Court cautions parties in Nnamdi Kanu’s lawsuit against rushing through process.

Attorneys for the Department of State Services and the Leader of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), Nnamdi Kanu, have been warned by the Federal High Court in Abuja against cutting short the proceedings on the next postponed date.

Following a Wednesday proceeding that was postponed due to DSS counsel Idowu Awo’s oral request for more time to respond to a subsequent affidavit served on him by Kanu’s attorney, Chief Mike Ozekhome, SAN, in open court, Justice Binta Nyako issued the warning.

According to the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN), Kanu sued the DSS and its Director General as the first and second respondents in the case.

In the lawsuit with the file number FHC/ABJ/CS/ 2341/2022, Kanu asked the court for permission to request a mandamus order compelling the DSS to give him unrestricted access to his doctor and other parties.

On February 1, following an ex-parte application filed by Ozekhome to that effect, the court had given Kanu authority to request the order of mandamus he wanted.

But the DSS urged the court to dismiss the case for lack of jurisdiction in a preliminary objection that was filed.

It claimed that a ruling from a sister court, rendered on June 3, 2022, in the case FHC/ABJ/CS/1585/2021 between Kanu and the director of the DSS and two others, was still in effect and dealt largely with the matter of granting the IPOB leader access to his personal physician.

It stated that the current lawsuit was analogous to the previous one and that Kanu had filed an appeal against the ruling.

Ozekhome informed the court during the reopened hearing on the subject that he had reacted to the DSS’s notice of preliminary objection.

The court granted Ozekhome’s request for a subsequent order declaring their additional affidavit as having been properly filed after Awo requested an order extending the deadline to file their processes.

Awo, who claimed to have just received service of the additional affidavit, stated he would need more time to review the document in order to determine whether any new information had been introduced.

He claimed that although the document included 60 paragraphs, 15 of them were embedded.

“It is also accompanied with a judgment from Abia State as exhibit.

“In the cisrcunstance, we will be asking for a short day,” he said.

However, Ozekhome claimed that the security agency had claimed that Kanu had jumped bail in the counter-affidavit it had submitted.

“We have to respond to that circumstances under which he left Nigeria and those facts had been validated by Abia Court in Umuahia,” he responded.

The senior attorney claimed that because the DSS served them on Friday, they were compelled to serve the additional document on Tuesday.

He claimed that the security company has a tendency of giving them its processes late in order to postpone hearings.

In her brief order for an adjournment, Justice Nyako stated that she would not put up with any behavior that could cause the proceedings to go on any longer.

“I will not allow this case to be truncated in the next adjourned date.

“There must be an end to exchange of processes,” she said.

The judge adjourned the matter until May 22 for hearing.