In recent times, the Supreme Court of Nigeria has been lamenting against the filing of frivolous appeals especially by counsel whose skins are craving the feel of the highly coveted silky gowns. In demonstrating its displeasure, we have seen the apex Court awarding high costs against offending counsel.

Frivolous appeals are mostly appeals touching on settled principles of law. For instance, there are many criminal appeals on the issue of arraignment of defendants before the trial courts. The usual argument is that, in line with Section 215 of the Criminal Procedure Act, the trial court must expressly record that a charge was properly read to the defendant and explained in the language he or she understands and that the defendant understood the charge before taking his or her plea of guilty or not guilty.

The Supreme Court has in a legion of cases dismissed such argument. In Okoro v. The State [1998] 14 NWLR (Pt. 594) 181 the Supreme Court held:

The provision of the law should not be stretched to a point of absurdity by reading into it that the Judge must record that the charge was read to the accused person to his satisfaction before taking his plea. It will be impeaching the integrity of the Judge to do that, as no Judge will take the plea of an accused person if he is not satisfied that the charge was read and explained to the accused person to his satisfaction.

In the recent case of Abubakar v. FRN [2020] 9 NWLR (Pt. 1729) 268, Counsel to the Appellant filed an appeal challenging the Appellant’s arrangement based on such argument, “with full knowledge of its futility”. (Nweze, JSC). The irritation of the Supreme Court as expressed by Nweze, JSC was further amplified by his Lordship, Eko, JSC who had this to say (at p. 292):

This Court is indeed very liberal. It is liberal to a fault and at its own expense; so much so that lawyers do not even think twice before formulating and presenting nauseatingly frivolous appeals, that smack of abuse of court’s process, before it… The Counsel is apparently behaving like the French Bourbons – who learnt nothing, who forgot everything. It is a clear abuse of court’s process for counsel to waste the time of the Court and, of course, the Respondent to present to the Court an issue over which the attitude of the Court is well known. Apart from it being futile, it is a reprehensible conduct.

His Lordship above likened Counsel to the French Bourbons. Historians have it that “The House of Bourbon is a European dynasty of French origin, a branch of the Capetian dynasty, the royal House of France. Bourbon kings first ruled France and Navarre in the 16th century.” The reign of the French Bourbons was truncated by the French Revolution – a period (1789 – 1799) of social and political upheaval in France and its colonies. According to Prof. Livesey James, in his book, Making Democracy in the French Revolution*, the Revolution made away with monarchical system of government and established a republic; created and elaborated the ideal of democracy.

Years after the Revolution, the Bourbons returned to power, and also returned to their old ways which led to the Revolution and clamour for liberal democracy. Ziauddin Choudhury captured the events succinctly:

After the French Revolution a large number of Bourbon loyalists migrated to other countries to escape the concessionary policies of Louis XVI and the violence of the republicans. When the Bourbons were restored in 1814, these émigrés returned to their country with exactly the same mentality they had left with 25 years earlier. The great statesman and diplomat of that era, Talleyrand, had said of them: “They learned nothing and forgot nothing.”

It was from the above that Eko, JSC carved out his description of the Appellant’s Counsel as a French Bourbon. The figurative allusion took an interesting twist in the version of his Lordship. While the French Bourbons were identified as a people who learnt nothing (from the harsh consequences of their reign – the Revolution) and forgot nothing (about their old practices which they re-adopted), Eko, JSC observed that the Appellant’s Counsel learnt nothing from previous decisions of the Supreme Court and forgot about them altogether.

*Livesey, J. (2001). Making democracy in the French revolution. (Harvard Historical Studies; No. 140). Harvard University Press.