Rutashubanyuma
JF-Expert Member
- Sep 24, 2010
- 219,470
- 911,173
No judicial era - here in Arusha- invokes fear, dismay and despair than the judicial reign of Judge Ernest Mwipopo at the then Industrial Court of Tanzania. Most of sacked employees perceive Judge Mwipopo favoured employers in most of his awards in order to advance parochial selfish ends.
Here in Arusha I once accosted a suave lady who now is underemployed as a typist in one of private stationeries. She confided in me that her lifetime plight would always be tied to Judge Mwipopo whom she accused of favouring her employer to cater for his personal gain. According to her, she previously worked for New Safari Hotel, and following change of ownership during the Mkapa orbit of invidious privatization, all the staff were declared redundant.
The redundant workers rushed to the then Industrial Court in search of reprieve ensuing after their erstwhile employer had reneged to adhere to the terms of their termination: Their former employer only parried them off with peanuts. At the Industrial Court, judge Mwipopo dismissed their claims citing grounds of frivolous and vexatious litigation!!! Through their lawyers, they pursued a revision application but todate no hearing date has been fixed, nine years after a wrongful determination was entered against these agitated ex-employees.
Ex-employees of General Tyre of Arusha had won a terminal compensation case through another vice chairman of the then Industrial Court, but when the ex-employees felt their former employer had no plans to honour the award via pussyfooting tactics, they lunged back to the Industrial Court. There their fate was summarily upended by Judge Mwipopo who, without jurisdictional powers of revision, revised the award in the wee hours while the applicants were not even represented. Todate, the matter remains in legal limbo.
Similar misfortunes had met ex-Fibreboard employees whose termination also was on grounds of redundancy.
Then there was this poignant trade enquiry involving one Charles Gugu; an ex-NCAA Chief Accountant, who went to the Industrial Court seeking a determination of whether his former employer had the powers to terminate his services two years after his employer had rejected his request for a financially induced retirement offer. Judge Mwipopo presiding over a review panel sidestepped the crux of the review application and progressed to decide other outlier issues, remote to the application. In such cavalier demeanour, justice was neither felt nor perceived to have been carried out knowing substantial issues to the trade dispute were left unaddressed by the judicial authority that was designed to have resolved them!!! The matter now is subject to inexorable references to the highest court in the land; and in the process, clogging the courts with trivial litigations.
Last night, as I was watching judge Mwipopo on ITV station where he was delivering his valediction, I could not feign ignorance to the collective hypocrisy subduing the Bench as principal judges of all forte showered the outgoing judge with undeserved encomiums of exemplary performer while he truly deserved a vitriolic censure for smudging the judiciary with dirty linen in his long career of over thirty years. Most of judge Mwipopos wrongly decided cases were egged on by self-serving appetites for quick enrichment, but nothing else. What a lifetime career riddled with perverse venality to bequeath to future generations?
