READ ALSO: Eradicating The Child Soldier Trend In Nigeria It is also important to acknowledge the obvious fact that fresh ideas are always needed at the Supreme Court for the sake of its vibrancy and institutional capacity that it requires to judiciously respond to the ev¬er-changing realities and general institutional progress in the emerging digital legal world. Some may argue that the need for prior experience on the Bench may have influenced the jaundiced selection process. It was probably the self-serving and nepotistic empire-building instincts of those charged with the sacred responsibility of nominating justices into the Supreme Court that have incestuously cornered it in favour of those already holding judicial appointments as if it were a vocational cult or a secret society and it has unwittingly denied the nation the services of some of her best legal minds while at the same time promoting a myopic judicial outlook.Ī credible and good faith headhunt should naturally be extended to the Bar, the academia and wherever juristic talents are to be found. Judicial appointments under the Constitution are reserved for legal practitioners of verifiable integrity but with no restrictions whatsoever as to their areas of legal practice. To have unduly restricted such key appointments to serving judges alone while there are hundreds of abundantly qualified law¬yers is a serious disservice to the legal order. Who gets appointed to the apex court and how he or she gets there would certainly go a long way in determining how re¬sponsive and forward-looking a nation’s legal system could be. While it may sound like a novel development, it is actually a half-hearted attempt to return to best practice as it is the case all over the legally civilised world.
It was reported last week that the Chief Justice of Nigeria, Ibrahim Tanko Muhamad, has expanded the recruitment pool from where Supreme Court Justices are picked beyond the present esoteric clique of privi¬leged serving judges to now include legal practitioners from different vocational specialties.
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