'Partners?' By Adesina Ogunlana

Who is a partner? If you expect me to inquire the oracles of a dictionary for an answer, then you’ll be waiting for Godot.

Of course we all have a fair idea of who a partner is. A partner is one who is a part of a common enterprise with another. A partner is a contributor to the prosecution and achievement of particular goals. If the goal is conjugal you call him a spouse, when martial, you tag him comrade, when criminal you label him accomplice, when nationalistic, you dub him patriot, when romantic, you call him lover, when political or artistic or intellectual you deign him a collaborator, when sportish a mate. And so on, and so forth.
Many people especially lawyers like to imagine that the Bar, the general constituency of all legal practitioners and the Bench the occupational constituency of a tiny percentage of legal practitioners are not only partners but partners in progress.

But is this really true? Lawyers and Judges dress and talk alike. They share a common place of operation or theatre of action so to say – the court. Even more, they share in the use of a common professional currency – law. While one submits on it, the other interpretes it. The ultimate proof that lawyers and judges are birds of a feather, or beans of the same pod is the fact that they learnt their basic trade at the feet of the same sage – the Nigerian Law School.

When the Bar and the Bench meet officially, outside the court-room, it is common to hear sweet, sentiments of the alleged “indivisible bond” between the Bar and the Bench, and their mutual and symbiotic dependence on each other. Of course the deceit doesn’t end until the panjandrums of the Judiciary declare that “the Bar is the mother of the Bench” and, “no Bar, no Bench”. I call it deceit because, at least speaking from the background of my Lagos State experience. Since I started practicing in this State-City of Ologunkutere, Esugbayi-Eleko and Fashola and that’s not three days ago, the Bench has never treated, the bar at least in the most part and time as partners. Master-servant relationship is actually more like it.

Individually, the average or do I say, normal judge does not see himself any longer a lawyer. Worse, he sees himself as not only a superior being but in fact a much better human being than lawyers. Let’s face it, many judges forget they are indeed and in truth nothing more than “promoted lawyers”. As a group and in formal relationships with the Bar, the Lagos Judiciary has the custom, of considering and treating the Bar, at the best of times as a poor irksome cousin and at the worst and more common times, as a serf-subordinate, fit for slight consideration as a last resort.
Many judges live by different rules from lawyers. It is the judge who comes late, very late indeed sometimes to work and feels no qualms. If he eventually sits and still has the grace to make perfunctory excuses as to his lateness, he invariably expects to be applauded for doing what was only proper. Interestingly this sort of judges has no care or consideration when counsel come late to their courts. Even when counsel make profuse explanations and tender even the most pathetic apologies, the judges refuses to budge.
It is the very judge who without any notice to counsel fails to come to court, causing social and financial dislocation to counsel and their clients. Nobody asks the judge to pay any cost for his misdemeanor. But when a counsel is absent from court, then all hell is let loose, as the judge literally catches fire. Before long, dire threats are issued from the Bench “If by the next adjourned date-:…………

A judge finds it convenient to be rude, even out rightly abusive of counsel. Ha, after all he is judge. But can a lawyer do that?
If any body is still in any doubt about the contempt in which the Bench holds the Bar in Lagos State, he only needs to consider the age-long attitude of the Bench to the marking of the Annual Law Weeks of the Bars in Lagos State. Let me give the attitude of the Bench a name. It is this –“an attitude of deceptive non-reaction, quiet but potent sabotage.
When the bar holds her week, the bench in Lagos State no matter the level of invitation behaves largely dumb and deaf, giving the distinct impression that she is not aware of the celebration of the bar. So judges and magistrates fix dates regardless of the programmes of the bar. Out of about nearly two hundred judges and magistrates in the State, the bar cannot hope to get even a tenth of that number of judex to attend their programmes. Partners indeed!

Of course because the courts do not consider the bar in her week, such celebration often record low attendance of even the lawyers themselves as a good majority troop to the courts, to satisfy their clients and for their daily bread. At the Dinner of the Ikeja Bar last week, at the Sheraton Hotel, I saw two out of the three heads of the state government at the occasion. No prize for guessing right, the absent one-the Chief Judge of course! As if that was not enough, of all the 50 judges of the State High Court and God knows the numbers of the judges at the Federal High court Lagos State division, only one and one only turned up at the dinner. And this judge, well understandably was once a chairman of the Lagos Bar. Little wonder, then!

And they say we are partners!