N110bn BUDGET FOR JUDICIARY NOT ENOUGH – YUSUF ALI TELLS BUHARI

A Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN) Mallam Yusuf Ali, on Saturday, declared that the N110 billion budgeted for the National Judicial Commission (NJC) in 2021 was not enough.

Ali said that the Judiciary needed to be well funded.

President Muhammau Buhari had on Thursday, declared that the sum of N110 billion naira has been budgeted for NJC.

But, Ali, while speaking during a thanksgiving and prayer session organised in honour of a former Executive Secretary of National Commission for Nomadic Education, Professor Rasid Aderinnoye, maintained that the judiciary must be well funded for it to be fair and independent.

Ali noted that the judiciary needed more funds to cater for its personnel and capital project.

He said, “Our court rooms are not as modern as they ought to be and with this pandemic, there is the need for the Judiciary to invest massively in ICT so that it can leverage on the outcome of the pandemic.

‘I believe quietly that the Judiciary will require more money than what it has been allocated in the budget”.

Aderinoye, while speaking, called on the Federal Government to address the infrastructural decay in the Nigeria Universities as well as welfare of lecturers..

He noted that it is unfortunate that what is obtainable when he joined the academic world is not what is obtainable now.

He said, “Even as students at the university, what we have then was really university, as students because that time you will move from your hall to the lecture room, from your lecture room to the cafeteria and from cafeteria to the library. But, today, it is not so again. Even, the hall to some extent is not all again. And when you look at the cafeteria, it is gone forever.