Saved N1.85bn from prosecution fees
Rauf Oyewole
The Bauchi State Government has said that it received and disposed 2,500 cases in five years while 20 criminal cases were concluded with the culprits languishing in correctional centres.
The Commissioner for Justice and Attorney General, Hassan El-Yakub (SAN) while speaking at the State Ministerial briefing on Friday, said that 557 cases comprising of armed robbery, culpable homicide, rape, kidnapping and other minor offences were recorded between January 2023 and June 2024.
Speaking prosecution financial implications, El-Yakub said that before his assumption of office “all high-profile cases were given out to external solicitors, mostly Senior Advocates (SANs) and an average fee of N500million was spent yearly in settling their fees. This trend has now been reversed. We now handle all such cases in-house and thereby saving the state this huge amount.
“We have also successfully defended most of the garnishee proceedings/cases which have hitherto held the state to ransom and we have made it a policy in the Ministry not to allow under any circumstance such cases to reoccur in the future.
“We have from just three cases, between 2023 to date saved the state the sum of N1,858,412,289,” he said.
According to him, the Ministry being a service rendering Ministry, was able to generate the sum of N236,618,298 from drafting of agreements and other legal instruments from 2023 to date.
“Upon assumption of duty, I identified some of the challenges bedeviling the Ministry and which are responsible for the low rate of productivity and the negative perception of the Ministry which mainly include the following: Lack of sufficient man power, and Lack of basic working materials.”
0 Comments