I conceive of the inherent power as enabling this Court to intervene with the shield of justice to protect a pleader from an execution that would in the particular circumstances of the case be oppressive or such as to render his appeal an empty and futile pursuit, injurious harm having occurred by execution. Such a power exists and would be exercised absent any rules granting the power to order stay. Fortunately for us, the rule for actualizing what is a necessary and laudible judicial intervention for the doing of justice does in fact exist. I have already found that Rule 5 (2) (b) is a proper, necessary and efficacious jurisdiction. I only say that even were I wrong on both the Rule and Section 3A the Appellate Jurisdiction Act, I would find this Court well and properly able to intervene ex debito justitiae. I do not for a moment subscribe to the view, sought to be sold to us by Mr. Abdullahi, that we should not worry about whatever issues that would flow from a successful validation of his arguments because, according to him, the High Court will sort them out and there would be no crisis. To accept that view would be tantamount to a grievous abdication of our duty as a court, an untenable retreat from jurisdiction and would have unimaginable consequences in the administration of justice. For who can tell what forces would be let loose, what anarchy rule, were it the case that judgments, no matter how atrocious and plainly reversible on appeal, could be executed at will, the court appealed to being impotent to intervene in the interim? Such a spectre is so drastic and chilling a departure from the experience and practice of courts in the modern world that had it been the intention of the framers to birth so strange a judicial landscape, they would have done so in bold, express and expansive terms. Per KIAGE JA in EQUITY BANK LIMITED v WEST LINK MBO LIMITED [2013] eKLR
Posted on: Fri, 07 Jun 2013 10:32:24 +0000
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