Nigeria does not have a Supreme Court (SC) and is desperately in need of one. What we have in this country in the form of the Supreme Court of Nigeria is a final court of appeals.
The two are not the same. The illusion of the two being the same is what has nearly crippled the administration of justice in Nigeria. The Nigerian Supreme Court entertains all sorts and welcomes thousands of appeals every year. A dispute with your brother on how both of you should share one plot of land that your father left can end up in the SC, not because it raises any serious issue of law but rather, for the ordinary reason of appealing the dispute until there is no where else to go. Thousands of such appeals are filed every year in the Nigerian Supreme Court. Supremacy of the Apex Court in Nigeria means finality of decisions and nothing more.
Nigeria urgently needs a SC for the exclusive purpose of settling and declaring the law to guide other courts of the land. The utility of the SC entertaining any matter should lie beyond settling the dispute between the parties with finality. That duty should be left to the Court of Appeal. The purpose should be to take advantage of the matter to settle grey areas of the law, break new grounds of law or change an existing legal rule. Nigeria needs a Supreme Court that should not have more than 150 cases at any particular time in its docket.
We can take a look at the US Supreme Court (USSC) and the UK Supreme Court (UKSC).The USSC grants and hears oral argument in about 75-80 cases out of the about 10, 000 petitions that it receives.The UKSC receives around 230 applications for permission to appeal and hears around 90 cases per year. No case gets to the SC in these two countries by appeal as of right. The court must approve a proposed appeal on the basis that it raises a legal issue that is of fundamental importance to the generality of the people of the country. Much of the time of these courts is devoted to determining which matters can be heard. In the US, that is done in chambers without taking oral arguments from the parties, most times.
There cannot, in the case of Nigeria, be less than 15,000 appeals pending at the Nigerian SC today. Any case that raises an issue of law, no matter how basic and pedantic, can get there as of right. At the rate of an average of 350 judgments a year, the Nigerian Supreme Court would require over 40 years to exhaust the appeals in its docket, even if further appeals to the court were banned or suspended. The average period for hearing a regular appeal in the court is now 12 years. At the end of this year, it will be 15 years.
The situation calls for urgent remedial action. This can be achieved with a constitutional amendment limiting appeals the Court to the four categories mentioned above, namely (1) disputes between or amongst the Federal Government and the States, (2) matters on grey areas of the law – either where there is no existing decision of the Supreme Court or where two different Divisions of the Court of Appeal have interpreted the law differently, (3) matters that raise issues of law that break new grounds, e.g. challenges of technological innovations to existing law, and (4) matters that seriously question the correctness of any existing decision of the SC. It means that every appeal to the SC must be by application for the leave of the Court to be determined along those parameters.
The Supreme Court plays the role of the queen bee in a beehive. It has to be closely guarded. Cases like Lawan v Michika that are only for seeking a big brother intervention in an otherwise pedantic dispute, with a high appeal to mischief, should be screened out.
Chuks Nwachuku
