Vice-President Yemi Osinbajo on Monday lamented the slow pace of adjudication process, saying the delay in the justice sector and undue bureaucratic processes in the public and private sectors constituted a major hindrance to investments in the country.
Osinbajo, who also restated the commitment of the Federal Government to fight corruption, spoke at a session of the ongoing 55th Annual General Conference of the Nigerian Bar Association in Abuja.
He spoke at the NBA conference session which was with the theme, ‘The role of law in national development’.
Earlier on Sunday, President Muhammadu Buhari, while speaking at the opening ceremony of the one week-long event in Abuja, described corruption as the greatest human rights violation ever and therefore urged Nigerian lawyers to support his administration to win the war against corruption.
Osinbajo while speaking on the broad economic policy of the Buhari Administration on Monday said bureaucracies and slow adjudication processes in the justice sector must be addressed for the country to be able to attract foreign and local investments.
He also lamented the impact of the devastating activities of the Boko Haram terrorists on education, agriculture and the attendant effects on the economy, and restated the commitment of government to rebuild the North-East zone where the destruction by the insurgents was most pronounced.
He said the country which was in dire need of providing jobs for teeming number of youths and graduates could not afford the delay in the administration of justice undue bureaucratic processes in the public sector.
“A country that is to provide jobs for 80 per cent of graduates from our universities and youth unemployment population of over 40 per cent cannot afford this disruptive delays in creating wealth opportunities,” he said.
The Vice President who said Nigeria was currently generating about 4,000megawatts of power and was striving to generate 5,000 megawatts before the end of the year, added that “the way the rules are applied and implemented in each aspect of the economic value chain” would determine the investors’ “confidence in the business environment”.
He also promised that the current administration’s policies would be consistent and fairly applied.
Osinbajo likened the level of corruption in the country to an emergency situation that required the support of the justice sector to tame.
He noted that with “the continuous and relentless pillaging of public resources that has characterised governance in the last few years, unless we are able to deal with the question of corruption it may be extremely difficult to get much work done”.
He added, “We have to deal with the issue of integrity in our judicial system even as we deal with general problem of corruption. There is no question at all that if we don’t handle corruption squarely, if our justice system is so degraded that it will be practically impossible to get very much done or to encourage anyone to come into our environment.”
A former President of the NBA, Mr. Olisa Agbakoba (SAN), who chaired the session, said the remarks by the Vice-President represented the first government policies on economic principles contained in the Chapter 2 of the Constitution.
He said though the provisions of the Chapter 2 of the constitution were non-justiciable (cannot be enforced by court order), if the Federal Government implemented its policies as presented by the Vice-President, it would no longer be necessary for lawyers to rush to court to enforce the economic rights of Nigerians.
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