NASSIRU ABDULAI BANDA v. COLONEL AYISI

GBADEGBE JSC:

On14 July 2008, an entity that goes by the name Khawaja Brothers Co Ltd purchased, so the plaintiff alleged, purchased one thousand bags of sugar from a company in Accra that was to be consigned to Kumasi. The purchaser initially approached the plaintiff, an employee of a haulage company to undertake the contract of carriage but as they had no vehicles available, the plaintiff arranged a vehicle belonging to the defendants to undertake the contract of carriage. According to the plaintiff, the terms of the carriage were agreed upon between the driver of the vehicle and the owner of the goods but unfortunately, the vehicle never discharged the goods at the agreed destination and all efforts to retrieve the goods failed, hence the action herein. The defendants strenuously contested the action by denying that there was any capacity in the plaintiff and also averred on the merits that by the practice prevailing in contract of carriage of goods, they were unanswerable for the loss.

On these facts, the plaintiff obtained judgment in the High Court, Kumasi. An appeal therefrom to the Court of Appeal by the defendants resulted in a reversal of the decision of the trial court from which the plaintiff lodged an appeal to us seeking a judicial correction. Although the submissions contained in the written briefs submitted to us by the parties are considerable, the point for our decision today is an extremely short one and although we have had the assistance of detailed arguments ranging over several pages, we hope we should not be thought disrespectful to those submissions if we find it possible to express our views in comparatively few words.

In our view, a careful consideration of the record of appeal and the submissions filed before us by the parties discloses that the question that we have to decide having regard to the pleadings and the evidence adduced at the trial is whether the plaintiff had the requisite capacity to mount an action that was based on the breach of a contract of carriage to which he was not a party. From the processes, it is quite plain that as the plaintiff did not claim to be either a party to the contract of carriage or had the interest of the owner of the goods assigned to him, he did not have the slightest interest. So stated, the principle on which this case turns, privity of contract being of ancient origin has long been settled without any conflict of authority and requires no reference to decided cases to sustain it. Ac