“Our legal system is more or less a Portuguese Parliament”

-Barrister Awutah, President of Meme Lawyers Association

Barrister Awutah Phillip Atubah was born on the 8^th 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.

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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