Sani
A piece titled The Absurdities in Kano Court: Who Will Stem the Tide? was published in World Entourage Magazine on the 24th of November, 2024, authored by Abdullahi O. Haruna (Haruspice).
Perhaps the first absurdity in the said writeup was the obvious ignorance displayed by the writer on, first – the incident that occurred in the court about which he wrote and, secondly – the position of the law on the general gamut of legal issues surrounding the incident.
I dislike the unnecessary arrogance of lawyers in ascribing the intentionally denigrating attribute of ‘laymen’ to non-lawyers, and I must confess that I felt guilty thinking the writer should not have delved into issues that only the ‘learned’ are qualified to comprehend.
The writer thinks it is “a dangerous trend”, a “macabre absurdity” and a “denigration” of a sort to ask a judge, this time, a Federal High Court judge, to recuse himself from a case he is handling.
I will strive to explain in as much simple terms as possible why asking a judge to recuse himself in a case before him is not any more absurd than drinking a cup tea at a breakfast table.
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In Nigeria’s courts of record, a demand for recusal is to be made officially via what lawyers call written ‘applications’ or ‘motions’. As far as it has been properly filed, the judge must consider it and make a decision on it.
This was what happened in the case at hand. The motion for recusal was properly filed. That’s normal. The motion was not considered because of issues concerning service on other parties in the case. So, the consideration and decision parts were deferred till the next adjourned date. That, too, was normal.
But abnormalities or absurdities, if you like, were introduced along the line.
Judicial recusal applications are made when a party involved in a legal proceeding believes that the judge presiding over their case may be biased or unable to render an impartial decision, especially if the judge has exhibited animosity to the party concerned.
The lawyer in the case at hand (who happens to be the chairman of the Kano branch of the Nigerian Bar Association) said the judge has consistently been displaying, in open court for that matter, a sense of anger and animosity against his client (Kano State government). There was no day he does not begin his court sitting with some tirades against Kano State government.
That’s an absurdity!
He said the animosity stemmed from the fact that the state government, through one of its agencies, had filed some petitions against the same judge at the National Judicial Council (NJC).
He also claimed to have noticed a very unusual concentration of cases filed by a particular opposition political party members against the state government in the said judge’s courtroom.
Here, I will excuse the confusion that Haruspice was thrown into. The applicant never spoke about the judgements of Justice Amobeda in their cases. They have the leeway to challenge any judgement at the appellate courts if they are not satisfied with it.
They were concerned about how one same judge would be the one to hear 70 out of 70 cases filed by people of one political affiliation against the state government within a year. Who, for example, was directing those cases to one, just one, out of three judges of the Kano division of the Federal High Court, and why? Why do some of those politicians pull their cases out of other courts and refile them at Justice Amobeda’s court?
Those are the questions that were raised by the application filed by the NBA chairman.
The legal standards dictate that judges must recuse themselves when there is an appearance of bias. The test often used is whether a “fair-minded and informed observer” would conclude that there is a real possibility of bias. Here, the mere possibility of bias is enough. The judge does not have to be really biased.
So, there is nothing ‘unsettling’ in the application of the NBA chairman before Justice Simon Amobeda.
Now, let’s consider the next absurdity in the incident.
The newspaper report upon which Haruspice built his article said Justice Amobeda became emotional and alluded to those who filed the recusal application as ‘lazy lawyers’ in open court. Those in court said he spent about an hour venting his anger over the fact that there was an application for recusal. Three Senior Advocates of Nigeria were present in the court, one of them the chairman of the Body of Benchers, the legal body of practitioners of the highest distinction in the legal profession in Nigeria. They had to appeal to him to be calm and mend his emotion.
That’s clearly an absurdity!!
Ordinarily, when a recusal application is made before a judge, the judge must follow a series of steps to address the request appropriately. First, he should review the application thoroughly. Then, he should consider legal standards, hold a hearing if necessary and take the appropriate decision, either to grant or deny the recusal request. It is that simple.
But this judge did not find it simple, for some reasons that were not clear to anyone in the courtroom.
The demeanor of Justice Amobeda in that court that day reflected the exact evidence given by the applicants in their affidavit; the very reason they wanted him to recuse himself. They said he comes to court to castigate the state government every day, calling government officials names and rendering bad utterances about them, the same way he called the NBA chairman names.
Most judges will recuse themselves from the case at hand even before the application is moved.
When G.O.K. Ajayi asked the Justices of the Supreme Cout of Nigeria to recuse themselves from hearing a case against late M.K.O. Abiola on the basis that all them were joined in a defamation lawsuit against Concord newspaper (owned majorly by Abiola), they all obliged. They recused themselves. Late Ajayi remains one of Nigeria’s most brilliant lawyers. In fact, it was out of brilliance, an unparalleled hard work, coupled with brevity that he was able to locate that there was a need for recusal.
One more absurdity was the way Justice Amobeda went on a self-glorification monologue about how he’s a ‘judicial activist’ as opposed to ‘judicial rascals’ and how his courtroom utilizes modern recording gadgets to make proceedings faster, even though lawyers in the jurisdiction say his court is the slowest when it comes to obtaining records of proceedings.
That is certainly an absurdity.
Judges with ‘no-nonsense demeanor’ do not waste their precious time making long remarks to justify or glorify their actions in court. They simply give their rulings or judgements and allow the wheel of justice to roll on.
Without doubt, there are absurdities in the courtroom of Justice Amobeda on Friday, the 22nd of November, 2024, except that Haruspice misplaced the source of the anomalies. The writer fired wide, perhaps because he did not know.
The remaining parts of Haruspice’s piece are not worthy of response. They are a regurgitation of what every lawyer have repeatedly heard directly from Justice Amobeda’s mouth in his courtroom. Haruspice’s parroting did not even capture those self-praise well enough.
- Sani is a law student based in Kano
