NIS recruitment: witness absence stall Moro’s trial

The absence of the fourth prosecution witness in the ongoing trial of former Minister of Interior, Abba Moro has stalled the continuation of the case before Justice Nnamdi Dimgba of an Abuja Federal High Court.

Moro is being tried alongside one-time permanent secretary in the ministry, Anastasia Daniel-Nwobia, a deputy director in the ministry, F. O Alayebami, one Mahmood Ahmadu (at large), and Drexel Tech Nigeria Limited, a firm that was given the recruitment job, in the ill-fated Nigerian Immigration Service, NIS recruitment exercise in 2014.

The prosecuting counsel,  Elizabeth Alabi who held brief for Aliu Yusuf informed the court at the resumption of sitting that,  the witness who is a bank official and based in Lagos could not be communicated with during the Sallah break,  and could not be prepared for testimony.

She informed that the witness was subpoenaed.

Before defence counsels could react to the submission, Justice Dimgba reprimanded the prosecution for the excuse it tendered before the court, questioning why the prosecution would have subpoenaed it’s own witness in the first place.

He held that if he had decided to strike out the suit for lack of diligent prosecution,  it would have raised several divergent insinuations in various quarters,  before the prosecution urged the court for an adjournment.

Akinlolu Kehinde SAN, counsel representing the first defendant expressed his disgust and opposed the application for adjournment, but urged the court to compel the prosecution to sign an undertaking to have its witness in court,  if the trial court would grant the adjournment.

Chris Uche SAN, who represented the second defendant argued that if the prosecution was not ready to call the next witness,  it should have prepared it’s other witnesses and produced them in court for the matter to move on.

Similarly,  S. I. Ameh,  counsel to the fourth defendant posited that a “subpoena is not just a document,  it is an authority issued by the President, and since the subpoenaed witness disobeyed the order, the legal thing to do is to teach the witness a legal lesson by ordering for a warrant to be issued on him”.

The matter was jointly agreed to be adjourned to October 4, 2017 at the instance of the prosecution.