-Barrister Awutah, President of Meme
Lawyers Association
Barrister Awutah Phillip Atubah was born on the 8th
of March 1971 in Kumba and went to Primary school in Government School Ajei in the
North West Region. From there he went to LCC; Longla Comprehensive College Mankon
in Bamenda. After his GCE Ordinary level, he went to Government High School
Mbengwi where he had his GCE A levels before moving to the University of Yaounde where he graduated with a first degree in Law. From there he moved on
to Abuja where he obtained a BL (Barrister at Law), a Diploma from the Nigerian
Law School. Barrister Awutah is also of the first badge of the Yaounde
University II.
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| Barrister Awutah |
As a student of the University of Yaounde, he was in year two
and it’s when he and his mates passed to year three that they were shifted to
the newly created University of Yaounde II at Soa in 2005. This move was made
because the only Faculty of Law and Economic Sciences at the time was at the
Soa Campus. The learned Barrister therefore constitutes part of that group of
students who experienced the nightmare of staying in Yaounde and studying at
Soa considering that the roads at the time were dusty during the dry season and
muddy during the rainy seasons and that there was no organised transport system
for university students shuttling between Yaounde and Soa. He was interviewed
by Francis Ekongang Nzante Lenjo and his revelations are in fact scintillating.
Read on
As a student at the
Nigerian Law School how was your experience?
The first thing I would want to say is that I got to Nigeria
and discovered that Nigeria is ahead of us economically and otherwise. Another
thing that I learnt about the country is that academically they are advanced
because they have good schools that are well equipped. I also took note of the
way Abuja was planned and was so impressed. The Law School we attended was a
new Campus not far from Abuja. Despite our positive impressions, one of the problems
we had was the high cost of living. To have food in Nigeria is not that easy.
With regards to the
practice of law how can you sum up your experiences there?
I noticed that in Nigeria there is a culture of Law firms which
is still very foreign to us here. Here everybody goes for sole proprietorship
but in Nigeria the majority of people go for partnership. The reason why there
is efficiency is in accordance with the saying that two heads do a better job.
So when returning to Cameroon, I had in mind the creation of a Law firm. That
is why in my office we are made of four lawyers and we are in partnership.
What are you doing to
improve upon Law Practice in Cameroon?
I am at the head of a law firm in Kumba. I created the Amumba
Law firm in 2007. From 2007 I was alone and I have so far trained a couple of
lawyers. Most of the lawyers I have trained now practice on their own.
Presently I have trainied two lawyers who are now in partnership with me and we
have done our best to keep to the standards. It is my wish that in the nearest
future I am going to build a permanent structure that’s going to house Amumba
Law Firm. The dream I have is a Law Firm like that of Rotimi Williams in Nigeria. I
visited this firm and was so impressed and marveled by what I saw there. A law
firm with a library, a Conference Room, waiting rooms, dressing rooms among
other facilities. In Cameroon, I visited the Nico Halle Law Firm and was impressed.
This is what I look forward to having.
What has MELA
specifically and Anglophone lawyers in general contributed to the present
importance given to the Lawyer in Cameroon?
Cameroon is a Bi-Jural Nation which is a habit of the Common
Law and the Civil Law and as a result of that we have a problem because when we
were in the university we had joint training at the level of the first year but
when we got into the second year, the Common Law students went their own way
while the Civil Law students went their own way but when you go to the field
you realise you are forced to battle between the two systems because being an
advocate of the Supreme Court of Cameroon, the national territory is what
constitutes your jurisdiction. So you have to go east of the Mungo in order to
do cases just like they have to come west of the Mungo which is in the Common
Law Jurisdiction in order to do cases. That has become a problem to most of the
practitioners and the Government came up with the issue of harmonizing the two
laws but it has not been easy to go about it. For now we have harmonized the
Criminal Procedure Code. At least we have a Common Penal Code but most of the
other issues like the Civil Procedure is still to be harmonized. Family Law is
still to be harmonized while Company and Commercial Law have been harmonized
under OHADA but what we want people to know is that the essence of any law
making body is to ensure that justice through these laws is not only done but
is seen to have been done.
I have realised that in the Civil Law Jurisdiction there is a
lot of injustice going on not because of their own making but because of the
laws that they implement. It is our wish that our legislators should realise
that a lot has to be gained from the Common Law System. That is why when they
go now to other countries like in Nigeria where I studied, they have a National
Law Reform Committee. This Committee is manned mostly by Lawyers. When we had
the All Anglophone Lawyers Conference in Bamenda, we came up with so many
resolutions that we thought if Government implemented them it was supposed to
go a long way to solve most of these problems that we have. If you go into what
has been harmonized now in the OHADA you will notice that so many of the things
inside have lapses same as the Criminal Procedure Code. The main issue concerning this law reforms by our Government is that the reforms are sort of imposed by donor countries. As a result the laws are merely made to satisfy them and not to take care of the needs of the population.
Can you shed light of some of these lapses?
In settling an issue which has to do with a client mortgaging
a property, they will list all types of documentations that you have to do from
one stage to the other and when you make the least error then the whole
procedure is annulled. The main essence of mortgaging a property is that if the concerned party
cannot pay back his loan then they will have to take the property, sell it off
and pay the bank. The bank is there to lend money to the public and this money
is people’s money, not theirs. But when they bring cumbersome procedures and it
becomes virtually impossible to sell the property of the mortgagor then it destroys
the whole essence of the law. The law is there to assist the economy to grow
but when it instead stifles the growth of the economy then there is something
seriously wrong.
In all circumstances, in Common Law we always say that they
cannot sacrifice justice at the altar of technicalities. Somebody cannot bring
a case to court and because of the mere fact that there are some procedural
errors the case is thrown out. The essence in the mortgage example above is to
ensure that the loan has been paid. If he has not paid the loan then his
property that was given as collateral should be sold.
There has always been
the issue of creating a Law School in Cameroon. Its absence according to many
quarters has been holding back the practice of this profession in the country.
When we were in Douala of recent, the Bar Council President
told us that they had prepared a bill which they had proposed to the Minister
of Justice for the creation of a Law School in Cameroon. That is so far what we
know but concretely, we don’t know the structure, how it is supposed to look
like and what it entails. But I will want to tell you that our legal system is
more or less a Portuguese Parliament for now. Because when they talk about practice
in Cameroon, the procedure is just that you leave the University and you sit in
for an exam like any other competitive exam like what French speaking
Cameroonians call concours. When you
pass it, you are sworn in as a Pupil Advocate after which you are assigned to a
particular chambers under which you applied at the time of going in for the
examination. Unfortunately, there is no programme of action for the training.
The Pupil Advocate is at the Mercy of his Principal. If the principal is
somebody who is not serious then you come out from there empty. It is
considered that after two years of pupilage you sit in for another examination which
is the final Bar Examination. When you
pass this exam you are now sworn in as a full fledged advocate with the right
to open a chambers of your own.
In the francophone system they talk about training through
seminars which are organised haphazardly at every time they think it is
supposed to be done. In these seminars they move from one area to the other and
it will be very difficult for somebody through that process to do the type of
training that you can obtain from a Law School. At the end of the day, the
training is not uniform because the pupils who are being trained in the Southwest may be recieving a
different training from those who are training in Bamenda. At the end of the
day these people will be graduating and writing the same exam. We often say
that examination is not the true test of knowledge and so
when they graduate the practice on the field will be the determining factor. I
think that to harmonize training, there is the dire need for a law school. In
Cameroon we think that any good thing must only come from France forgetting
that we are now open to the whole world. We should come out with a school which
trains everybody as a Magistrate and as a Lawyer. This is the case in Nigeria.
It is only after graduation that you put in some years as a lawyer for you to
qualify as a Magistrate. But it is instead funny in Cameroon that somebody who
had been a Magistrate when he is maybe going on retirement then he can apply to
then become a lawyer. We are thinking about creating a law school. Why not just
take ENAM, the National School, of Administration and Magistracy as a Law
School where both magistrates and lawyers are trained.
There is also the issue
of the way the average Cameroonian relates with the legal practitioner. Many
Cameroonians don’t yet seem to be aware of the importance of the legal
practitioner. Sometimes people who are not of the profession usurp the
activities of the legal practitioner and capitalize also on the ignorance of
the population…
What I have realised for the time I have been in practice is
that a majority of people are ignorant of the role of the lawyer in the
society. The people know that it is when you have a problem that you need to
look for a lawyer. But in other countries this is not the orientation. I think
people need to know who a lawyer is and what value is supposed to be attached
to a lawyer. First the people need to know that before you go into any
transaction of any nature, you need to get the advice of a lawyer who is
supposed to orientate you on what you are supposed to do before getting into
what you want to do because all sectors activities are orientated by a
particular law. But people go into these things without consulting us and it is
only at the end when there is trouble that they think they have to contact a
lawyer. A lawyer is needed at every time in life. Even before you get married a
lawyer is needed to advice you on the type of marriage contract you want to get
into.
There is the claim that
the lawyer in Cameroon is not yet fully utilizing his powers. How far do you
think lawyers are exercising their powers?
Our Bar has actually not yet assumed
its position because normally nothing is supposed to be done without the Bar
input. If a bill is supposed to go to Parliament for example and we find out
that the bill has something to do with the population, the Bar is supposed to
stand up and give its own position on it after scrutinizing the law. Most of
the time the bills that go to Parliament fall in the hands of parliamentarians
who are not lawyers. In other advanced countries the parliamentarians are given
the opportunity to take the stuff home and meet the lawyers for advice but
that’s not the case in Cameroon. Here a bill is tabled and the next minute you
will want them to deliberate and that same day it is passed into law. There are
also issues like the violation of human rights which is going on with impunity.
It is the responsibility of the Bar to come up and stand firmly to ensure that
those injustices are not done. In Kumba we’ve rammed it down the throats of many
that bail is free. We have worked with the legal department in this direction.
Before now the gendarmes had taken it upon themselves to give convocations to
people on Friday so that by the time you get there you will be forced to pass
the weekend in cell. So when you reach there they will make sure they squeeze what
ever money that they can get from you. You find people paying FCFA 25.000 if
you don’t want to spend the week end in jail. In some cases people pay even
fifty or one hundred thousand because they don’t want to pass the week end in
jail. We came in and told the State Counsel that this practice is not the best.
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