When this article under the heading Saving the Supreme Court from Crises was published by The Cable on 12 November 2022, it addressed the multiple dimensions of the crises of attrition, retention, and replacement in Nigeria’s Supreme Court as well as the pathologies that make these resilient… Three issues were immediately in focus.
One is occupational health and well-being for Supreme Court Justices. The tendency to reduce the triple crises of attrition, retention, and replacement in Nigeria’s Supreme Court to an issue of appointment of brilliant academics or supposedly proven practitioners avoids the real problem. Indeed, the records suggest that premature mortality on the court has been most unkind to its brightest and best.
For instance, Chukwunweike Idigbe was reputed to be arguably the sharpest and most rigorous mind on the court at his death in 1983. Augustine Nnamani was only the fourth holder of a doctorate degree in law to be appointed to the court, after Taslim Elias, George Baptist Ayodola Coker, and Egbert Udo Udoma; and Okay Achike was only the second law professor and the third legal academic to sit on the Supreme Court after Taslim Elias. Adolphus Godwin Karibi-Whyte, another academic who preceded him to the Supreme Court and who, like Achike, retired in 2002, was an Associate Professor at the University of Lagos before the onset of his judicial career. Niki Tobi, former Dean of Law at the University of Maiduguri, followed later.
The Supreme Court does not appear to have been the kindest of working environments its most brilliant minds and there is nothing to say that it will be kinder to any bright minds who agree to go there now. If anything, the court has been somewhat of a cemetery in a quite literal manner to the brightest legal minds…
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