By Chibuike Nwabuko
ABUJA (PRECISE POST) – Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN), Jibrin Okutepa, has identified Nigerians’ growing tendency to accept and rationalise wrongdoing as the greatest bane of the country’s development.
Okutepa made the assertion in remarks posted on his official X handle on Sunday, warning that the normalisation of illegality and wrongdoing was weakening Nigeria’s institutions and undermining the country’s constitutional democracy.
According to him, the greatest danger to Nigeria is not merely the existence of people who violate the law, but the emergence of individuals who defend, excuse and even celebrate such violations.
He said the situation had become particularly dangerous when due process was sacrificed for political expediency, court orders were selectively obeyed, public officials abused their offices without accountability, and lawyers abandoned professional conscience in favour of partisan loyalty.
Okutepa argued that a society could not make meaningful progress when citizens determined what was right or wrong based on who stood to benefit rather than what the law required.
He said political power and professional status should not confer immunity from accountability, stressing that justice must remain impartial and the law must bind both the powerful and the powerless.
The legal practitioner also expressed concern over what he described as the infiltration of the culture of normalising wrongdoing into the legal profession.
He said the legal profession, which ought to be a foremost guardian of justice, constitutionalism and due process, must not become an instrument for legitimising injustice or providing intellectual cover for illegality.
According to him, Nigeria’s legal system cannot develop jurisprudentially in an atmosphere where legal arguments are deployed to defend the indefensible, judicial pronouncements are respected only when convenient, and procedural safeguards are discarded whenever they frustrate desired outcomes.
He stressed that jurisprudential development required intellectual honesty, courage, principled advocacy and an unwavering commitment to justice.
Okutepa further described due process as an essential safeguard of justice rather than a technical obstacle, saying it protects individual rights, restrains arbitrary power and prevents the pursuit of justice from becoming an instrument of oppression.
He called on Nigerians, particularly members of the legal profession, to regain the courage to condemn wrongdoing irrespective of who was responsible or who stood to benefit.
He warned that deliberate justification of wrongdoing was more destructive than silence in the face of injustice, saying a nation that normalised illegality would eventually destroy the institutions upon which its survival depended.
“If we must rescue Nigeria, we must first rescue our conscience,” Okutepa said, insisting that justice must become a national culture rather than a slogan or a weapon of convenience.
He maintained that until Nigerians learned to condemn wrongdoing even when it benefited them, justice would remain elusive, jurisprudential development would stagnate and national progress would remain a distant dream.
