By Ike Uchechukwu
IKOM—For years, the men and women who walked into Cross River State’s courtrooms to seek justice did so under leaking roofs, past cracked walls, and beneath ceilings that had long given up the fight against time and neglect. In Ikom, Central Cross River, justice had a smell of dust and abandonment, and a look of quiet defeat.
Today, that story has changed not because the government remembered its duty, but because the very people who serve justice refused to keep waiting for a government that, in their words, had “turned deaf ears.”
Out of sheer frustration, the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA), Ikom Branch, alongside community leaders, business owners and private individuals, did what many say the Cross River State Government should have done years ago: they raised N18 million out of their own pockets to renovate the High Court 2 building in Ikom, a structure stakeholders say had become a symbol of everything wrong with judicial infrastructure in the state.
The rebuilt courtroom was commissioned days ago by the state Chief Judge, Justice Akon Bassey Ikpeme, in a ceremony that oscillated between pride in what lawyers had achieved and quiet anger at what government had failed to do.
