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Chief Justice Godfrey Chidyausiku

CHIEF Justice Godfrey Chidyausiku on Monday named the country’s best performing High Court judges and slammed lazy ones including one who wrote just two judgments the whole year. Opening the 2015 legal year in Harare, Chief Justice Chidyausiku demanded reforms in how judges are recruited proposing that they be put on probation to test their competence.

The Chief Justice singled out Justice Nicholas Mathonsi for special mention after he wrote a staggering 72 judgments in 2014. The country’s top judge said other top five hard workers were Justices Nokuthula Moyo (Bulawayo) Priscilla Chigumba, Loice Matanda Moyo and Charles Hungwe all based in Harare. Chief Justice Chidyausiku did not reveal the names of the lazy judges but said there was no justification for their poor performance as they operated in the same environment as the top performers. He said the worst performers had two, three, six and 11 judgments for the whole year against Justice Mathonsi’s 72.

“The four worst performers and Justice Mathonsi operate in the same environment and are subject to the same limited and unattractive conditions of service. As head of the judiciary I will accept no explanation that will seek to justify such low output,” said Chief Justice Chidyausiku.

He said it was clear that declaration of more vacancies at the High Court and appointing more judges was not the main solution in reducing the backlog of cases at the High Court. Chief Justice Chidyausiku said diligent application by judges was in fact the answer to taming the backlog.

We want to commend Chief Justice Chidyausiku for being truthful and candid in his speech. The lazy judges have been shamed and exposed but we totally agree with the Law Society of Zimbabwe that censuring the underperforming judges is not enough. The LSZ said Chief Justice Chidyausiku should have spelt out specific action to be taken against the underperforming judges. The difference of two judgments and 72 is just too wide and is therefore not acceptable. The underperforming judges should be reprimanded and given a time frame to improve their performance.

According to Chief Justice Chidyausiku, one of the top five performing judges, Justice Hungwe used to perform badly. He said Justice Hungwe’s performance over the years had been a cause for concern but he has since improved remarkably. This confirms that the lazy judges can also pull up their socks and improve their performance as Justice Hungwe did.

The LSZ said it wanted Chief Justice Chidyausiku to come up with concrete measures to deal with errant judges, particularly in the light of the Judicial Code of Conduct which prescribes times frames for finalising matters.

We cannot agree more with the lawyers on this one. They say justice delayed is justice denied, so lazy judges are delaying justice and in the process denying people justice. Chief Justice Chidyausiku confirmed that his office is undertaking a performance appraisal of its members of staff and he deserves a thumbs up for this. Many government departments are not undertaking this critical exercise to assess the performance of workers hence the poor service delivery by many civil servants.

We want at this juncture to call on the government to reward high performers as a way of motivating them. Lazy workers should be reprimanded and if they do not change they should be removed from the service.