“Court!”

The first knock on the courtroom door sent the lawyers scurrying to their places, wiggling wigs on heads and flipping open files. One barrister was still not at his correct station when the judge entered, and he skirted the bench at a stoop, like someone walking in front of a cinema screen, holding his white shaggy mop in place. With the funny gait, the black suit and the lawyers robe, he looked like Groucho Marx. He got to his place just in time to assume a deep and earnest bow. The judge took his seat. The bench was so high all anyone could see was the top of his wig. When the lawyers spoke they did so haltingly, as if they were unsure of themselves. When the judge spoke no one could hear him.
Why do barristers continue to wear wigs in Nigeria? I would have thought that would be one of the first things to go after independence. What greater symbol of the old regime could there be? Even in the UK the rules have been relaxed. Only the barristers who speak in court and the judges need wear them, not the solicitors of the legal team.
Here you can tell the experience of the lawyer by how battered his wig is. Newly qualified barristers have bright white wigs, fuzzy and immaculate, as if the sheep had groomed himself especially well before sloughing his hide with the greatest of care. Hard bitten old-timers look like they’ve stepped from the pages of Sketches by Boz, their wigs flattened and crumpled, brown with age, they fall apart at the seams.
I, like most reporters, began my career at the courts. I stalked the Holloway Road magistrates’ court looking for those weird details that made a case interesting. The waiting hall of the court was a mixture of drug addicts, un-licensed drivers, teenage tearaways, nightmare neighbours, and other petty criminals, their lawyers, policemen, and the odd spectator, like Jock.
Jock was a retired court usher who had nothing better to do than come down to the courts every day: “It’s better than television!” he’d exclaim after a particularly juicy case. He showed me how the court worked.
Being the magistrates’ court most of it was dull. All the juicy stuff -murders and such- went on to the Old Bailey, but occasionally you’d get a gem. Once I saw a big goon in the dock, he’d been at a nudist health spa called Rio’s in Kentish Town. His associate had interrupted his shower to tell him that a traffic warden was trying to clamp his car, he’d run outside and beat the warden with a chair. A passing armed diplomatic protection officer intervened and the attacker's towel dropped leaving him stark naked in the street.
Another occasion I saw a man who’d been caught trying to pick up a policewoman disguised as a prostitute get off because his barrister (I’d followed her to the court, it wasn’t often you’d get a genuine silk down Holloway Mags… she wasn’t wearing her wig by the way) noticed a mistake in the dates on the police forms. She’d jumped up and said her client should be entitled to know “which case he was pleading guilty to”. The panel of magistrates considered their verdict and said he should be let off “in the interests of justice”. The previous defendant, caught in exactly the same operation but representing himself, because he was on benefits and could not afford a lawyer, got an £800 fine. “Quite why you’re trying to buy sex when you are on income support eludes me,” the magistrate said.
Back in Maitama the lawyers were trying the same thing. Legal maneuvering, trying to include other parties in the suit, serve papers, protest they had not been properly served, question the locus standii, or force an order of mandamus.
I can’t think of a single case that my colleagues have reported on that has been decided on the merits of the evidence. All the legal jousting is about knocking the case out before it comes to trial, even to the degree that a former governor accused of stealing from his treasury is prepared to argue that the case against him in the federal court should be thrown out because the money he accused of stealing was from his state, and therefore not under the jurisdiction of the Abuja court.