The Department of State Services has filed an appeal against a N 10m judgment in the case involving the purchase of a SIM card previously owned by the President’ s daughter , Hanan Buhari .
Justice Nnamdi Dimgba of a Federal High Court had in May ordered the DSS to pay a trader, Anthony Okolie, who was detained for 10 weeks without charge for buying Hanan’ s old SIM card .
Okolie subsequently filed a human rights suit against the DSS , Hanan, and telecoms firm, MTN .
While the court absolved Hanan and MTN of blame, it ordered the DSS to pay Okolie N10m for trampling on his rights .
After winning the case, Okolie’ s lawyer, Mr Tope Akinyode, vowed to recover the judgment debt and threatened to institute contempt proceedings against the Director -General of the DSS over non - payment.
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However , the DSS has lodged an appeal over its defeat and the security agency is seeking to obtain a stay of execution to bar Okolie from enforcing payment of the judgment sum until the appeal is determined.

Reacting to the development , Akinyode, who is also the National President of Revolutionary Lawyers’ Forum, said the application for stay of execution would be opposed and his client would be asking the court to compel the DSS to pay the judgment sum into an interest yielding account to be designated by the court.
The lawyer said , “ We are vehemently opposing the application for stay of execution. It ’ s a frivolous ploy by the SSS to delay payment . We will be asking the court to compel them to make payment into an interest yielding account designated by the court and whoever wins at the appellate court will harvest the money .
“ Also we ’ ll be cross appealing against the remaining two defendants , especially the daughter of the president about who we were able to place convincing evidence of her involvement before the trial court.”
The case has been fixed for July 7, 2020, for argument by the parties

source: https://punchng.com/dss-appeals-judgement-on-hanan-buhari-sim-card-case/

When it comes to accusatorial system (most especially in Nigeria), people always see lawsuit as a battlefield (which isn't bad because that is what it is) except that it's not always a means to end dispute as defence counsel would rather spend 4 times the cost awarded by the trial court as damages only to spend it as legal fee to keep appealing to higher court than to pay the cost as 'damages' all in a bid to frustrate the prosecution counsel to back off the case or settle out of court in a bid for appellant to keep his/her "pride". This case may even go to Supreme Court and the Court of Appeal may even uphold the judgement of the trial court.

DSS must pay....or EFCC will

[img]https://media./images/29ef9b79871ff5830e6dc7066333e34a/tenor.gif[/img]

Just imagine how a whole nation's secret police has been reduced to something similar to boys scouts, discussing sim cards litigations and all. I won't be surprised if very soon they will begin to control traffic and open doors in fast food restaurants

Abegi,

This one na news??

They would have used alternative dispute resolution(AdR) initially. That would have saved them all these.