Act firmly to reduce backlog in Judiciary

It is disheartening that at the end of 2017, there were 533,350 cases were still pending determination at various courts across the country. Some of them concerned life and death (literally), a lot others involved multi-billion shilling disputes which can be unlocked and injected back into the economy.

Despite the transformation going on in the Judiciary, the high number of unresolved cases remains the elephant in the room. The justice system must be unclogged so as to play its part in nation-building.

When he took over office, Chief Justice David Maraga promised in his six-point blueprint that 365,824 cases, which had been pending for over five years, would be cleared by December.

The CJ’s vision that the Judiciary will not have cases older than three years by December 2020 may become a pipedream, unless new strategies are adopted to clear the huge backlog.

Nevertheless, a lot has been done to reduce the number of cases, including deploying alternative dispute resolution mechanisms. Yet there is still so much work left.

Buoyed by sound judgments, independence and firmness in handling disputes, the Judiciary has been enjoying massive public goodwill, which should not be slowed by the slow pace at which cases are being resolved.

Judges, magistrates and all other judicial officers must repay the goodwill by ensuring that litigants get timely judgements by say, the officers taking full charge of the cases before them.

They must eschew the dirty tricks some of the parties deploy to delay cases. They must restore the faith and believe of litigants, some of who have spent over ten years in the corridors, looking for justice for justice delayed is justice denied.