THE GUARDIAN MARCH 26 2009
CITING the inability of the state counsel, Mrs. A.A Olorunfemi, to produce the prosecution witness (PW1), Judge Benedicta Shitta-Bey of Lagos High Court yesterday set free two armed robbery suspects standing trial before her.
The suspects, who were on bail, have been standing trial at the court in the past six years.
At yesterday's hearing, Olorunfemi told the court that the witness spoke to her a day earlier, saying that he would not be in court because of some official engagements outside the state.
The prosecution counsel then requested an adjournment to enable her produce the witness or other witnesses for the start of the defence.
But defence counsel, Adesina Ogunlana, opposed the prosecutor's application on grounds that it has taken the state more than three years to produce its witness.
He also argued that in the interest of justice and record purposes, PW1 should be excused from the trial while Olorunfemi should call other witnesses to move the case forward.
Ogunlana told the court that the suspects have been attending its proceedings from Badagry for six years, draining their resources.
He also argued that if it would take three years for Olorunfemi to produce a witness who had earlier testified in court, it might then take nine years to produce three other witnesses.
But Olorunfemi, in her objection, told the court that she could not compel the witness on national duty outside the state to come to court.
Citing the gravity of the charges, she also prayed the court to grant her another adjournment to get the second witness since PW1 was not immediately available. In her ruling, Judge Shitta-Bey closed PW1's testimony and upon close examinations of the number of adjournments taken on the case, cautioned the accused to steer clear of the circumstances that brought them before her and struck out the case.
Saturday, April 4, 2009
I’m Into Magazine Publication to Fight Corruption in the Judiciary – Ogunlana
National Mirror – November 20 2008
Unionist, Lawyer and Publisher, Adesina Ogunlana is an interesting personality. In the Lagos State Judiciary, the fear of his weekly magazine, the Squib, is the beginning of wisdom. In this interview with our Reporter, Adeyemi Adebanjo, he explains the rationale behind the setting up of the magazine. Excerpts:
How long have you been in practice?
I was called to the bar on March 14 1996. so I am just 12 years old. I am a young lawyer.
How has the practice been so far?
Interesting! I enjoy the practice of law. By nature I am an agitator and so in practice I’ve been essentially an advocate. I don’t think I have even incorporated a company, that is I have not dabbled into commercial practice. I don’t think I have sold a piece of land. I don’t think I have sold any house for people. People say that there is a lot of money in those kind of practice but I have not dabbled into it. I do not have interest in that. My interest is in the traditional aspect of lawyering; going to court and defending the interest of my client. And I find that rewarding. Rewarding emotionally, rewarding mentally and I also think rewarding financially.
Are you saying that you’ve never been approached to handle land matters, or that you simply don’t take such briefs?
Maybe both ways. You know the way legal practice is. It’s that it is what you are interested in or what you are doing that you continue to do. There are lawyers who sell properties, they call them property lawyers and that’s what they continue to do, searching for buyers or for sellers, perfecting documents of properties and all those kinds of work. There are people that look for briefs from banks, recovery of loans, they go to the legal departments of the concerned banks and all that and you go to court for them.
There are various aspects, many aspects of the legal profession but I am not interested. But I am not saying if somebody should bring such briefs to me I will reject them outright, but it is not my first love. I am a traditional value lawyer, litigation. People say there is no money in it but that’s what makes me happy.
You are also a publisher. What informs your decision to dabble into newspaper publication?
Well, thank you. I am not just the publisher of a magazine. I have actually written four books on the profession. One is ‘Understanding the Secrets of Successul Lawyers’ I have also written a book on ethics and jurisprudence entitled, ‘Why Lawyers Are Angels but Other People Say No.’ I have written on the late legendary lawyer, Frederick Rotimi Alade Williams, and I think I wrote a book on the election of the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) in 2006 which saw Olisa Agbakoba SAN emerge as the president of the association. That book is titled, ‘The Stranger Who Became King.’
As for the magazine, it is called The Squib. It is a weekly magazine and it has been on the newsstands since 2001. and Squib was a reaction, my reaction to the massive and widespread corruption and conduct in the judiciary and the legal profession when I joined it, when I became a lawyer in 1996. You may not know it, but I will say that in 1996 when I became a lawyer that was 11 years after I became a graduate, law was my second degree and I graduated first in 1985 and I was a teacher, a secondary school teacher until 1990 when I got into LASU to read law. And I read law as an adult. I was 26 years old when I started reading law and I became a Students Union leader, an activist. I finally graduated in 1995, because of student union problems and temporary expulsion from the university which lasted for almost two years.
So when I came in here, what I found was that we had a situation of bribery, widespread bribery and corruption and extortion. The bribery thing was from the lowest cadre to the highest cadre in the judiciary. That’s my personal experience which I endured for about three years. You know when you are a new lawyer, people toss you about, you want to file papers they will demand bribe or gratification.
In the court rooms, registrars you want to collect some papers, documents, they will demand bribe. And there were judges and magistrates who collected bribe. It was widespread and the NBA was not doing anything about it, at least not to the level someone like myself wanted.
So by year 2000 I had started writing articles and I would just produce about 300 articles and circulate them myself. And I think the next week I did it, somebody called me, Olanrewaju; I have forgotten his first name now and he said these your pieces are so good, why don’t you turn it into a magazine – as I was raising issues. And the one of the issues that bothered me then was that there was a judge, the late Justice Victor Manuwa who was eventually dismissed from service. Information was rife then that he had been suspended from office, and yet the judge continued to sit. And I wrote an article about that. I remember another…Karibi Whyte was reported in the international press that he was dozing at the International Court of Justice at the Hague, that the Nigerian judge was dozing while the court was in session and I wrote an article about that. And you could see that I was getting worried and concerned about the judiciary and the legal profession.
And so as a reaction to the corruption that was going on then, I started the Squib on March 21 2001. and the Chief Judge at that time, Justice Christoper Segun left in June and Ibitola Shotuminu came in, and that was it.
So the Squib was set up to fight corruption. Nobody was ready to rock the boat. People would complain in the quietness of their rooms and safety of their chambers; there was a lot of gossip and all that but nobody was ready to bell the cat. So I adopted a motto for the magazine which is “The Heavens Will Not Fall” and our modus operandi is to get to the bottom of corruption and misconduct, investigate it and expose it irrespective of the fact that you are a CJ, whether a fake lawyer, whosoever you are as long as you are in the judiciary sector and you’ve not done well.
Looking back now, do you think you’ve been able to meet the goal of setting up the magazine?
Maybe I may not be the proper person to answer that question since I am the publisher and the editor-in-chief of the magazine.
Have there been periods when you sat down and said to yourself, yes we are forging on?
Why not? I have never relented. I said earlier that it’s a weekly magazine. It is neither monthly nor quarterly. I don’t just want to talk much on that because I don’t want to be seen as blowing our own trumpet. But I can tell you that the Squib is the longest legal journal. By far wealthier lawyers, more respectable lawyers have floated one lawyer’s magazine or the other, but none was a weekly magazine. When we started, even professional journalists, judicial correspondents would tell me that it would not last, that after about six months or one year, that the magazines don’t live long in Nigeria. But seven and a half years on, the Squib is still on. And if we’ve not been embraced by the people, the Squib would have died. And for you to think that the Squib survived various persecutions, my workers were arrested more than five times, brutalized more than 5 times, charged to court. I have also been taken before the disciplinary committee of the body of benchers and the Squib is still on. And like I used to say, up till date nobody has dared take my magazine to court for libel.
I agree that we libel people but there is a defence to the law of libel, justification. Anything you read in The Squib you can be sure it is the truth, it may seem so strange. If a Chief Judge is corrupt like I have exposed two before, we just published and we prove. We don’t just keep quiet. The magazine monitors Lagos State High Court and about 80% of them are being monitored, that is the judges in the state high courts. We send staff there everyday to monitor when they sit, when they rise and we publish all these. And this has forced many judges to be more punctual and there is a popular saying in the state judiciary that the fear of The Squib is the beginning of wisdom. Before we came on board, corruption was brazen, but now nobody can dare to be corrupt and be open about it because there is a Squib factor in the Lagos State Judiciary and the legal profession. They will say, oh The Squib will hear about it and will publish. Not only about judges, so many lawyers, we have exposed lawyers who are fake, who have been practicing for so many years. We have exposed lawyers who have misconducted themselves. That is The Squib. I believe that the mere fact that we are on the news stands every week and lawyers buy it, judicial workers buy it and litigants; these are favourable responses to us. Letters are also written to us. The Squib is as factor in the Lagos State Judiciary because everybody knows that there is one platform where instances of misconduct can be reported and published fearlessly. And you know that when you are an administrator, you wouldn’t want your misdeeds to be openly reported and so you amend your ways. To that extent, The Squib has affected the quality of our administration of justice in Lagos State.
From your account of what your paper is into is it not likely that you will be rather unpopular amongst your colleagues?
If you say so that will mean that these are people who are corrupt. If you are a judge and you don’t like my magazine, you don’t like me, it is most likely that you are corrupt. If you are a lawyer and you don’t like what we are doing, it’s most likely that you are involved in several instances of misconduct.
Has there been any instance of your being harassed either physically or otherwise by your colleagues?
Let me say this…my colleagues, I don’t think so. Of course there are people that have…you can’t stop people from making snide remarks, uncomplimentary remarks mostly behind your back; oh, is he the only one, what does he mean and all that.
On the other hand, there are many people who appreciate our service, our courage, our sacrificial commitment. And they say this to our face that but for you this profession would have gone badly. Now as for attack, in the course of producing the Squib I have been physically attacked in the office thrice. Gun men came to my office about two years ago, I escaped that. People have broken into my office twice in two days through the roof and destroyed my computers looking for documents.
As for judges, I do my cases but for one or two incidents when to my face no judge has dared to harass me. I am simply not harassable in court. But about two weeks ago when I was not in court, judge, Funmilayo Atilade, a justice of the Lagos State High Court sitting at Igbosere was making uncomplimentary remarks about my chambers when I was not there. A junior colleague had gone to represent us in a case and when the judge heard my name, she was said to have asked my colleague: oh young lady, what are you doing in that chamber? You can’t gain anything from there, that trash, and all that. And on account of that, our client later came to say that he was not comfortable with retaining us as his counsel and I sympathized with him; I understand with him. We handed over his brief. He is not an activist, he is a businessman. He has the option of saying Mr. lawyer, try and get our case from that judge because the judge is biased against you, it’s going to affect me. But his own perspection is that instead of changing the court, he changed us; but that happens everyday, people for one reason or the other change their lawyers. They have their constitutional right to do so.
So, but if I were in that court, believe me that judge will not dare say that. I have never lost a case on account of the Squib. People used to fear, oh you will lose cases, the judge is going to be annoyed and all of that. But me as the editor of the Squib, is different from me as the owner and principal of the Winners Don’t Quit Chambers.
What should Lagosians be expecting from you vis a vis The Squib in the area of innovation or even extension of the magazine to Lagosians generally, that is not restricted to lawyers and the court?
It is lawyers magazine. I have no…I use the magazine as a critique. And let me say this, if at the risk of sounding as blowing my own trumpet, there is nothing like The Squib. This is the only magazine that is profession specific and profession critical. There is no magazine…My magazine is unique and peculiar in the sense that it is not talking about the principles of law, it’s talking about the operators of the administration of justice and criticizing them, and evaluating them. It’s like having a teacher’s magazine, criticizing and exposing corrupt principals, randy lecturers. Or you have a doctor’s magazine which says oh in so and so hospital there is a killer nurse, in so and so hospital there is a corrupt doctor and all that.
I do not intend to extend it as to the people and say…People who are not lawyers are free to buy it but…There was a time we were thinking of extending it to cover the parliament but we don’t have the resources yet, I realized that we may be over-stretching ourselves because my first love now is law and Squib and it is tasking. Though I am not prepared to become a full time journalist, I have to restrain myself within the ability and capacity that I can cope with.
So Lagosians are free to come to the court and buy it. If you want to know what is happening within the Lagos State Judiciary, how it’s being run, that’s the magazine to buy. In fact, it is the only magazine, we have no rival. All the other magazines, they come maybe twice a year but for you to know how judges behave, how lawyers react, what is happening; The Squib is the way to go.
Unionist, Lawyer and Publisher, Adesina Ogunlana is an interesting personality. In the Lagos State Judiciary, the fear of his weekly magazine, the Squib, is the beginning of wisdom. In this interview with our Reporter, Adeyemi Adebanjo, he explains the rationale behind the setting up of the magazine. Excerpts:
How long have you been in practice?
I was called to the bar on March 14 1996. so I am just 12 years old. I am a young lawyer.
How has the practice been so far?
Interesting! I enjoy the practice of law. By nature I am an agitator and so in practice I’ve been essentially an advocate. I don’t think I have even incorporated a company, that is I have not dabbled into commercial practice. I don’t think I have sold a piece of land. I don’t think I have sold any house for people. People say that there is a lot of money in those kind of practice but I have not dabbled into it. I do not have interest in that. My interest is in the traditional aspect of lawyering; going to court and defending the interest of my client. And I find that rewarding. Rewarding emotionally, rewarding mentally and I also think rewarding financially.
Are you saying that you’ve never been approached to handle land matters, or that you simply don’t take such briefs?
Maybe both ways. You know the way legal practice is. It’s that it is what you are interested in or what you are doing that you continue to do. There are lawyers who sell properties, they call them property lawyers and that’s what they continue to do, searching for buyers or for sellers, perfecting documents of properties and all those kinds of work. There are people that look for briefs from banks, recovery of loans, they go to the legal departments of the concerned banks and all that and you go to court for them.
There are various aspects, many aspects of the legal profession but I am not interested. But I am not saying if somebody should bring such briefs to me I will reject them outright, but it is not my first love. I am a traditional value lawyer, litigation. People say there is no money in it but that’s what makes me happy.
You are also a publisher. What informs your decision to dabble into newspaper publication?
Well, thank you. I am not just the publisher of a magazine. I have actually written four books on the profession. One is ‘Understanding the Secrets of Successul Lawyers’ I have also written a book on ethics and jurisprudence entitled, ‘Why Lawyers Are Angels but Other People Say No.’ I have written on the late legendary lawyer, Frederick Rotimi Alade Williams, and I think I wrote a book on the election of the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) in 2006 which saw Olisa Agbakoba SAN emerge as the president of the association. That book is titled, ‘The Stranger Who Became King.’
As for the magazine, it is called The Squib. It is a weekly magazine and it has been on the newsstands since 2001. and Squib was a reaction, my reaction to the massive and widespread corruption and conduct in the judiciary and the legal profession when I joined it, when I became a lawyer in 1996. You may not know it, but I will say that in 1996 when I became a lawyer that was 11 years after I became a graduate, law was my second degree and I graduated first in 1985 and I was a teacher, a secondary school teacher until 1990 when I got into LASU to read law. And I read law as an adult. I was 26 years old when I started reading law and I became a Students Union leader, an activist. I finally graduated in 1995, because of student union problems and temporary expulsion from the university which lasted for almost two years.
So when I came in here, what I found was that we had a situation of bribery, widespread bribery and corruption and extortion. The bribery thing was from the lowest cadre to the highest cadre in the judiciary. That’s my personal experience which I endured for about three years. You know when you are a new lawyer, people toss you about, you want to file papers they will demand bribe or gratification.
In the court rooms, registrars you want to collect some papers, documents, they will demand bribe. And there were judges and magistrates who collected bribe. It was widespread and the NBA was not doing anything about it, at least not to the level someone like myself wanted.
So by year 2000 I had started writing articles and I would just produce about 300 articles and circulate them myself. And I think the next week I did it, somebody called me, Olanrewaju; I have forgotten his first name now and he said these your pieces are so good, why don’t you turn it into a magazine – as I was raising issues. And the one of the issues that bothered me then was that there was a judge, the late Justice Victor Manuwa who was eventually dismissed from service. Information was rife then that he had been suspended from office, and yet the judge continued to sit. And I wrote an article about that. I remember another…Karibi Whyte was reported in the international press that he was dozing at the International Court of Justice at the Hague, that the Nigerian judge was dozing while the court was in session and I wrote an article about that. And you could see that I was getting worried and concerned about the judiciary and the legal profession.
And so as a reaction to the corruption that was going on then, I started the Squib on March 21 2001. and the Chief Judge at that time, Justice Christoper Segun left in June and Ibitola Shotuminu came in, and that was it.
So the Squib was set up to fight corruption. Nobody was ready to rock the boat. People would complain in the quietness of their rooms and safety of their chambers; there was a lot of gossip and all that but nobody was ready to bell the cat. So I adopted a motto for the magazine which is “The Heavens Will Not Fall” and our modus operandi is to get to the bottom of corruption and misconduct, investigate it and expose it irrespective of the fact that you are a CJ, whether a fake lawyer, whosoever you are as long as you are in the judiciary sector and you’ve not done well.
Looking back now, do you think you’ve been able to meet the goal of setting up the magazine?
Maybe I may not be the proper person to answer that question since I am the publisher and the editor-in-chief of the magazine.
Have there been periods when you sat down and said to yourself, yes we are forging on?
Why not? I have never relented. I said earlier that it’s a weekly magazine. It is neither monthly nor quarterly. I don’t just want to talk much on that because I don’t want to be seen as blowing our own trumpet. But I can tell you that the Squib is the longest legal journal. By far wealthier lawyers, more respectable lawyers have floated one lawyer’s magazine or the other, but none was a weekly magazine. When we started, even professional journalists, judicial correspondents would tell me that it would not last, that after about six months or one year, that the magazines don’t live long in Nigeria. But seven and a half years on, the Squib is still on. And if we’ve not been embraced by the people, the Squib would have died. And for you to think that the Squib survived various persecutions, my workers were arrested more than five times, brutalized more than 5 times, charged to court. I have also been taken before the disciplinary committee of the body of benchers and the Squib is still on. And like I used to say, up till date nobody has dared take my magazine to court for libel.
I agree that we libel people but there is a defence to the law of libel, justification. Anything you read in The Squib you can be sure it is the truth, it may seem so strange. If a Chief Judge is corrupt like I have exposed two before, we just published and we prove. We don’t just keep quiet. The magazine monitors Lagos State High Court and about 80% of them are being monitored, that is the judges in the state high courts. We send staff there everyday to monitor when they sit, when they rise and we publish all these. And this has forced many judges to be more punctual and there is a popular saying in the state judiciary that the fear of The Squib is the beginning of wisdom. Before we came on board, corruption was brazen, but now nobody can dare to be corrupt and be open about it because there is a Squib factor in the Lagos State Judiciary and the legal profession. They will say, oh The Squib will hear about it and will publish. Not only about judges, so many lawyers, we have exposed lawyers who are fake, who have been practicing for so many years. We have exposed lawyers who have misconducted themselves. That is The Squib. I believe that the mere fact that we are on the news stands every week and lawyers buy it, judicial workers buy it and litigants; these are favourable responses to us. Letters are also written to us. The Squib is as factor in the Lagos State Judiciary because everybody knows that there is one platform where instances of misconduct can be reported and published fearlessly. And you know that when you are an administrator, you wouldn’t want your misdeeds to be openly reported and so you amend your ways. To that extent, The Squib has affected the quality of our administration of justice in Lagos State.
From your account of what your paper is into is it not likely that you will be rather unpopular amongst your colleagues?
If you say so that will mean that these are people who are corrupt. If you are a judge and you don’t like my magazine, you don’t like me, it is most likely that you are corrupt. If you are a lawyer and you don’t like what we are doing, it’s most likely that you are involved in several instances of misconduct.
Has there been any instance of your being harassed either physically or otherwise by your colleagues?
Let me say this…my colleagues, I don’t think so. Of course there are people that have…you can’t stop people from making snide remarks, uncomplimentary remarks mostly behind your back; oh, is he the only one, what does he mean and all that.
On the other hand, there are many people who appreciate our service, our courage, our sacrificial commitment. And they say this to our face that but for you this profession would have gone badly. Now as for attack, in the course of producing the Squib I have been physically attacked in the office thrice. Gun men came to my office about two years ago, I escaped that. People have broken into my office twice in two days through the roof and destroyed my computers looking for documents.
As for judges, I do my cases but for one or two incidents when to my face no judge has dared to harass me. I am simply not harassable in court. But about two weeks ago when I was not in court, judge, Funmilayo Atilade, a justice of the Lagos State High Court sitting at Igbosere was making uncomplimentary remarks about my chambers when I was not there. A junior colleague had gone to represent us in a case and when the judge heard my name, she was said to have asked my colleague: oh young lady, what are you doing in that chamber? You can’t gain anything from there, that trash, and all that. And on account of that, our client later came to say that he was not comfortable with retaining us as his counsel and I sympathized with him; I understand with him. We handed over his brief. He is not an activist, he is a businessman. He has the option of saying Mr. lawyer, try and get our case from that judge because the judge is biased against you, it’s going to affect me. But his own perspection is that instead of changing the court, he changed us; but that happens everyday, people for one reason or the other change their lawyers. They have their constitutional right to do so.
So, but if I were in that court, believe me that judge will not dare say that. I have never lost a case on account of the Squib. People used to fear, oh you will lose cases, the judge is going to be annoyed and all of that. But me as the editor of the Squib, is different from me as the owner and principal of the Winners Don’t Quit Chambers.
What should Lagosians be expecting from you vis a vis The Squib in the area of innovation or even extension of the magazine to Lagosians generally, that is not restricted to lawyers and the court?
It is lawyers magazine. I have no…I use the magazine as a critique. And let me say this, if at the risk of sounding as blowing my own trumpet, there is nothing like The Squib. This is the only magazine that is profession specific and profession critical. There is no magazine…My magazine is unique and peculiar in the sense that it is not talking about the principles of law, it’s talking about the operators of the administration of justice and criticizing them, and evaluating them. It’s like having a teacher’s magazine, criticizing and exposing corrupt principals, randy lecturers. Or you have a doctor’s magazine which says oh in so and so hospital there is a killer nurse, in so and so hospital there is a corrupt doctor and all that.
I do not intend to extend it as to the people and say…People who are not lawyers are free to buy it but…There was a time we were thinking of extending it to cover the parliament but we don’t have the resources yet, I realized that we may be over-stretching ourselves because my first love now is law and Squib and it is tasking. Though I am not prepared to become a full time journalist, I have to restrain myself within the ability and capacity that I can cope with.
So Lagosians are free to come to the court and buy it. If you want to know what is happening within the Lagos State Judiciary, how it’s being run, that’s the magazine to buy. In fact, it is the only magazine, we have no rival. All the other magazines, they come maybe twice a year but for you to know how judges behave, how lawyers react, what is happening; The Squib is the way to go.
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