- Bamidele
Aturu
By some happenstance in the morning of Wednesday, May 14,
2014, I watched Her Ladyship, the judge hearing the Oscar Pistorius case in
South Africa read her ruling in the application made by the prosecution seeking
psychiatric evaluation of the defendant. Her decision was a model of what a
court ruling on such applications should be. She considered the arguments of
counsel for both parties exhaustively without boring anyone by regurgitating
word for word all that the counsel said.
It was a precise and concise ruling that demonstrated her
sound learning without any attempt to impress. She refrained from deciding the
substantive criminal charge before her at the interlocutory stage. Her
reference to judicial authority was not pedantic. But it is not only her
decision that fascinated me. I think we need as a people to learn a thing or
two from the South Africans, particularly from their justice system.
First, as all who have been following the celebrated trial
must have noticed by now, South African lawyers and judges do not wear wigs on
their heads. Why Nigerian lawyers and judges still wear wigs that are really
nothing but rugs in the scorching tropical climate is a testimony to our self-deprecating
colonial mentality. I know this is a country where people, particularly the
so-called educated ones like to differentiate themselves from those they
consider below them in the social ladder, but that is not a warrant to be
wearing on one’s head rugs in 2014. The British climate may justify the use of
wigs, there is nothing at all to commend the use of wigs in Nigeria. The
Nigerian Bar Association should look for other paraphernalia to differentiate
the learned people from the others, if differentiate we must. I do not see any
sense in inflicting self-punishment on oneself just to show that one is
learned.
Such learnedness really exposes functional illiteracy.
More so, the lawyers freely referred to the judge as “my
lady” and she did not take offence as some of our female judges, particularly
those at the Court of Appeal do. In Nigeria, even though we can dress like a
medieval lord just to look like a British lawyer or judge and to be different
from lay people, our female judges refuse to be addressed as “my lady” even
though that is how female judges are addressed in advanced societies that value
respect for all gender. They would quickly point out that they are not your
lady in such a stern way that you would think that you had just called them “my
wife”. For me, it is nothing but functional illiteracy for a female judge to
insist that she be addressed as “my lord”. Gender activists would laugh us to
scorn if they heard that this is the attitude of our senior female judges. Each
time I encounter a judge who tells me “I am not your lady”, I simply feel like
throwing up. These judges must be told the plain English truth that “my lord”
is for the male gender while “my lady” is for the feminine gender. Indeed, in
other countries, the shift to the use of “my lady” to address female judges was
the outcome of the struggle to treat women as women and to respect them as they
are. It is therefore demeaning of womanhood for a judge, for that matter, to stick
to a mode of address that denigrates women and reflects a reactionary
disposition.
I have deliberately made this point as provocatively as I
could so that our Lady, the learned Chief Justice of Nigeria and the National
Judicial Institute would consider a training programme in gender politics and
advocacy for our female judges.
Furthermore, I was shocked beyond description when both
counsel, for the prosecution and the defence, announced to the judge that they
would agree on the terms of the order that the court said would be ready by
Tuesday, May 20, 2014. In other words, although the judge had granted the
application for psychiatric evaluation of the defendant, the counsel would sit
down and craft the terms of the order! Such practice can only take place where
counsel understand the import of the phrase that describes them as “officers of
the court”. In Nigeria, a counsel would rather be working on her notice of
appeal against the order and, of course, an application for stay of proceedings,
to delay the trial for another two or three years as we nauseatingly see in
corruption cases. Until lawyers who file manifestly frivolous cases are shown
the way out of the profession, it would be difficult for non-lawyers to take us
seriously. These are the preliminary lessons that I think are worth learning
from the Pistorius trial so far. I have a feeling that we have more to learn as
the trial unfolds.
Mr. Aturu, the
Lagos-based lawyer who wrote this article passed on on July 9, 2014, 16 days
after its publication.
The write-up was
first published in The Punch newspaper of Monday, June 23, 2014.
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