Something was bound to give. It eventually did on Thursday, January 18, when the Supreme Court bench declared that henceforth, Senior Counsel Ahmednasir Abdullahi shall have no audience before it.
Since no timeline was indicated, the communication meant that Mr Abdullahi — nicknamed ‘Subreme Goat’ by Kenyans on social media — is barred from representing himself or his clients indefinitely.
“It is the decision of this court,” the seven judges said in a letter signed by Supreme Court Registrar L.M. Wachira, “that henceforth and from the date of this communication, you shall have no audience before the Court, either by yourself, through an employee of your law firm, or any other person holding brief for you, or acting pursuant to your instructions.”
This was a far-reaching declaration that, read correctly, sought to curtail the controversial lawyer’s right to freedom of expression and to earn a livelihood from his work as an officer of the court.
In Kenya’s history, the only other famous case of a lawyer being locked out by a judge involved Martha Karua, who was once blocked from appearing before the High Court during President Daniel arap Moi’s administration.
She had been found guilty of contempt of court after she and other members of the Law Society of Kenya (LSK) had been “prohibited” from taking part in politics by a judge. Ms Karua and her colleagues assumed that such an order was unenforceable and continued to criticise the Moi administration.
However, she was barred from practicing after she was accused of failing to apologise to the court. The ensuing stand-off left the Judiciary an egg on its face, and the courts had to find a surreptitious way to walk back on that ignominious decision.
Mr Abdullahi has been a vocal critic of the Supreme Court, particularly its President, Chief Justice Martha Koome, whom he has consistently accused of failing to act against corruption. “How I wish/pray CJ Koome knows her stuff! She doesn’t need chai (tea) and mandazi (snacks) with H.E. Ruto (the President) at State House,” he wrote in one of his more recent posts on X, the social media platform.
“She just needs to clean the Judiciary or corrupt and incompetent judges. Simple!” He was responding to a headline in the People Daily, which reported the CJ as having protested that President William Ruto had blocked avenues for dialogue between the Judiciary and the Executive in the wake of the President’s consistent lamentations about corruption in the Judiciary.
Indeed, it was the President who, in the first week of January, fired the first salvo against the Judiciary, saying in so many words that it was acting at the behest of influential personalities with vested interests in multi-billion shilling government projects and programmes.
According to him, these individuals were using courts to stop programmes such as the Affordable Housing Scheme and Universal Healthcare Coverage (UHC). The Court of Appeal, incidentally, was scheduled to rule on the health plan on January 19, the date of the publication of this Special Edition of the Nairobi Law Monthly.
To read the full story, get the February 2024 issue of NLM at https://epaper.nairobilawmonthly.com.
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