That Judiciary's paltry N70bn budgetary allocation (2)

The CJN was said to have told the legislators that only one per cent of the nation’s budget was being allocated to the judiciary which he said inadvertently put the judiciary and by extension, the nation in dan­ger. The CJN was quoted as saying, “Recently, at the opening ceremony of the 2015 All Nigeria Judges Con­ference, I alluded to the fact that the judiciary was appropriated a total sum equivalent to less than one per cent of the total national budget of the government of the country.

“In many respects, the judiciary has recently been left with the im­pression that it is being asked to car­ry the weight of justice with one arm tied behind its back.”

“To put the insufficiency of that sum into context, a frightening sta­tistics that we would like you to debate upon is with regards to the presence of only 1,074 judges of su­perior courts in the entire Nigerian judiciary, inclusive of the recent ap­pointments made last month. This means that at our superior courts, there is one judge or justice of Ap­peal Court for every 158,287 (cases?) inclusive of Appeal Courts and the Supreme Court, based on conserva­tive estimates.”

Section 81 of the 1999 Constitution provides that, “any amount standing to the credit of the judiciary in the Consolidated Revenue Fund of the Federation shall be paid directly to the National Judicial Council for disbursement to the heads of the courts established for the Federation and the states under section 6 of the Constitution”.

With respect to the judiciary in the 36 states of the federation, Sec­tion 121 of the same Constitution similarly stipulates that “any amount standing to the credit of the judiciary in the Consolidated Revenue Fund of the State shall be paid directly to the heads of the courts concerned.”

It was in order to enforce this provision of the constitution, that Agbakoba in 2014 dragged the At­torney General of the Federation and Minister of Justice, the National Judicial Council (NJC) and the Na­tional Assembly to court to chal­lenge the constitutionality of allow­ing funds meant for the judiciary to pass through the executive arm of government.

Prior to this decision, Justice Ad­eniyi Ademola of Federal High Court had on January 13, 2014 restrained the Federal Government alongside the 36 state governors from holding on to funds meant for the judiciary.

Ademola had ordered that funds meant for the judiciary should be disbursed directly to the heads of court and not to the executive arm of government. His order which was premised on a suit filed by Judiciary Staff Association of Nigeria (JU­SUN), also declared that the work­ers have the standing to ask both the Federal Government and the states to comply with the provisions of the Constitution as they affected the funding of the judiciary. He also maintained that the practice of the executive disbursing funds to the judiciary was unconstitutional and also threatened the independence of the judiciary.

Earlier in September 2013, during a ceremony marking the commence­ment of a new legal year of the Su­preme Court, Justice Mohammed’s predecessor, Justice Aloma Mukhtar (rtd.), had also expressed concern over the yearly decline in the judi­ciary’s budget. She had posited then: “A situation where budgetary allo­cation to the judiciary continues to drop while the general government budget is on a steady increase ev­ery year is clearly an impediment to the quick and effective dispensa­tion of justice in Nigeria and, on the whole, a setback to the current effort at transforming the Judiciary. Over the years, funding of the courts has remained a challenge, as evident in the conditions of many courts in Ni­geria today. Statistics has shown that funding from the Federal Govern­ment has witnessed a steady decline since 2010, from N95bn in that year to N85bn in 2011, then N75bn in 2012 and dropped again in the 2013 budget to N67bn.”

Courts, institutions and other heads, whose proposed spending are captured in the NJC’s budget are the Supreme Court, Legal Practitioners Privileges Committee, Court of Ap­peal, Federal High Court and Na­tional Industrial Court of Nigeria, High Court of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), FCT’s Sharia Court of Appeal, FCT’s Customary Court of Appeal and the NJC. Others are: Federal Judicial Service Commission, Judicial Service Committee of the FCT, National Judicial Institute, Body of Benchers, retirement benefits of former Chief Justices of Nigeria, IT Project for Judiciary and state judicial offices.

Where now does President Buhari’s speech at the 2015 All Nigeria Judges Conference fit in? He had made the following pledged. “This adminis­tration is committed to the financial independence of the Nigerian judi­ciary in accordance with extant laws. We believe that the judiciary must be treated fairly and must be treated in much the same way as the executive and the legislature.”

In the 2014/2015 Legal Year, the Su­preme alone Court heard 1578 mat­ters, consisting of 1009 motions and 569 substantive appeals, delivering 262 Judgments in that period. Over 500 new appeals were filed in the last Legal year alone at the rate of about ten new appeals per week, most of which are interlocutory in nature. Ni­geria’s Supreme Court is certainly the most overworked in the world. Other courts are also groaning.

The AUTHORITY, hereby, calls on the executive arm to match its words with action by affording the judiciary perform its functions adequately, es­pecially now, by empowering it ad­equately, both financially and admin­istratively