P&ID AND ITS GREEDY HUNTER’S CASE.

By

JESUTEGA ONOKPASA

Oftentimes, litigants think courts are the sort of institutions they can run circles around and basically make a fool of.

Your business model was anchored all along on graft, bribery, kickbacks and fraud and yet you come to court with your filthy hands requesting to be granted a humongous award in comparison to which the most you might had actually expended in respect of the subject matter was only a pittance!

Even where you might had come to equity with clean hands, the courts are quite mindful not to render judgements that offend common sense.

Courts are also loath to make decisions that should be impossible to implement or grant orders that would cause greater harm than the good they are supposed to effect.

I always knew that, ultimately, nothing would come of the “Ali Baba And The Forty Thieves” case “The Greedy Hunter”, P&ID, had instituted against Nigeria.

Indeed, even if it ever had a genuine case, few appellate and certainly no apex forum in this world was likely to have awarded it $11 billion against Nigeria, knowing full well that extracting such an amount from the Nigerian treasury would upend the country’s national economy.

What happens in court often mystifies the uninitiated.

Some people, such as “Obidients”, for instance, say it is madness.

What they fail to realize is that if it is madness, there must be a most painstaking and quite reliable method to that madness – after all, a “madness” you have to spend five years learning at university and an additional year studying at the Law School must be a very special kind of “madness”, indeed!

The truth of the matter is that, contrary to the submissions of the frustrated, the law is not an ass, the court is not a stable of horses and judges are some of the smartest people in the world.

They are also extremely difficult to gaslight.

So ladies and gentlemen, sit back, relax and wait for the Judiciary to do justice according to law and you will not be disappointed unless it was not actually justice you were envisaging all along.

Onokpasa, a lawyer, was a member of the All Progressives Congress, APC, Presidential Campaign Council, and writes from Abuja.