By Sanni Onogu,The Nation

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The National Institute for Legislative and Democratic Studies (NILDS) and the National Judicial Institute (NJI) have agreed to collaborate in enhancing their roles as training arms of the Legislature and Judiciary.

At a meeting in Abuja on Friday, both bodies inaugurated a nine-member joint committee to explore areas of cooperation in capacity building, research, and knowledge-sharing.

NILDS Director-General, Prof. Abubakar Sulaiman, who received NJI Administrator, Hon. Justice Babatunde Adejumo, said the synergy would strengthen the training of lawmakers and judicial officers.

He added that NILDS could support advocacy roles for NJI, while benefiting from NJI’s legal expertise in training legislators.

Sulaiman said, “The mandate of our institute is that it is the research wing of the legislature and democratic actors in Nigeria and West Africa. The only legally-backed body to train our lawmakers and nurture their skills.

“We also train political parties, Non-Governmental Organisations, Civil Society Organisations (CSOs), and the media.

“We have been providing all manner of assistance, especially when it comes to legislation. This is the leading institute in West Africa today in that regard, and we remain the ladder on which the parliament stands.”

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Sulaiman added that a lot could be achieved through the synergy in guiding some of the “conflicting pronouncements” by our courts through equipping judicial officers with the requisite skills to avoid missteps.

He further stated that a better-equipped NJI could become the hub for the training of judicial officers from across Africa, thereby saving the nation the scarce resources spent on foreign training in places like Harvard and Oxford.

“So, in this area, the NJI can speak out, they can guide, they can advise.

We need to share knowledge even in the training we give to our clients.

“We also run Master’s and Ph.D programmes in NILDS, and we have resource persons and lecturers from many other bodies.

“We can’t be wasting resources going to Harvard all the time. NJI can fit in here and make Nigeria the place other African judges can come to be trained”, the DG of NILDS said.

Earlier, Hon. Justice Adejumo shared the same views as Sulaiman, agreeing that both institutions “have a lot to learn from each other”, despite executing different mandates.

According to the former President of the National Industrial Court of Nigeria (NICN), the ever-evolving nature of law means that judicial officers also must always be a step ahead by honing their skills.

“We need sister agencies like NILDS to achieve our training objectives. So, I am here to understudy, learn from you, and synergise. You may need our support too, and so on.

“NILDs is one of those few institutes we need to collaborate with to meet our own objectives”, Adejumo said.