The letters written by counsel addressed to the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) sequel to the judgment in the pre-election matter against Mr Isa Ali Pantami at Federal High Court, Gombe Division, purporting to direct how the party should act on the ground, reveal a disturbing trend: politicians increasingly deploy lawyers not to pursue justice through the courts, but to manufacture outcomes outside them.
The constitutional problem is plain. Section 6 of the 1999 Constitution vests judicial power in the courts, and Section 36 guarantees every party a fair hearing. Once a dispute is before the Court of Appeal, due process is the only lawful route to a remedy. A lawyer’s letter is not a judgment, an order or a writ of enforcement. Presenting it as instruction is an attempt to achieve by pressure what one evidently doubts can be achieved by law.
Consider the sequence. An appeal has been filed. A motion for stay of execution has followed. Both, as procedure demands, must have been served on all parties. That is the law doing its work. Service places the other side on notice, and it is for that side, guided by its own counsel, to grasp the implications of those processes. To write again, telling the recipient what to do, is to distrust the very system one has invoked. It is to say: we have gone to court, but we do not believe the court is enough.
Nigerian jurisprudence has long frowned on this instinct. In Governor of Lagos State v. Ojukwu, the Supreme Court condemned self-help and insisted that parties must not take the law into their own hands while a dispute is pending. The principle is not a technicality. It is the difference between a republic governed by law and one governed by whoever acts fastest or threatens loudest. A party that files for a stay concedes that the court is the arbiter of what happens next. It cannot behave as though it has already won, that is rather prejudicial!
There is nothing inherently improper about a lawyer writing a demand, giving legal advice or communicating his client’s position. Lawyers routinely do so. The difficulty arises when correspondence assumes the character of an alternative adjudicatory process, particularly where it purports to tell another party how it must act in circumstances already governed by pending judicial proceedings.
The PDP, like every litigant, has its own lawyers. Those lawyers have a professional responsibility to advise the Party on the legal consequences of the judgment, the appeal, the application for stay and every other relevant process. That is precisely why legal representation exists.
The professional ethics dimension is equally serious. Under the Rules of Professional Conduct for Legal Practitioners 2023, a lawyer is an officer of the court, bound not to obstruct or undermine the administration of justice. Advocacy is a privilege exercised within the law, not a licence to substitute for it. A lawyer who advises that a firm letter can accomplish what a pending motion has yet to secure does not advance the client’s cause. He lowers the standing of the profession. There is also the delicate matter of addressing a party known to be represented. The PDP has lawyers, who are duty-bound to advise it on the consequences of the processes served. Opposing counsel should trust them to do so, and correspondence that seeks to direct the party over and ahead of its lawyers is a practice the Bar should discourage.
Some will call such letters harmless reminders. Context says otherwise especially in the digital era. Delivered in the middle of litigation, amid a political contest, a letter of this kind is meant to be read as a warning, and its audience includes the public as well as the recipient. Its purpose is to create facts on the ground that no court has authorised.
The cost of this habit is cumulative. Each time a letter is allowed to stand in for a ruling, the authority of the courts erodes a little further. Litigants learn that shortcuts work, and the citizen who respects process learns that patience is for the naive.
The remedy is simple. If the appeal has merit, let it be heard. If the stay is deserved, let the court grant it. If a party is in breach of an order, let the aggrieved return to court and seek enforcement or contempt proceedings. Lawyers who serve politicians should remember that their first client is the law itself. Power grabbed by letterhead is still a grab, and no legal language can make it lawful.
The integrity of the legal profession ultimately depends on recognising that the most powerful instrument available to a lawyer is not the threatening letter, it is the law itself.
- Mr Abdulkadir, Esq is a legal consultant based in Gombe and can be reached via [email protected]
