Good afternoon, readers.
Today's post is a follow-up on my post of yesterday, 26th May, 2015.See that post on my Facebook timeline at Oluseyi Tomiwa Phillips or here on this blog for a recap.
The legal question for determination in yesterday's post is whether or not the eighty-year-old peasant farmer could recover the six million naira ( N6, 000,000.00) the police placed on the heads of the three inmates in law having given information leading to their arrest.
THE LEGAL POSITION
First, it is instructive to note that the scenario at hand is a reward case that falls into the category of unilateral contracts as opposed to bilateral contracts. For economy of space and time, I shall not dwell on the meaning of a bilateral contract. Suffice it to only say, here, that the bilateral contract is the opposite of the unilateral contract.
What then makes our scenario a unilateral contract? In law, before a binding contract can be deemed to have come into existence in a transaction, certain ingredients must be present.These are offer, acceptance, consideration and intention to enter into legal relations.For the purpose of this post, I shall restrict us to the first two ( that is, offer and acceptance). Conventionally speaking, contracts should pass through the offer and acceptance stage. This is the stage when one of two contracting parties makes an offer to the other party and that other party accepts that offer and this stage is called the executory stage, the stage when neither of the parties has done more than mere exchange of promises.At this stage neither of the parties has acted in reliance on the promise of the other and has changed his position before the contract.Promises made between the contracting parties at this stage are also called executory consideration in law.
Nevertheless, some contracts in law are by, their nature, regarded as a radical deviation from this conventional rule of contract.A good example of such contracts is a reward case like the scenario at hand.Such contracts are regarded as unilateral contracts because they do not involve the traditional exchange of promises by parties as it is only the promise of the party making an offer that will feature only to be followed by the execution or performance of an obligation by the other party in reliance on the promise of the party making that promise.
Now back to our instant case.When the police publicly announced the reward initially, the old man was in a very remote village not even within any radio coverage.Thus, he was not even present when the promise was made by the police but during a visit to his son in the city where the son lived with his family, the old man was opportune to hear the news of the police search for the inmates and the promise of reward (Maybe in my next post, I shall also address the fate of the old man in law assuming he did not hear about the reward at all and he still went ahead to give the police information that led to the inmates' arrest).At the point when the old man heard the news, technically, an offer had been made to him by the police (which was the six million naira (N6 000,000.00) reward).By the nature of the contract between the police and the old man as a unilateral contract, he was not expected in law to inform the police whether or not he had accepted their offer before he could execute or perform his own part of the contract. So, at the time the old man gave the police information leading to the arrest of the inmates and the inmates were subsequently arrested, the old man had fulfilled his own part of the contract in reliance on the police promise of reward.
From the foregoing, the old man could succeed if he instituted an action against the police authority to recover the reward in the scenario.
Thank you for reading.
See you tomorrow.
Till then, stay blessed.
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