The Work of a Nigerian Magistrate's Court

Judicial statistics are frequently non-existent, or at best patchy, in developing countries. This note contains some very basic information—of the sort that in some places one might well find in published statistics—about the cases dealt with by a magistrate's court in Zaria, in one of the northern states of Nigeria during a six-month period in the early 1970s. The purpose of the study was to try to find the answers to some very elementary questions about the functioning of this part of the legal system such as: what sorts of cases were courts of this type trying? how long did the cases take? what were the outcomes? how many accused persons had lawyers and did this make any difference to the outcome? The period in question was chosen as the most recent six-month period; there is, so far as I am aware, no reason to suppose it to have been in any way exceptional, although naturally enough the nature of the cases may well have been affected by police activity, for example a more than usually extensive vehicle document check or a crack-down on Indian hemp (marijuana). As we shall see, the Chief Justice had been urging courts to try to keep down the prison population, which may have had an impact on the granting of bail and the proportion of custodial sentences imposed.