The High Court of the Federal Capital Territory has been embroiled in a crisis of corruption and personnel grievances that posses far-reaching implications for the administration of justice in the nation’s seat of power, after judges, in a rare move, supplied Peoples Gazette with unspeakable humiliation they endured under Chief Justice Husseini Baba-Yusuf.
In discreet interviews conducted over seven weeks, five judges on the court bewailed the mismanagement of the division’s resources to help judicial officers fare better as misery proliferates nationwide after President Bola Tinubu ditched subsidies on petrol to purportedly stave off a broader economic collapse.
The judges also accused Mr Baba-Yusuf of bilking their meagre allowances, leaving their courtrooms without support personnel or equipment while running the court like his private estate and treating them generally like “secondary school boys,” according to accounts obtained by The press, with the judges warning that the neglect could aggravate their susceptibility to bribe-taking — even though they stridently maintained they would rather quit than compromise justice.
Since 2007 when President Umar Yar’Adua raised the salaries of FCT judges from N200,000 to N530,000 monthly (roughly $600), no reviews have been conducted, much less approved, they said.
“We regularly sit on cases involving individuals and companies accused of stealing billions, and most of them have agents that usually try to bribe judges in order to influence court decisions,” one of the judges said. “Yet we cannot even feed ourselves or compromise our constitutional oath to guarantee a decent living.”
“Even the prosecutors from the EFCC who bring cases to our courtrooms are better paid and equipped,” a judge said.
