OPINION BY CHIDI ANSELM ODINKALU: A supreme court of crises? | TheCable
That crisis of appointment has often been accompanied by a crisis of retention and mortality. When Stafford Foster Sutton retired as the last foreign Chief Justice of Nigeria , the government appointed an Egba prince, Adetokunbo Ademola, to succeed him on April 1, 1958.
However, early in 2002, Justice Achike suffered a stroke forcing him ultimately to take early retirement from the Supreme Court at the age of 69 in August of the same year. He was too ill to even attend his own valedictory session the following month. One year later, in August 2003, he died.The early retirement of Justice Okay Achike happened at the beginning of a bad season for Nigeria’s Supreme Court. Over the next three years, seven Justices left the Supreme Court.
Before the untimely death of Dan Ibekwe in 1977, the death of a serving supreme court justice was almost unheard of. When he died on June 1, 1959, Olumuyiwa Jibowu was a justice of the then federal supreme court, which was the equivalent of today’s court of appeal. The apex court for the country then was the judicial committee of the Privy Council in London.
From the Body of Senior Advocates of Nigeria the reaction was swift and immediate. On behalf of the Body, Onomigbo Okpoko claimed that the complaint of the CJN was self-inflicted because of an appointment process that “appears to have been designed and operated to exclude good and competent lawyers from being appointed Justices of appellate courts”.
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