The
National Judicial Council (NJC), on Tuesday, recommended the most senior
Justice of the Supreme Court, Justice Walter Onnoghen, as successor to
Mahmud.
Mahmud will retire on November 10.
Onnoghen, who is from Cross River State, is the first Southern CJN-designate in 29 years.
Only his name was agreed upon by the council and will be sent to President Buhari today.
No stand-by nominee was chosen at the emergency meeting.
A
council source told the Nigerian Tribune that the practice of sending
two names to the president stopped with the appointment of Justice
Aloysius Katsina-Alu.
The single-nominee arrangement leaves the president with no luxury to make a choice.
However,
the planned arraignment of the seven arrested judges, which was
initially planned forMonday at a magistrates’ court in Life Camp, Abuja,
was shelved at the last minute.
The
Supreme Court had quickly raised a defence team of mostly Senior
Advocates of Nigeria (SAN) for them, before news came that the
arraignment, which was to secure prison detention order, had been
dropped.
Nigerian
Tribune also sighted a correspondence from the DSS to the NJC, seeking
the suspension of the arrested judges still in service.
The
memo, dated October 10, with reference no LSD 960/11, read: “it is the
humble request of the Service to the council to immediately suspend all
the judges found to have been involved in grand corruption or based on
petitions already submitted to it, including the already arrested
judges.”
It was signed by Ahmed Ahmed on behalf of the DSS DG.