By Okoi Obono-Obla
A leading journalist with Cross River Watch online news, Jonathan Abang Ugbal, in a piece on his Facebook page titled “On Denis Odama and those sharing Section 24 of the Cybercrimes [Prohibition, Prevention, etc.] Act, 2015”, wondered why different lawyers such as Femi Falana, SAN, Olumide Fusika, SAN, Firsts Baba Isa, Marshal D.F. Abubakar, Inibehe Effiong, Bolaji Oluwatosin and my humble self have given varied interpretations of Section 24 of the Cybercrime Prevention and Prohibition Act, 2015.
Since Ugbal has particularly mentioned me as one of the lawyers that have given differing opinions on the interpretation of Section 24 of this law, I have had to answer him thus:
Put 29 lawyers in one room and give them a single topic to research, or ask each of them to give his or her own perspective, and you will be disappointed to find that each will give a different perspective.
We have various philosophies of law, traditions, and schools, and lawyers draw their influence and inclinations from each of these schools. Therefore, it is not strange that all the lawyers you listed gave different interpretations of the provisions of Section 24 of the Cybercrime Prevention and Prohibition Act, 2015. None of them may be wrong. But ultimately, it is the interpretation of the Judge who hears and determines a particular case hinged on the contravention of Section 24 that will prevail, not the varied opinions of all the lawyers you mentioned.
The law, at the end of the day, is what the court or the judges say the law is. This is the position of the American School of legal thought, which is more pragmatic than other schools.
There are several traditions and schools of law. They include the Natural Law School, which sees law as rooted in morals and reason; the Positivist School, which sees law as the command of the sovereign; the Historical School, which sees law as a product of the people’s history and culture; the Sociological School, which sees law as an instrument for balancing competing social interests; and the American Realist School, which is pragmatic and focuses on how courts decide cases in reality.
According to Justice Roscoe Pound, who was a Professor at Harvard University School of Law and later a Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States of America, on the Bad Man Theory, law is what the courts decide and it is based on the Bad Man Theory. The theory postulates that law should be viewed from the perspective of a bad man who is only concerned with what the courts will do to him for his actions, and therefore the law is essentially a prediction of what the courts will do.
In conclusion, my response to Ugbal’s inquiry is that the divergence among counsel, including Falana, Fusika, Baba Isa, Abubakar, Effiong, Oluwatosin and myself, is natural and expected given our different jurisprudential inclinations. However, while these diverse opinions enrich legal discourse, they remain mere opinions. The decisive and binding interpretation of Section 24 remains that of the court seized of the matter.
