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Odinkalu Hails Retired Kogi Judge’s Courage Ahead of Electronic Evidence Book Launch

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By Chibuike Nwabuko

ABUJA (PRECISE POST)  –   Human rights lawyer and public affairs commentator, Chidi Odinkalu has paid glowing tribute to retired Kogi State High Court judge, Omolaye Alaba-Ajileye, describing him as a jurist of exceptional integrity and intellect whose judicial courage came at a personal cost.

Odinkalu made the remarks on his X handle on Wednesday ahead of the official launch of Alaba-Ajileye’s new books on electronic evidence scheduled to hold on Wednesday at the Conference Centre of the National Open University of Nigeria (NOUN) in Abuja.

Reflecting on their time on the Bench, Odinkalu said Alaba-Ajileye distinguished himself while serving as a judge of the High Court of Kogi State, where he handled some of the most challenging and sensitive cases with remarkable fairness and balance.

According to him, the retired jurist consistently demonstrated integrity and intellectual depth in the discharge of his duties, maintaining impartiality despite the complexities of the matters before him.
Odinkalu, however, lamented that Alaba-Ajileye allegedly suffered institutional setbacks because of his commitment to justice, claiming that he was denied the career advancements and official recognition he deserved as a consequence of his judicial courage.

“Professor Omolaye Alaba-Ajileye served with my integrity and intellect on the High Court of Kogi State, taking on some of the most difficult cases in the system and retaining balance while he did so.

As reprisal for his judicial courage, he was denied the preferments that were his due,” Odinkalu stated.
Following his retirement from the Bench in 2023, Alaba-Ajileye transitioned into academia, joining the National Open University of Nigeria as a professor, where he has continued to contribute to legal scholarship.

Odinkalu noted that the retired judge has built considerable expertise in the highly specialised field of electronic evidence, an area of growing significance in modern legal practice due to the increasing reliance on digital technology in criminal and civil litigation.

He described the books to be unveiled as groundbreaking contributions to Nigeria’s legal literature, expressing confidence that they would enrich the country’s jurisprudence and serve as valuable reference materials for judges, lawyers, academics, law enforcement agencies, and students.

Precise Post recalls that the book launch is expected to attract members of the legal profession, academics, judicial officers, policymakers, and other stakeholders interested in the evolving landscape of electronic evidence and digital justice administration in Nigeria.

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Odinkalu Reflects on Biafra Anniversary, Questions Whether Nigeria Has Truly Won the Peace

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By Our Reporter

ABUJA (PRECISE POST)  –   Human rights lawyer and public affairs commentator, Prof Chidi Odinkalu has reflected on the events that led to the Nigerian Civil War, describing this period as one of the most consequential anniversaries in Nigeria’s post-colonial history and raising questions about whether the country has fully healed from the conflict more than five decades later.
In remarks shared on his X handle on Saturday, Odinkalu recalled that on May 27, 1967, then Head of State, General Yakubu Gowon, created 12 states from Nigeria’s four regions, a move that transformed his political dispute with the Military Governor of the Eastern Region, Colonel Emeka Odumegwu Ojukwu, into what he described as a territorial issue.


According to Odinkalu, three of the newly created states emerged from the Eastern Region, accounting for about 25 per cent of the new state structure.
He noted that the decision prompted an emergency meeting of Eastern Region leaders in Enugu, where participants reportedly urged Ojukwu to declare the secession of Biafra.
Odinkalu said that after three days, Ojukwu, whom he described as reluctant and under pressure, announced the establishment of the Republic of Biafra on May 30, 1967, a move that made armed conflict almost unavoidable.
He further recounted that hostilities formally began two months later with fighting in Gakem, marking the start of a war that lasted for 30 months.
The civil war ended on January 15, 1970, following Biafra’s surrender and Nigeria’s military victory.
While acknowledging that Nigeria won the war, Odinkalu questioned whether the country had done enough to achieve lasting reconciliation and national healing.
“Nigeria won the war. But did it do enough to win the peace? Has the Civil War truly ended?” he asked.
Precise Post recalls that his remarks come as Nigerians mark key anniversaries associated with the events that culminated in the outbreak of the civil war, one of the most defining and tragic episodes in the nation’s history.

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Odinkalu Slams APC Over ‘Fantasy Figures,’ Says Nigeria Appears Unserious to Global Audience

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By Our Reporter

ABUJA (PRECISE POST) –  Human rights lawyer and former Chairman of the National Human Rights Commission, Chidi Odinkalu, has criticised the ruling All Progressives Congress over what he described as the “disgrace” of fabricated figures allegedly presented during a televised programme.
In a post shared on his X handle, Odinkalu accused supporters of the APC of constantly seeking to silence criticism and “de-market” allegations against Nigeria, while ignoring actions that he said damage the country’s image internationally.
Referring to events that unfolded on a programme he identified as “Prime Time TV,” the outspoken lawyer said diplomats, investors and politicians across the world who watched the broadcast would conclude that Nigerians are “not a people to be taken seriously.”
Odinkalu particularly criticised former Senate President and Secretary to the Government of the Federation, Anyim Pius Anyim, alleging that the handling of the matter exposed a lack of seriousness and professionalism in public affairs.
“The vuvuzelas of APC who are always looking to exterminate #DeMarketingNigeria will not see the disgrace of fantasy figures being invented by the most powerful in the country,” he wrote.
He further lamented what he described as the trivialisation of issues he considered sacred to governance and national credibility, questioning how the country could be perceived internationally amid such controversies.
Precise Post recalls that the remarks have since sparked reactions on social media, with supporters and critics of the government debating the implications of Odinkalu’s comments on Nigeria’s political image and public accountability.

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Odinkalu Alleges Pressure Behind INEC Statement, Warns of Rising Stakes Ahead of 2027 Elections

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By Our Reporter

ABUJA (PRECISE POST)  –  Human rights lawyer and legal scholar, Chidi Odinkalu, has raised concerns over what he described as undue pressure influencing a recent statement issued by Nigeria’s electoral body, Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC).

In remarks shared on his X account on Monday, Odinkalu disclosed that the statement followed a high-level meeting involving senior officials of INEC, the Presidency of Nigeria, the Court of Appeal of Nigeria, and the Federal High Court of Nigeria within the past 60 hours.

He further alleged, citing what he described as “impeccable authority,” that a pre-signed resignation letter existed for INEC Chairman, Mahmood Amupitan, claiming it was a condition tied to his appointment.

According to Odinkalu, the possibility of invoking this resignation was used as leverage to compel the issuance of the controversial statement.

Odinkalu criticized INEC’s role in interpreting judicial decisions, arguing that it falls outside the commission’s mandate. He maintained that, in cases of ambiguity, the commission should have sought clarification directly from the Court of Appeal rather than issuing its own interpretation.

“It should be evident to a professor of law and Senior Advocate of Nigeria that interpreting court judgments is not the business of INEC,” he stated, emphasizing that adherence to due process is critical for institutional credibility.

The legal scholar warned that the situation reflects deeper tensions within Nigeria’s democratic framework, suggesting that the country faces a critical moment as it looks ahead to the 2027 general elections.

According to him, only those who understand the gravity of the unfolding developments will fully grasp the stakes involved in what he referred to as “NigeriaDecides2027.”

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Opinion

Nigeria’s Crisis of Judicial Pensions Is Not About the Law of Karma (OPINION)

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By Chidi Anselm Odinkalu

“The term of office of judges, their independence, security, adequate remuneration, conditions of service, pensions and the age of retirement shall be adequately secured by law.”

Principle 11, United Nations Basic Principles on the Independence of the Judiciary, (1985)

Babajide Candide-Johnson became a judge of the High Court of Lagos State at 45. The son of the third Chief Judge of Lagos State, he is polyglot; fluent in several languages, including French. When his judicial tenure came to an end on 27 June 2021, 20 years after he became a judge, Babajide Candide-Johnson was the head of the family court in the High Court of Lagos State.

At his retirement, the Chief Judge of Lagos State, Kazeem Alogba, described Babajide Candide-Johnson as “a brilliant, hardworking, meticulous and fearless judge, an intellectual who delivered judgments without fear or favour.”

Those words describe a model judge. Yet, nine months later, in March 2022, he was back in court, this time to sue the government of Lagos State, whom he had served without blemish in judicial office for two decades, for “his pension, severance gratuity, and other entitlements.”

The government of Lagos State initially demurred, disingenuously arguing that responsibility for judicial pensions under the Pension Right of Lagos State Judicial Officers Law of 2015, lay with the state Judicial Service Commission. The state government later saved itself from a public unraveling of an embarrassing position and the parties agreed to an amicable settlement.

In 2022 alone, at least five other former judges of the High Court of Lagos also sued the State government over the same issue.

The year before the retirement of Babajide Candide-Johnson in Lagos, 22 retired judges of the High Court of Abia, the self-described “God’s own State” in south-east Nigeria, had similarly sued before the National Industrial Court of Nigeria, (NICN), claiming to have been shafted by a succession of three governors going back nearly a decade and a half, who claimed mandates from God to ruin the state. It appears that in response to the case, the then state government “reportedly promised to pay N10 million to the retired judges every month, but only did so for one month.”

Three years after this case began, it was still stuck in the NICN, with little progress. Meanwhile, five of the retired judges had died in penury while waiting for the case to rescue them. In May 2023, Abia State installed a newly elected governor. Two months later, he and the retired judges reached an agreement to clear the back-log of 16 years of judicial pensions liability.

Around the country, retired judges are increasingly resorting to judicial proceedings to call attention to a crippling and chronic crisis of judicial pensions for judges who retired before June 2023. In Ondo State, retired judges sued in April 2016 for similar issues. Their peers in Imo, Ogun, and Oyo have as well.

For long, the constitution provided for how to compute judicial pensions but not necessarily for how to finance or administer it effectively. Effective from June 2023, a new constitutional amendment transferred to the National Judicial Council (NJC), responsibility for the administration of judicial pensions. This has not, however, alleviated or addressed the crisis of judicial pension obligations arising from before then and may, indeed, have surfaced new problems of its own.

In Kogi, eight retired judges of the state High Court have recently served notice on the state government of their intention to return to court as litigants to enforce their pension rights. They include a former Chief Judge of the State John Bayo Olowosegun; a former President, Customary Court of Appeal, Hon. Justice Yunusa Musa; and a former senior judge, Professor Andrew Alaba-Ajileye.

The NJC has to accept some responsibility for the historical liabilities. It has been an indifferent and perfunctory advocate for retired judges. On his way out of office as then chairman of the NJC and Chief Justice of Nigeria and after much hand-wringing, Olukayode Ariwoola, in January 2023 finally tabled the issue before the Council at its 100th meeting.

In a statement at the end of the meeting, the Council described as “worrisome, the situation whereby many Judicial Officers of the States are being owed their retirement benefits, including severance pay/gratuity and pensions”, and warned that this undermined the rule of law without clearly saying how so.

Even worse, the Council failed to disclose which states were involved, for how long or by how much. Instead, the NJC directed State Chief Judges from across the country to report on compliance with this resolution without indicating what it had previously done to compute the quantum of liabilities involved.

On the whole, the NJC lost an opportunity to show that it cared about the subject matter; that it had indeed bothered to do its homework; or that this was an issue on which it desired to enlist any support or reinforcement for the affected retired judges. Since then, the Council does not appear to have seriously monitored or re-engaged with this issue.

The consequences of the chronic accumulation of pension debts in the public service are quite corrosive of both morale of existing personnel and effectiveness of service delivery. Serving officers just need to behold that situation in order to appreciate the urgency of the need to take their own destinies into their own hands while they still have the opportunity to do so.

The judiciary presents a somewhat special case because the average age of intake into the bench of the superior courts of record is higher than in any other branch of pensionable service in Nigeria. The consequences of the deliberate neglect to fulfill pension obligations can, therefore, be quite dire. In States, like Taraba in the north-east, for instance, many judges who retired before 2023 have died waiting endlessly for their pensions and terminal benefits.

The uncertainties about judicial benefits have also created other problems of their own, with crooks cashing in on the vulnerabilities of retired judges. In March 2024, the NJC went public with the complaint that “fraudsters had been bombarding retired judges with phone calls demanding various sums of money to help them fast-track the payment of their retirement benefits.” It vowed that the Council “would never demand money from any judicial officer to fast-track the payment of his retirement benefits.” The jury, at best, is still out on this.

The problem remains that this crisis of judicial pensions and terminal benefits fosters a system of perverse incentives conducive to bartering judicial outcomes for material benefit.

Some may view as uncharitable a strand of public opinion that suggests that there is a Law of Karma at work and that the destitution of retired judges in this way is the natural consequence of a deepening crisis of judicial integrity and politicization of the judiciary. Others have gone as far as to accuse judges indiscriminately of feeding upfront while in service the political lion with the menu of their pensions.

Even if the conduct of some judges in service could conceivably deserve the attentions of a hypothetical Karma, there remain many judges who do their best not to fall into that category. Such points of view should, however, demonstrate for all involved the urgency of addressing this issue with finality.

For the judiciary, it is existential at both personal and institutional levels. For the citizens and court users, it is the only way to guarantee the possibility of minimal credibility to the work of the courts. For the country, it should ensure that the promise of an independent judiciary stands a chance of not disintegrating into a constitutional hoax. The distinction between judges who retired before June 2023 and those retiring thereafter is artificial and unnecessary. The NJC can work constructively with government at the federal and state levels to close it.

 

A lawyer and a teacher, Odinkalu can be reached at [email protected]

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Odinkalu Eulogises Anyaoku @ 93, Says He’s Nigerian Diplomat Who Helped Shape a Freer Commonwealth

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By Chibuike Nwabuko

ABUJA (PRECISE POST)  –  Professor of Practice in International Human Rights Law and former Chairman of Nigeria’s National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), Chidi Odinkalu, GCoF has eulogised Chief Emeka Anyaoku on the ocassion of his 93rd birthday, describing him as Nigerian Diplomat who helped shape a freer Commonwealth.

Odinkalu who stated this when he took to his X handle on Sunday said,

“Eminent diplomat and elder statesman, Chief Emeka Anyaoku, on Monday marked his 93rd birthday, drawing renewed attention to a remarkable life that has spanned some of the most defining moments in modern global and Nigerian history.”

“Born in 1933, barely two months before the first inauguration of United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Anyaoku’s life journey has mirrored key turning points in world affairs. His intellectual brilliance was evident early, earning him admission to University College Ibadan, now the University of Ibadan, where he graduated with a degree in Classics as a College Scholar.”
“Three years before Nigeria attained independence in 1960, Anyaoku began his diplomatic career with the United Kingdom’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office, a rare feat for a young Nigerian at the time. This early exposure to international diplomacy laid the foundation for what would become one of the most distinguished careers in global public service.”
“In October 1983, Anyaoku was appointed Nigeria’s Minister of Foreign Affairs. However, his tenure was short-lived following the military coup led by Major-General Muhammadu Buhari in December of the same year, which overthrew the civilian government less than three months after his appointment.” “Fortuitously, Anyaoku returned to the Commonwealth Secretariat, where his career would soon reach historic heights.”
“Six years later, he was elected Secretary-General of the Commonwealth, becoming one of the most influential voices in multilateral diplomacy. During his tenure, Anyaoku presided over landmark developments, including the liberation of Namibia and critical negotiations with the African National Congress that culminated in the end of apartheid and the emergence of majority rule in South Africa in 1994.”
“Perhaps one of his most enduring legacies was steering the Commonwealth decisively into the realm of human rights advocacy through the adoption of the Harare Declaration, widely known as the Harare Principles. This framework redefined the Commonwealth as a values-based organisation committed to democracy, rule of law and respect for fundamental human rights.”
“Beyond his global achievements, Chief Anyaoku remains deeply rooted in his heritage. He hails from Obosi in Anambra State, South-East Nigeria, where he is the senior-most titled chief and holds the revered traditional title of Adazie Obosi.”
“As tributes poured in from across Nigeria and beyond, his 93rd birthday served not only as a celebration of longevity but also as a reminder of a life devoted to principled leadership, diplomacy and service to humanity.”
At 93, Chief Emeka Anyaoku stands as a towering symbol of Nigerian excellence on the world stage, an enduring moral compass whose legacy continues to inspire generations.
Happy 93rd Birthday, Adazie Obosi, Odinkalu added.

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Opinion

On Whose Mandate Do Judges Stand? (OPINION)

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By Chidi Anselm Odinkalu

“I had discovered since my appointment as a High Court judge that most of the politicians in Nigeria and, indeed, in other developing countries only pay lip-service to the independence of the judiciary…. It pays in the end for a judge, even at the risk of being a snob or of haughtiness, to be somewhat aloof, not only from members of the Executive, but also from political powerbrokers.”
Atanda Fatayi Williams, Faces, Cases and Places, pp. 77-78 (1983)

Atanda Fatayi Williams, the fourth Chief Justice of post-colonial Nigeria (CJN), has not always received the kind of credit that he probably should for a judicial career of impact. Few judicial careers in Nigerian history can compete with that of this grand-son of an Ijebu merchant in terms of both legacy and luminosity.

Sworn in as a judge a mere seven days after independence on 7 October 1960, Justice Fatayi Williams was the first person to be appointed a judge in post-independence Nigeria. 19 years later, he became Nigeria’s first Chief Justice of the presidential era. In this capacity, he was the first CJN to truly feel the pulse of the elected president as both head of state and head of government.

It was his good fortune that the president during his tenure as CJN was the emollient Alhaji Shehu Shagari but he saw enough to leave him a sceptic about judicial dalliance with politicians. “In Nigeria” he warned in his memoirs, “familiarity does not breed contempt. It breeds obligation…. people with whom you are friendly expect you to bend the rules to suit their requirements.”

As CJN, Fatayi Williams pioneered the All Nigeria Judges Conference in Ilorin, the capital of Kwara State, on 8 March 1982. That was one year after the current CJN became a lawyer. Shehu Shagari, then the president, traveled to Ilorin to address the conference. His presence and delivery bore the hallmarks of the polished modesty that defined Shagari’s long public service career.

The conference has grown since then to become a biennial tradition of the bench of Nigeria’s Superior Courts of Record. For many judges, the opportunity to mix, introspect, and learn together with colleagues from across the country, both serving and retired, is the highpoint of every judicial biennium. The conference is also an opportunity for judges as a collective to diagnose common problems that afflict the judicial branch, think together, and communicate with the other branches of government on policy matters adjacent or relevant to the judiciary.

For the past decade and a half, the conference has acquired a permanent home on the premises of the National Judicial Institute (NJI) in Abuja. This year’s conference began on 17 November at the same venue. The Administrator of the NJI, Babatunde Adejumo, himself a former President of the National Industrial Court of Nigeria, ran the floor under the direction of the Chair of the Institute who is also the CJN.

As befits a conference with the president of Nigeria in attendance, the opening of the conference was supposed to be brisk. The Administrator of the NJI had to be persuaded from lingering on the microphone with prolix protocol. Thereafter, it was the turn of the CJN.

Her delivery made a case that appeared both respectable and heartfelt, inviting her colleagues to defend and deepen democracy in Nigeria “by ensuring that justice is not only done but manifestly seen to be done in every courtroom, across every jurisdiction, and in every case.” With deftness, she acknowledged widespread notions that judicial decisions in Nigeria are “sometimes vulnerable to external influences”, a euphemism for perceptions of both corruption and capture of the judiciary; and admitted “with candour that there are some within our ranks who have undermined the integrity of the Bench.” She hoped that “this must change” but stopped short of saying how or when.

The CJN ended her address by inviting President Bola Tinubu to address the judges and declare the conference open. As she unfurled this introduction and transition, the judges gathered in the Andrews Otutu Obaseki Auditorium of the NJI stood in unison both to applaud the delivery of the CJN and, presumably, as a mark of courtesy to their presidential patron.

In unison, the military band from the presidential Guards Brigade broke into an instrumental rendition of “On Your Madate We Shall Stand”, the president’s personal fealty anthem. When the president was done with the delivery of his 1,314 word-long address, the same band again played the same accompaniment as the judges stood to applaud his transition from the presidential podium back to his seat.

So, not once but twice in a period of less than 15 minutes, the presidential band played this partisan political rendition. From any other president, this may have been a mistake but this president is no political eunuch. If the first was an error, the second surely was comfort. Whatever the intention or design was, this guaranteed that no one remembers anything of what President Tinubu said. The only memory of his showing at this All Nigeria Judges Conference is that he sought to wheedle the judges with an instrumental symbolism of personal fealty.

For a conference with the timely theme of “Building a Confident Judiciary”, President Tinubu could hardly have done worse in undermining public confidence in the judges. To their credit, many of the judges inside the conference auditorium were schtum at the rendition(s). Unmistakably, however, there were people within the hall who also sang along.

President Tinubu’s own television station, TVC, later offered the spectacular apologia that the singing was done by “the people who came with the president…. The president’s staff, they were at the back”, adding: “if those ones were singing, can anyone question them for singing? This is a song they have been singing since they were in Lagos.” The claimed that President Obasanjo had such a song too. That was absurd.

To convince their audience of presumed presidential proselytes, they hyperventilated to the claim that the same tune had been played the previous week when the president opened the conference of the Guild of Editors. In their estimation, a gathering of Nigeria’s most senior judges is worth no more than the currency of a conference of the Guild of Editors.

One judicial participant at the event went further, privately dissimulating that there was no such rendition and that any sound other than the National Anthem associated with their gathering was deep fake from Artificial Intelligence!

The leadership of the judiciary appeared ambivalent. When eventually they responded, over 48 hours later, it was through a statement with mangled syntax signed by a middling officer described as the “Head, Information, Media and Public Relations” at the NJI. The only thing notable about this statement was what was missing on its face: no judicial principal was courageous enough to own the debacle. Its content was entirely forgettable.

In its text, the statement dutifully dismissed the optics as unfounded, exculpated all conferees from suggestions of partisan political animus, and righteously denounced “any attempt to distort the solemnity of the event”, without offering evidence or process. Instead, they trained ostentatious indignation at people to whom they owed both contrition and apology.

The authors of this statement apparently didn’t know that the horse of the distortion of the solemnity of the event had long bolted. The president accomplished that with hubris to spare.

It does considerable injustice to the current generation of judges in Nigeria to suggest, as that statement does, that they are incapable of running with efficiency and without partisan incident a conference in existence for over four decades. Its attempt to outsource responsibility for an incident that should never have occurred is beneath the dignity of judicial office. A confident judiciary should learn from this and promise itself that it shall never happen again.

Alexander Hamilton may have called the judiciary “the least dangerous” branch, having “neither force nor will but merely judgment”, but in taking his personal fealty anthem to the floor of the judges conference, President Tinubu sought to relocate the source of the judicial function from its constitutional foundation to personal loyalty to him. The question he raised is simple: On whose mandate do judges stand? The judges cannot duck the issue posed by the president’s symbolic choice of battleground.

A lawyer and a teacher, Odinkalu can be reached at [email protected]

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Opinion

Why Nigeria’s Election Petition System is Unconstitutional By Chidi Anselm Odinkalu

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“Sovereignty belongs to the people of Nigeria from whom government through this Constitution derives all its powers and authority.” Section 14(2), Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, 1999

In 2007, the contest to rule Nigeria was between two sons of Katsina State. From the Katsina Emirate, Umaru Musa Yar’Adua ran on the ticket of the then ruling Peoples’ Democratic Party (PDP) to succeed outgoing president, Olusegun Obasanjo. His elder brother, Shehu, had served as Obasanjo’s second-in-command during military rule from February 1976 to October 1979. From the Daura Emirate, also in Katsina State, Muhammadu Buhari who also served alongside Obasanjo and Shehu Musa Yar’Adua in that military government, was the leading opposition candidate on the platform of the All Nigeria Peoples’ Party (ANPP).

The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) announced Umaru Musa Yar’Adua as winner and Muhammadu Buhari lodged a petition to challenge the declaration. After a prolonged period of litigation, the Supreme Court handed down its decision on 12 December 2008 by a narrow majority dismissing Muhammadu Buhari’s petition.

Of the many things pronounced upon by the court, two stood out. One was its refusal to affirm any set of principles to govern the conduct of elections in Nigeria. The other was the formal pronouncement in the leading judgment of Niki Tobi that in elections in the country, “the judges must be the final bus-stop.” A report on election dispute resolution in Nigeria published earlier this year by the Policy and Legislative Advocacy Centre (PLAC) reinforced this, declaring that the electoral process in Nigeria has now been formally relocated “from ballot to the courts.”

The idea of judges as the “final bus-stop” for the determination of electoral legitimacy in Nigeria sounds like a wanton departure from the clear constitutional design which confers sovereignty upon the people “from whom government through this constitution derives all its powers and authority.” Judges may be people in the sense of human beings like every other citizen, but as a conclave of decision makers in a court, they are not the people upon whom the constitution confers the mandate to decide who rules the country.

Democracy without voters: The origin of Nigeria’s insecurity crisis

When it comes to contests over elections in Nigeria, the Electoral Act does not provide any room for the people whose mandate is at stake to participate in disputes over the destination of their mandate or what happens to it.

It is problematic enough that judges have now overthrown popular sovereignty as the basis of the mandate to rule in Nigeria and substituted it with a grandiloquent notion of judicial sovereignty. The case of the Zamfara State governorship election in 2019 demonstrates how dangerously self-regarding judicial sovereignty has become in Nigeria.

In that year, Mukhtar Shehu Idris, the candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC), secured a total of 534,541 votes or 67.41% of the votes cast to win the contest for the office of governor of Zamfara State. He clearly won the vote in each and all of the 14 Local Government Areas of the State. In a distant second was Bello Matawalle of the PDP who secured 189,452 votes or 23.89% of the votes cast, less than 25% of the votes cast in the state. Matawalle also lost in every LGA in the state.

Preceding the vote, however, the contest for the ticket of the APC was the subject of competing and contradictory orders from various courts in the country, both state and federal. Nobody alleged that the result was anything other than the manifest will of the people. But in resolving the complicated pre-election litigation on 24 May 2019, the Supreme Court invalidated the APC primaries, disbarred their candidate from the contest retrospectively and pronounced that “this being so, the votes credited to the (APC candidates) in the 2019 general elections in Zamfara State are wasted votes.”

Not content with throwing the votes of more than two-thirds of the voters of the state into the dust-bin, the Supreme Court went further and pronounced as the winner, Bello Matawalle, who had been beaten hopelessly into an insignificant second position. This was election robbery under the ruse of jurisprudence.

There was nothing inexorable about the order made by the Supreme Court in this case. The court could have invalidated the primaries of the APC. Indeed, it could still arguably have excluded the APC from the contest. But faced with the reality of excluding over two-thirds of the voters of the state from having a say in who governs them, the structure, text and spirit of both the constitution and the idea of government founded on the will of the people required the Supreme Court in that case to do only one thing – order a re-run so that the people of Zamfara State could look at the candidate on offer and choose who to rule them. Instead the court chose to supplant popular sovereignty with judicial sovereignty, infantilise the voters and install as governor for the people of Zamfara State a person whom they looked at and roundly rejected at the polls.

At the beginning of January 2008, Nigeria’s Supreme Court decided in the case that ultimately handed the office of the Governor of Rivers State to Chibuike Rotimi Amaechi that under Nigeria’s constitution, it is the political party alone that contests or wins an election. However, in a little-noticed line in that judgment, Adesola Oguntade, who delivered the judgment of the court, cautioned that the law governing political or election dispute resolution in Nigerian constitution and law was “intended to ensure a smooth transition from one administration to another. It is not a provision to destroy the right of access to the court granted to a citizen under section 36 of the same Constitution.”

The basic requirement of section 36 of the Constitution is a guarantee that a person or group whose “civil rights and obligations” are liable to be determined in a court of law, “shall be entitled to a fair hearing within a reasonable time by a court or other tribunal established by law and constituted in such manner as to secure its independence and impartiality.” In a system of government founded on one person one vote, no civil right or obligation competes for primacy on an equal footing with the right of citizens to choose who governs them or how to constitute their government.

Yet, when the Supreme Court decided in 2019 that the votes of a super-majority of the people of Zamfara State in the governorship election were “wasted”, it did not bother to hear from any of the affected voters or their legal representatives. In Plateau State, where a judicial hit-squad from the Court of Appeal did something similar to the voters in the legislative elections in 2023, again, the people could not be represented. It is difficult to contemplate a clearer violation of section 36 of the Constitution.

In Nigeria where the decision on whom to confer the mandate to rule has been relocated by fiat of the Supreme Court from the ballot box to the court room, citizens are currently denied standing to participate in disputes involving the identity or determination of the person or party on whom they have conferred that mandate. The surprise is that no one has sought to bring this to the attention of the courts as such or challenge the lawfulness or constitutionality of this fundamental design flaw in Nigeria’s election petition system. The main objection to this is that it could be both confounding and inconvenient to ask potentially millions of voters to join in such proceedings. We will address this objection fully next.

A lawyer and a teacher, Odinkalu can be reached at [email protected]

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Opinion

Opinion: Democracy in Africa and the Dangers of a Judicial Selectorate

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By Chidi Anselm Odinkalu

In March 2006, Uganda’s Supreme Court convened to begin adjudication of the disputes over the presidential election that occurred the previous month in the country. Voting took place on 23 February. Two days later, on 25 February, the Electoral Commission announced the results giving the incumbent, Yoweri Kaguta Museveni, 59.28% of the valid votes cast. In second place, with an award of 37.36% of the votes, the Commission announced Kiiza Besigye, a medical doctor whose military career began as part of the bush war that brought Museveni to power 20 years earlier in 1986.

In his petition against the announced result, Col. Besigye argued that the Electoral Commission did not validly declare the results in accordance with the Constitution, and the Presidential Elections Act; and that the election was conducted in contravention of the provisions of both. His evidence was compelling.

Yet, the impression that the petition process was a ritual performance with a predetermined outcome pervaded the process. Leading the legal team for the Electoral Commission of Uganda who were defendants in the petition was Lucian Tibaruha, Solicitor-General of Uganda. In reality, he also led the lawyers for the president, also a defendant alongside the Electoral Commission. Handling election petitions for a party political candidate was not supposed to be part of Lucian’s job, but there he was.

Presiding was Bejamin Josses Odoki, Chief Justice of Uganda since 2001 and the author of the 1995 Constitution that incrementally made Museveni a life president. Idi Amin, Uganda’s infamous military dictator, elevated Odoki to the bench as a 35 year old in 1978. Amin’s nemesis, Museveni, elevated him to the Supreme Court eight years later and made him Chief Justice in 2001.

Announcing its reasoned judgment in January 2007, the court found that there had been non-compliance with the Constitution of Uganda and the applicable laws in the form of “disenfranchisement of voters by deleting their names from the voters register or denying them the right to vote” as well as “in the counting and tallying of results.”

The Court equally found as a fact that the “principle of free and fair elections was compromised by bribery and intimidation or violence in some areas of the country” and also that “the principles of equal suffrage, transparency of the vote, and secrecy of the ballot were undermined by multiple voting, and vote stuffing in some areas.”

Despite these findings, Chief Justice Odoki and his court ruled by a majority of four votes to three of Justices of the Supreme Court of Uganda to uphold the election and grant President Museveni another five years in power. Two years after this decision, in 2009, when the Chief Justice’s son, Phillip Odoki, wedded, Museveni’s son, General Muhoozi Kainerugaba was the best man

In 2010, it emerged that Chief Justice Odoki never harboured any doubts about the outcome. Questioned about the role of judges in deciding elections in Africa, Odoki, “smiled when commenting that to nullify a presidential election would be suicidal.” He lived to see his peers in Kenya and Malawi do just that in 2017 and 2020 respectively. It proved not to be suicidal.

According to former law teacher, Olu Adediran, the role of judges in these kinds of cases is in reality “a compromise between law and political expediency.” Jude Murison is more direct in calling it “judicial politics.” Judges are not instruments of change or revolution and when they are called upon to adjudicate between sides in a political dispute, they are more often than not likely to treat that not as an opportunity to change political paymasters except when the bell has already tolled undisputedly for an incumbent.

Politicians are supposed to sell themselves to the people through their programmes and through campaigns in a contest of both ideas and vision. In return, the people through their votes offer endorsement to the politicians and programmes whom they believe best advance their interests. An electoral commission is a referee supposedly engaged and maintained at the public expense to administer this contest.

This is where things begin to break down. Although engaged in the name of the people, every electoral commission is appointed by people in power who never wish to relinquish it. When a dispute emerges as to the kind of job done by the electoral commission, it ends up before judges. However, the same people who appoint the electoral commission also usually appoint the most senior judges into office. In the maelstrom of party political competition, guardrails break down as politicians struggle to casualise the popular electorate in order to prosper a judicial selectorate.

The more election disputes end up in court, the more it becomes evident to politicians that it is easier to make deals with the judges. The people are and can be unpredictable, unlike most judges. Increasingly, therefore, politicians seek to judicialize the site of decision-making on elections, relocating that from the polling booth to the courtroom.

If a politician can get their spouse appointed to become a judge, they can even make the site of decision-making in elections more intimate, relocating it from the courtroom to the bedroom.

Instead of the usual soapbox, increasingly elections in many countries can be decided by good old pillow-talk. Former federal legislator, Adamu Bulkachuwa, whose wife, Zainab, headed Nigeria’s Court of Appeal for six years until 2020, published the manual on this model of electoral ascendancy in his parliamentary valedictory remarks as a senator in June 2023.

This is why the judicialization of politics in Africa increasingly represents a huge risk to the popular will as the basis of government. First, it vitiates the right to democratic participation and suppresses the popular will as the foundation for democratic legitimacy. Second, it enables the courts to deprive the people of their democratic rights, accomplishing that under the alluring pretence of rule of law. Third, it provides perverse incentives for politicians to capture the courts, making the judiciary in many African countries a battleground for the pre-determination of election outcomes. Fourth, it has the capacity to alter the character of the judiciary from an independent institution to a plaything of political insiders.

This trend in consigning elections to the care of a judicial selectorate around Africa now endangers judges and their independence. In Malawi, in 2020, the president attempted to remove the Chief Justice in order to secure a Supreme Court panel more solicitous of his interests in the lead-up to a presidential re-run, following a rigged electoral contest that had been struck down by the courts.

The following year in September 2021, the ruling party in Zimbabwe pressured the Constitutional Court to overrule an earlier decision of the High Court that blocked an extension of the tenure of the Chief Justice after he had reached the official retirement age. This allowed the Chief Justice to still serve, but on a contract that made him more subject to presidential whim. Ahead of contentious national elections two years later, the same president decided to advance $400,000 to all serving judges in Zimbabwe in “housing loan” with no repayment obligations. One of the beneficiaries was the chair of the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC), herself a serving judge. Unsurprisingly, she announced her benefactor, the incumbent president, as winner in the ensuing election.

Even worse, this trend now also endangers entire countries, if not indeed regions. This was evident in April 2020, when Mali’s Constitutional Court overturned the results of 31 parliamentary seats won by the opposition. Its decision to hand these seats over to the ruling party sparked an uprising that led first to the dissolution of the Constitutional Court, and later the overthrow of the government in a military coup.

Mali’s twin crises of governmental legitimacy and state fragmentation is a tragic reminder of the dangers of judicial overreach in election adjudication. But the crisis in Mali has also become a regional crisis for West Africa. To adapt an expression familiar to new-age Pentecostals in West Africa: what judges cannot do does not exist.

A lawyer and a teacher, Odinkalu can be reached at [email protected]

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News

Respect Multi-Party Architecture of Our Republic – Concerned Democrats To Tinubu

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By Chibuike Nwabuko

ABUJA (PRECISE POST)  –  Perturbed by the increasing wave of defection of opposition leaders to the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) as a result of alleged persecution and intimidation, using institutions, a group under the auspices of Concerned Democrats has called on President Bola Tinubu to respect the multi-party architecture of Nigeria, and to also end the persecution and intimidation of opposition leaders.

In a statement signed by 18 members of the group on Sunday and made available to newsmen, the members  said they are witnessing, with increasing dismay, a calculated and systematic effort by the administration of President Tinubu to dismantle the democratic foundations of our republic and reduce Nigeria to a one-party state.

The group further highlighted that under this administration, political pluralism is being eroded not by persuasion or performance, but by bribery, blackmail, and coercion. Adding that serving and former governors, senators, members of the House of Representatives, and key opposition figures are decamping en masse to the ruling party, not out of conviction, but out of fear and pressure.

The statement titled: “DEFENDING DEMOCRACY: A CALL TO RESIST THE MARCH TOWARD A ONE-PARTY STATE IN NIGERIA – Concerned Democrats” reads in full:

Fellow Nigerians, Friends of Democracy,

We, the undersigned democrats, raise our voices in alarm and solidarity at this critical hour in the life of our nation. Nigeria’s democracy—hard-won through decades of struggle, sacrifice, and steadfast resistance against authoritarian rule—is under grave threat.

We are witnessing, with increasing dismay, a calculated and systematic effort by the administration of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu to dismantle the democratic foundations of our republic and reduce Nigeria to a one-party state.

Under this administration, political pluralism is being eroded not by persuasion or performance, but by bribery, blackmail, and coercion. Serving and former governors, senators, members of the House of Representatives, and key opposition figures are decamping en masse to the ruling party, not out of conviction, but out of fear and pressure. The pattern is disturbingly clear: an invitation by the EFCC for questioning on financial impropriety is swiftly followed by political capitulation. This weaponization of state institutions for partisan gain corrodes public trust and undermines the integrity of our democracy.

We must say it clearly: a democracy without opposition is not a democracy. The presence of multiple, vibrant parties is not a luxury—it is the lifeblood of any democratic system. It provides citizens with real choices, ensures accountability, encourages debate, and fosters innovation in governance.

The drift toward a one-party state is a betrayal of the ideals that many of us—and indeed President Tinubu himself—fought for during the darkest days of military dictatorship. It is not what we envisioned when we stood in the streets demanding civil rule. It is not what the constitution guarantees. And it is not what Nigeria’s future demands.

The implications of this creeping authoritarianism are dire:

• We risk returning to a culture of impunity, where the absence of opposition breeds arrogance and unaccountable governance.

• We jeopardize the federal character of our democracy by suffocating the diversity of voices and interests that make up our republic.

• We stifle the political space for young Nigerians to organize, question, and contribute to the national discourse.

This must stop.

We call on Mr president to remember the democratic path that brought him to power, to respect the multi-party architecture of our republic, and to end the persecution and intimidation of opposition leaders. The strength of a democracy lies not in the dominance of one party, but in the ability of many to coexist, compete, and cooperate for the good of all.

We urge the Nigerian people, civil society, the media, and the international community to stand vigilant and speak out. History will not be kind to silence in the face of this unfolding danger.

We did not fight to end military dictatorship only to enthrone civilian authoritarianism. We must rise now to defend democracy, or risk losing it forever.

 

Signed:

1. Richard Akinnola

2. Abdul Mahmud

3. Dr Sam Amadi

4. Auwa Ibrahim Musa (Rasfajani)

5. Nnimmo Bassey

6. Adeola Soetan

7. Hon. Uche Onyeagucha

8. Uzodinma Nwaogbe

9. Mma Odi

10. Osa Director

11. ⁠Prof Adele Jinadu

12. ⁠Sen Babafemi Ojudu

13. ⁠Abubakar Siddique Mohammed

14. ⁠Prof Chidi Odinkalu

15. ⁠Chief Tola Adeniyi

16. Dr Jibrin Ibrahim

17. Femi Aborisade

18. Olufemi Adegbulugbe

Precise Post recalls that the presidency in a statement released on Sunday denied the accusations that the administration is moving towards authoritarianism, describing it as baseless and exagerated.

It further stated that contrary to the false claims in the propaganda materials in circulation across mainstream and social media, democracy is not under any threat in Nigeria. The statement added that no policy, official action, or directive from the Presidency seeks to “dismantle democracy” or “weaken opposition or create a one-party state.”

Accusations of bribery, blackmail, and the weaponisation of state institutions only exist in the idle minds of politicians and their agents who have failed in their assigned role of opposition and are fishing for scapegoats, the presidency said.

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Opinion

In Rivers State, a Supreme iniquity By Chidi Anselm Odinkalu

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The political control of the resources of the territory known as Rivers State in Nigeria’s Niger Delta has been a site of curious jurisprudence since the Acting Consul of the Oil Rivers Protectorate, Harry Johnston, procured the judicial liquidation of King Jaja of Opobo in December 1887 in Accra, present capital of Ghana. The charge against King Jaja was the violation of a treaty obligation to assist the British “in the execution of such duties as may be assigned.” At the end of proceedings which lasted less than one day before a forum described by Elvar Ingimundarsson as a “Kangaroo court”, King Jaja was convicted and sentenced to exile. The court also prohibited the people of Opobo from designating a replacement for him.

At the end of February 2025, Nigeria’s Supreme Court continued a tradition of afflicting the people of the territory of Rivers State with curious jurisprudence. Separated by 137 years, the decision of the Supreme Court in the latest of the legal disputes from the political rift between incumbent governor, Siminalayi Fubara, and his predecessor, Nyesom Wike, reprises essential parallels with the trial and exile of King Jaja with haunting similarity.

Now, as then, the underlying dispute is really about “a treaty”; in this case allegedly between the governor and his predecessor, the terms of which also appear to be about “the execution of such duties as may be assigned….” The court orders are against a ruling figure (Governor Fubara) from Opobo and the political effect is to seek to exile him from office while precluding any other Opobo person from replacing him.

Context is necessary to understand the case that the Supreme Court had to decide. Going into the 2023 election, the governor of Rivers State, Nyesom Wike, was term-limited. In 2020 and 2021, he publicly declared that he would not impose a successor on the state. In 2023, he did. His choice was a little-known public servant from Opobo-Nkoro, Sim Fubara. After the election, their relationship disintegrated. The reasons are subliminal in this case; the consequences are explicit.

In December 2023, 27 members of the Rivers State House of Assembly loyal to Nyesom Wike, including the Speaker, Martin Amaewhule, ostentatiously announced that they had defected to the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC). In 2015, the Supreme Court of Nigeria ruled that such defection is permissible only if the political party from which the legislators seek to defect is so hopelessly splintered that it “makes it impossible or impracticable for [the] political party to function as such.” If not, according to the court, “the defector automatically looses (sic) his seat.”

With the defection of Martin Amaewhule and his 26 other colleagues, the House of Assembly of Rivers State became factionalised. The remaining five members were loyal to the incumbent governor. Shortly after the defection of the Amaewhule faction in December 2023, the premises of the Rivers State House of Assembly were demolished ostensibly on the orders of the state government. The faction loyal to the state governor relocated to the Government House where, shortly thereafter, they purported to pass into law the 2024 Appropriation Bill for the State, which became law when the governor promptly assented to it.

The outbreak of litigation that followed has been inexhaustible. The appeal determined by a five-person panel of the Supreme Court on 28 February 2025 is one them. Essentially, it sought orders to restrain the Central Bank of Nigeria from remitting to Rivers State, its share of the proceeds from the Federation Account except to finance a budget passed by the Amaewhule faction of the State House of Assembly. In other words, this was litigation asking the judiciary to take sides in what is in fact a very grubby dispute over control of Rivers State’s money.

This case traveled up to the Supreme Court with supreme alacrity. The Federal High Court delivered judgment on 30 October 2024, a mere three and a half months after filing on 15 July. Not wishing to be outdone, the Court of Appeal delivered judgment on 13 December 2024, less than a month and a half later. The Supreme Court has been equally supersonic in bringing the case to judgment.

The Supreme Court dealt with two issues when it should have addressed at least three. First, it affirmed the jurisdiction of the Federal High Court to hear the case. Next, on the question whether the rump of the House of Assembly of Rivers State loyal to the governor could constitutionally sit to pass the 2024 budget, it held that they could not. In support of this position, the court cited precedent applicable to when the legislature sits on impeachment, a special procedure for which the constitutionally prescribed parliamentary arithmetic is different.

The third issue, it left unattended. The Court simply proceeded without deliberation or reasoning to grant all the orders asked for.

An injunction, the principal relief sought in this case, is notoriously a remedy in equity, only granted deliberatively. Over one century ago, the path-breaking decision in The Lusitania laid down the principle that “as a general rule of both civil and common law… the remedy must be commensurate with the injury received.”

There are four glaring problems with this Supreme Court judgment. The first is not what is in it but what is missing. Lawyers claim that “equity does not act in vain.” The Supreme Court did not bother to provide any reasoning or justification for its orders, leaving it open to legitimate accusations of having acted in vain or in a transaction. Granting the court every latitude on the violations that it found, its orders are an unreasoned overreach.

Second, ordering the Central Bank to withhold Rivers state’s share of the Federation Account is at best a rogue order that punishes the people for a dispute between politicians. It violates the maxim that “equity regards the beneficiary (in this case the people of Rivers State) as the true owner.” Their right to their share of the Federation Account is antecedent to, independent of, and unconnected with the dispute in this case.

Third, being aware of the ongoing litigation on the legal consequences of the defection of the Amaewhule faction of the State House of Assembly, the Supreme Court short-circuited a contingent appellate process and issued dispositions on a dispute that was neither before it nor necessary for the determination of the issues it was called upon to decide. In doing so, the court chose with a touch of injudicious shamelessness to accept the invitation to take sides in the underlying political dispute in Rivers State.

Fourth, the Supreme Court announced revolutionary jurisprudence on the judicial fly, claiming that, in cases where there is a disputed defection, “only the [legislature] can declare a seat vacant for defection and not the Governor of a State. Not even the Courts can do so.” It takes heedless audacity for an apex court to castrate the judiciary. That is exactly what the court did with this line in italics. When the Supreme Court laid down the contrary principle in 2015, it was by a panel of seven Justices. This Supreme Court purports to overrule that principle without even citing, acknowledging, or considering its earlier decisions on the same point. Moreover, a five-person panel of the Supreme Court cannot overrule a seven-person panel.

When Chief Justice of Nigeria, Kudirat Kekere-Ekun, showed up reportedly to turn the sod on proposed judicial digs with Nyesom Wike last October, there were unheeded warnings then concerning the prohibitive institutional costs of such dalliance with a notorious political litigant who has a reputation for instrumentalizing the courts. Many will look at will be argued that she was not on the panel; to which the response will be, she chose the judges and constituted the panel.

On 1 December 1887, the Kangaroo court of Rear Admiral Walter Hunt-Grubbe ruled that the presence of King Jaja in Opobo “would be fatal” to British commercial interests and authorized his eventual exile to West Indies. The judgment was widely seen as a transactional travesty and its effect, it was said, was “to haunt the British colonial administration in West Africa for a long time.”

It may similarly be said of what the courts of post-colonial Nigeria did in the 137th year of that iniquity that they sought in another transactional travesty to exile another figure from Opobo from his position because his presence would be fatal to the interests of Nigeria’s most prolific political litigant.

A lawyer and a teacher, Odinkalu can be reached on [email protected]

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Opinion

This Sentinel at the Door of Anambra State Must Succeed (Opinion)

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By Chidi Anselm Odinkalu

Comprising five of the country’s 36 states, south-east Nigeria is the site of resilient atrocity. In the eight years from the middle of 2015 to the end of 2023, the monitoring coalition, Nigeria Mourns, confirmed about 3,000 killings in this theatre from open source records but unofficial estimates suggest that there may be up to five killings missed for each counted. The worst of the killings have occurred since 2019 and the worst-hit state in the zone over that period is Anambra.

Many erroneously date the origins of this to the radicalization of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) in the aftermath of its proscription in 2017. In reality, the escalation has lasted for over a quarter of a century dating back approximately to the assassination in Enugu in 1998 of Igwe Amobi IV of Ogidi.

The annual Conflict Barometer by the Heidelberg Institute for International Conflict Research identifies the south-east as one of eight different conflicts of concern in Nigeria, describing it as a “violent crisis of secession” and ranks it on a par with the crisis of armed pastoralism in the Middle Belt of the country; ahead of the crisis of resource militancy in the Niger Delta; and only below the Boko Haram insurgency in the north-east and the armed bandits in the north-west of Nigeria.

Three framings define the crisis in south-east Nigeria in popular narrative. One is that it is about secession. A second is that most of the fatal incidents connected with it are perpetrated by “unknown gunmen”. The third is that the response to the situation is predominantly kinetic. Each of these is flawed. Together, they miss the underlying issues, with the result that they have turned an otherwise manageable crisis into an interminable atrocity.

Let’s begin with the first. The simplicity of the secession narrative is appealing at both the emotive and pecuniary levels. The former unites other Nigerians with subliminal appeal against a historical “Igbo question”. The latter enables the managers of expeditionary military deployments in the region to finagle more money for themselves using the excuse of preserving Nigeria’s territorial integrity. This would not be so if the situation were to be understood as a policing preoccupation with crime and criminality.

What’s the reality? IPOB’s business model does not stand a snowball’s chance in hell in any of the truly deadly sites of atrocity in south-east Nigeria. Awkuzu, host to the most horrendous atrocities in the region, is the site of “Nigeria’s most brutal police station” where hundreds, if not more, detainees have been killed extra-judicially. In Obosi, the ancient city on the banks of the Idemili River; and in Awka, the state capital, hundreds of young men routinely exterminate one another in murderous inter-cult and inter-gang warfare. In Ogbaru, located between the banks of Oguta Lake and the floodplains of River Niger, organized gangs mobilize deadly violence in sophisticated operations to rustle hydrocarbons. Lokpanta, the point along the Enugu-Port-Harcourt motorway where all the states of south-east Nigeria come close to sharing common borders is an ungoverned territory where commercial kidnapping meets atrocity liquidation. None of these square with the convenience or simplicity of the secession narrative or with its profitability.

Turning to the second popular narrative about the situation in south-east Nigeria, the mythical “unknown” perpetrator is a figure of considerable antiquity in Nigeria. It has been around since the inconclusive judicial inquiry into the attack on Fela Anikulapo-Kuti’s Kalakuta Republic in February 1977 blamed the incident on the “unknown soldier”. In 2011, the traditional ruler of Ihembosi, a community in Anambra State, was disappeared by “unknown gunmen.” They were also to blame in the violent abduction and subsequent disappearance in May 2014 of Chike Okoli, former Commissioner in the same state.

The legend of the unknown perpetrator in Nigeria has over the years emerged as both metaphor and measure of what is widely seen as state incapacity and leadership indifference to the scourge of impunity in the country. Far from an affirmation of unknown actors, Nigeria’s legend of the unknown perpetrator signposts a sense of popular despondency or loss of belief in the capacity of the state to end impunity for atrocities.

In the face of these tendencies, therefore, the third idea that the country or region can shoot its way out of this crisis is worse than wishful thinking. The complex landscape of drivers and factors in the situation in south-east Nigeria does not lend itself to such over-simplifications. To reprise a useful metaphor, it is more deserving of a scalpel than a hammer.

Over 24 months from 2022 to 2024, Bianca Ojukwu, the current Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, and I together led a Truth, Justice and Peace Commission (TJPC) into the causes of the crisis in south-east Nigeria, the perpetrators, the consequences and possible solutions. The Commission met and consulted with hundreds of victims and witnesses, including the security services, community leaders, clergy, politicians, vigilante elements as well as various armed militias in the region.

Two things were evident. One is that the situation in the south-east is fundamentally a crisis of governance and of popular lack of belief in the legitimacy of many in political office in the region. The second is a clear desire on the part of most people to recover their communities and address the tasks of reconstruction and healing from the traumas of the violence.

There are no easy answers to these but there are common threads. Rather perversely, the perpetrators who insist on rendering the region uninhabitable and the security providers who feed the secessionist trope are both engaged in a mutually profitable joint enterprise. Neither wishes insecurity in the south-east to end. This is why the audacity of Governor Chukwuma Charles Soludo in enacting the new Anambra State Homeland Security Law, 2025, is welcome because it evinces a durable solution to the crisis. The law establishes a complementary security provider for the state called “Agun’echemba” (sentinel at the gate) and launches Udo g’Achi (peace shall reign) targeting atrocity insecurity.

Several aspects of the new law have come under scrutiny. In particular, section 18 which targets transactional ritualism has drawn attention, with claims that it lacks the clarity required to pass constitutional muster and discriminates against traditional worship. For context, the TJPC which I led met twice with Juju priests. Separately, I met privately with some senior exponents of the trade. They were united in acknowledging that some amongst them had chosen to parlay their skills in support of atrocity insecurity and made detailed proposals, including asking the government to help root out such practitioners, prohibit infiltration, and regulate and support legitimate practitioners.

The TJPC report diagnosed this phenomenon as “transactional accultism”, which it identified as enabling “violent cultism” and “the crisis of insecurity”. The report argues that this is “a major component of the psychological armor plate of impunity” providing the perpetrators of the violence with deadly rituals which lead them to believe that they have “an aura of both impenetrability to projectiles and invincibility in the field of atrocity, an immense psychological boost in an environment of impunity.”

The law also targets the compounded deficit of legitimate political leadership as an underlying driver of the crisis of insecurity in the region. In 2005, the New Humanitarian reported on the situation in south-east Nigeria that “rigged elections increase disenchantment”, explaining that sympathy for separatism “has been growing since the general elections of April and May 2003, which were marred by widespread allegations of vote rigging.” Office holders who are widely seen as lacking legitimacy are liable to be compromised when confronted with atrocity insecurity. Instead, they get reduced to belligerents instrumentalizing the violence rather than seeking to end it. In this law, Governor Soludo shows he is different.

Above all, this law also addresses the need to rebuild the capacity to administer criminal justice fairly and effectively, beginning with responsible policing; capable magistrates, coroners and the office of the Directorate of Public Prosecutions (DPP). In many states in the region, the police have been rendered destitute of confidence, denuded of the trust of communities. Similarly, most magistrates are desolate and DPP’s offices in the region are unfunded, leaving prosecutorial personnel at the mercy of self-interested parties or of adversaries who threaten them into being ineffectual. The result is that in much of region, all sides glamourize summary, arbitrary or extra-judicial killing as the solution to crime or deviance, disagreement or dissonance.

None of these is easy to implement. As a programme, it confronts organized opposition from those who have profited so far from the over-simplification in a single-narrative of secession that has bedeviled the search for solutions to the situation. This present Government of Anambra State has demonstrated single-mindedness ending this. For that it deserves support and other states in the region can adapt this model.

A lawyer and a teacher, Odinkalu can be reached at [email protected]

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Opinion

Does Africa Have a January Problem, Asks Chidi Anselm Odinkalu(Opinion)

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IN IMO STATE, FOR INSTANCE, WHERE THE NATIONAL JUDICIAL COUNCIL (NJC) HAS REMOVED THE CHIEF JUDGE FOR FALSIFYING HER AGE, THE STATE GOVERNOR HAS CHOSEN NOT TO DESIGNATE ANY REPLACEMENT BECAUSE, OSTENSIBLY, HE DOES NOT FIND THE OPTIONS AVAILABLE POLITICALLY PALATABLE.

57 years ago almost to the month, celebrated Kenya political scientist, Ali Mazrui, observed that “for some reason a disproportionate number of the historic acts of violence in Africa since independence have tended to happen in the months of January and February.” He had good reason for this.

In January 1961, the Belgians and the Americans arranged to hand over to Moise Tshombe in Katanga, Patrice Lumumba, the inconvenient post-colonial Prime Minister of the country now known as the Democratic of the Congo.

The following month, the world learnt of the brutal fate that befell Lumumba. The Congo and, indeed Africa, have both paid a heavy price for those events.

Togo’s first president, Sylvanus Olympio, was killed in January 1963. Two years later, in January 1965, Pierre Ngendandumwe, Burundi’s Prime Minister, was assassinated.

In the year before the assassination of Ngendandumwe, meanwhile, Ugandan, John Okello, led overthrow of Sultan Jamshid bin Abdullah in the very bloody Zanzibar Revolution.

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) would later record with clinical economy that the effect of the revolution was that “the Arab regime of Zanzibar vanished in a single day as its leaders fled, died or were interned.”

The year after the assassination in Burundi, it was the turn of Nigeria’s Prime Minister, Abubakar Tafawa Balewa together with the regional premiers in the Northern and Western regions.

The following month, Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah was overthrown while on his way to see Mao Tse Tung in Beijing, China.
Professor Mazrui never did manage a dispositive answer to his question as to whether there is “any special reason why the opening months of January and February from year to year should have had such a disproportionate share of Africa’s great acts of turbulence?”

Instead, he offered a telling insight, arguing that these events were the fallouts of the search for two forms of legitimacy essential to the trajectory of Africa after the colonial experience. One was the legitimacy of the state and the other was the legitimacy of regimes or of rulers.

Nearly six decades later, these twin problems of state and regime legitimacy continue to afflict African countries but the ways in which different countries now respond to them have arguably made our collective African Januaries a little more interesting.

In many countries, elections – rather than assassinations – have become the chosen path.

In 2024, the people defenestrated ruling parties in Botswana, Ghana, Senegal, and even South Africa. Namibia’s ruling party edged a contest that produced the country’s first female president in an act of political survival for the ruling SWAPO that may just have postponed its day of electoral reckoning.

Some of the elections during the year, of course, re-enacted familiar scenes from a discredited part in Africa’s history.

Tunisia’s election in October 2024 arranged to re-select law professor and incumbent president, Kais Saied, with 90.7% of the votes cast.

It was like a scene from the period before the Arab Spring.

Since the turn of the millennium, however, many of Africa’s elections have been increasingly decided by judges not voters.

In the latest example, in Mozambique, the ruling FRELIMO party procured a judicial validation of an election widely seen as heavily rigged in its favour.

A country already ravaged by a murderous insurgency in its northern region of Cabo Delgado and a destructive cyclone must now live with self-inflicted ungovernability.

The Botswana Democratic Party (BDP), in power since independence in 1966, made a different choice when the people rejected it.
Judicial involvement in elections is not without high risk to the judges involved or to political stability.

To deliver their judgment nullifying the rigged presidential election in 2020, the Malawi Defence Forces arranged to clothe all five judges of the Constitutional Court of Malawi who sat on the case with bullet-proof vests.

In the same year, by contrast, the ruling party in Mali chose to steal through the courts 31 seats won by the opposition in parliament.

The result was an uprising that led first to the dissolution of the Constitutional Court, and later the overthrow of the government in a military coup.

Ghana’s 2024 election was the first in nearly one and a half decades not to end up in the courts.

The candidate of the ruling party and incumbent Vice-President, Mahamudu Bawumia, conceded the race long before a far-from-credible electoral commission had got around to announcing any results.

Ahead of the election, the opposition had made it clear that they would not contemplate going to court if they were denied victory.

In his concession, Bawumia saved the country from what would have been an assured date with instability.

Judges do not always wait until after the ballot to weigh in with their own votes.

In Burundi in 2015, President Pierre Nkurunziza was determined to run for a third term even though it seemed clear that he was constitutionally barred from doing so.

The case ended up before the Constitutional Court where the judges initially decided to uphold term limits barring the president from running for a third term.

Under pressure from a barrage of very personalized presidential threats, the Vice-President of the Constitutional Court, Sylvere Nimpagaritse, fled into exile and “the remaining judges then changed their decision in Nkurunziza’s favour.”

The model of judicial overthrow of the popular will and its replacement with judges as the only eligible voters is, of course, an exclusively Nigerian invention. The politicians who control Nigeria’s Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) are quick to intone “Go to court” at the end of every rigged election, secure in the knowledge that they have also rigged the courts and have many of the judges safely locked away inside their bedrooms.
In the 2023 election cycle, over 81% of the seats contested ended up being decided by the judges.

This business model of managing elections is bad both for democracy and for independence of the judiciary.

First, it denies citizens the right to decide who governs them or on what platform.

Second, the way in which judges achieve this result is not much different from the toppling of elective government by soldiers with guns.

The only difference when the judges do it is that they deploy the artifice of law when in fact what they seek to do is to replace legality with corrupt whim.

Third, the depth of judicial involvement in elections in Nigeria makes the judiciary a plaything of the politicians who have every incentive to capture and corrupt it.

Fourth, this creates an internal market in judicial business that casualizes all but political cases where the judges involved increase their chances of trading in judicial power and legitimacy for cash or powerful networks at the hands of politically exposed litigants.

In 2025, Nigeria will enter the foothills of another major election cycle.

With all the political parties all but defanged, the main theatre of activity will be the judiciary.

In Imo State, for instance, where the National Judicial Council (NJC) has removed the Chief Judge for falsifying her age, the State Governor has chosen not to designate any replacement because, ostensibly, he does not find the options available politically palatable.

In the elections in Tanzania this year and in Uganda at the end of the year, judges will be very active persecuting regime opponents.

In Nigeria, that is already routine even before the electoral gong tolls. The upshot is almost assuredly to guarantee uncertainty instead of ending it.

When he wrote in 1968, Ali Mazrui thought that the opening months of the year seemed to guarantee turbulence in Africa.

Today, that tendency occurs all year round. Far from becoming less turbulent, Africa’s January may have infected the remaining months of the year with a turbulent contagion.

A lawyer and a teacher, Odinkalu can be reached at [email protected]

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Opinion

In the Matter of Dele Farotimi Before Star Chamber By Chidi Anselm Odinkalu

by Edit
written by Edit

Paul Anyebe was a judge of the High Court of Benue State in north-central Nigeria who had a young son with sticky fingers and a sense of adventure It was his role as a dad that endangered his job as a judge.

One night around 1983, Anyebe caught his son attempting to steal from his bedroom. In response, Anyebe pulled his gun in an effort to scare the boy. The gun went off, discharging a bullet which hit and seriously injured the boy. The Attorney-General of Benue State decided to prosecute Paul Anyebe for attempted murder. The Penal Code applicable in Benue State at the time had ample provisions for the crime of attempted murder.

The Attorney-General also added a charge of illegal possession of firearms, a federal offence. Unlike the crime of attempted murder, which was a state crime in Benue State, all firearms offences are federal. The Attorney-General of Benue was well within his powers to prosecute for attempted murder but only the Attorney-General of the Federation could prosecute or authorize prosecution for federal offences.

At the conclusion of the trial, the High Court of Benue State discharged Paul Anyebe on the charge of attempted murder, a state offence, but convicted him on the charge of illegal possession of firearms (a federal offence)for which it sentenced him to three years in prison. The Court of Appeal reduced this sentence to six months in prison or a fine of one hundred Naira. Following this decision and while his appeal was yet to be heard by the Supreme Court, Paul Anyebe was dismissed as a judge.

When the Supreme Court decided Anyebe’s appeal in January 1986, Dahunsi Olugbemi Coker, a Justice of the court, summed up the issue for decision in one sentence: “The short point is whether a State Attorney-General can prosecute an offence created by an Act of the National Assembly.” To this question, the court unanimously responded in the negative. They nullified Anyebe’s trial and ordered the fine paid – one hundred Naira – refunded to him. The Court of Appeal ordered his reinstatement with full benefits.

Adolphus Godwin Karibi-Whyte, one of the justices who decided Anyebe’s appeal at the Supreme Court, said of what the case decided that ”the Attorney-General of a State has no general authority to exercise the powers of the Attorney-General of the Federation to prosecute in respect of Federal offences.”

One effect of this decision is to preclude the prosecution of federal crimes before state courts. A Magistrates Court is a state court. It does not have jurisdiction over federal crimes.

38 years after the Supreme Court of Nigeria established this principle in Anyebe’s case, the Nigeria Police Force (NPF) on 4 December arraigned lawyer and writer, Dele Farotimi, before a Magistrate in Ekiti State on 16 counts of crimes under the Criminal Code Act, a federal legislation.

Three years ago, Ekiti State enacted into law the Criminal Law of Ekiti State, no. 12 of 2021, which repealed and replaced the state’s pre-existing Criminal Code Law of 2012. Comprising nine parts, 429 sections and 140 pages, Ekiti State’s Criminal Law of 2021 does not include the crime Criminal libel or defamation. Section 70 of the law contains a crime of causing disaffection or breach of the peace through offensive publication but that is a simple offence punishable by six months in prison. It is not in issue in this case.

Last week, on 3 December, operatives of the NPF heisted Dele Farotimi from his residence in Lagos State, where the crime of criminal defamation is similarly unknown to law. They raced him across state lines to Ekiti where they detained him. The following morning, on 4 December, the police arraigned Dele before a Magistrate in the state capital.

This is important because the gist of the charges purportedly preferred against Dele Farotimi before the Magistrate in Ekiti is precisely criminal defamation which is not a crime in Ekiti State.

It seemed quite clear that the charges presented by the police did not disclose a crime known to the laws of Ekiti State nor did they disclose a crime over which a Magistrate in Ekiti State could purport to exercise lawful jurisdiction. Despite the evident absence of jurisdiction on multiple fronts, the Magistrate proceeded with undue haste to order the remand of Dele Farotimi in prison custody for one week until 10 December. The Magistrate probably did not realise that 10 December is International Human Rights Day.

Even if the Magistrate had jurisdiction, which he did not, the crime alleged was punishable with two years in prison. Under section 4(5) of the Criminal Law of Ekiti State, this is classed as a “misdemeanor” at best, that is to say “an offence punishable by imprisonment for not less than six months, but less than three years.” These are bailable on liberal terms. Offences punishable by more than three years in prison are called “felonies”. Those are regarded as serious offences. The order of remand in this case seemed wilful with a whiff of the pre-determined about it.

The United Nations Declaration of Basic Principles of Justice for Victims of Crime and Abuse of Power has a name for what happens when a court orders prison remand for a crime which does not exist in law and in proceedings over which it lacks powers. It is called “criminal abuse of power.”

Many people claiming to be senior lawyers have invited Dele Farotimi to have his day in court where he can prove the allegations the subject of these charges or face the consequences. This is clearly designed to make all this seem like an invocation of law. It isn’t.

First, Dele Farotimi can only do so before a court of competent jurisdiction. A Magistrate claiming to sit over a crime that does not exist in the state is not such a court.

Second, the burden in criminal proceedings is on the state to prove that the accused guilty. So, criminal proceedings in Ekiti or anywhere cannot possibly be the forum for Dele Farotimi to prove the truth of his claims. Anyone who makes that assertion is either wilfully jejune or must concede that the only opportunity to put that to test has to be in civil proceedings.

Third, insisting on the kind of proceedings now going on in Ekiti state without any sense of irony only reinforces the kinds of claims that Dele Farotimi makes in his best-selling book about supposedly legal and judicial processes which seem to occur in the pockets of human principalities given to playing god. A lot of things may yet happen in those kinds of proceedings but it does not look like law will be one of them.

Moreover, in 2021, the Supreme Court of Nigeria – no less – condemned as “vexatious and oppressive” and “dangerously rampant”, the “misuse of the criminal law machinery for getting reliefs in disputes that are civil in nature, by using the instruments of State.” The court also required that “a complainant who initiates a prosecution with the knowledge that criminal proceedings are unwarranted and the remedy lies in the civil law, should be made accountable in law for pursuing misconceived criminal proceedings.”

In that same case in 2021, the Supreme Court described the crime of criminal defamation as “an innovation in Star Chamber”, a reference to a notoriously arbitrary and captured judicial forum dating back to late mediaeval England. It was not a judicial endearment.

Dele Farotimi himself was perspicacious about the events as they have so far unfolded. Shortly before he was taken from Lagos, he warned: “Abducting me to be tried in Ekiti State is not justice but a witch-hunt.”

Somewhere in Ekiti State on International Human Rights Day 2024, the very rights consecrated by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights will face the Guillotine with Dele Farotimi strung up as the sacrifice. Those who think this vindication may yet live to rue their affliction with terminal hubris.

A lawyer and a teacher, Odinkalu can be reached at [email protected].

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Opinion

Professor Odinkalu, Let The New CJN Breathe By Omoniyi Osadare

by Edit
written by Edit

In recent times Professor Chidi Odinkalu has become a constant critique and “thorn in the flesh” of the Nigerian Judiciary and he is very right to do so because the Nigerian Judiciary has in recent times become a shadow of its former self with its inconsistent decisions and it indeed appears to have been hijacked in many respects by unscrupulous people.

As soon as the current CJN Hon Justice Kudirat Kekere-Ekun resumed office, Professor Odinkalu continued his spate of criticism against the Judiciary and has even attacked the CJN ‘s character raising insinuations she has been captured or about to be captured by Politicians and unscrupulous persons.

His latest missile is against the Dinner hosted by the Lagos State Government to celebrate the appointment of the current CJN who is the third indigene of Lagos State to be appointed to the exalted position of Chief Justice of Nigeria.

Professor Odinkalu says that Justice Kekere Ekun ought not to have attended the event because Lagos State is a litigant at the Supreme Court and he suggests that her attendance may colour her objectivity and may affect the Supreme Court’s impartiality in their ultimate decision.

With due respect to Professor Odinkalu, his submission is “balderdash ” and without basis for the following reasons:

Justice Kekere Ekun is a respected, impartial and fearless jurist who has been a Judge at all levels of the Judiciary including the Magistracy and has never been indicted for any form of impartiality or moral turpitude in the course of her judicial career.

Secondly, as CJN she is now the Administrative head of an arm of Government and must as a matter of course interact with other representatives of the other arms of Government including the State Government as part of her administrative duties. Some of those duties will include attending social events of the Government that should not necessarily carry any imputation of malfeasance or compromise.

Attending a dinner event compromising mainly Judges from all levels of the Judiciary and legal practitioners to honour one of their own who has attained the highest office in the Judiciary cannot be interpreted by a stroke of imagination as a prelude to compromise by this respected Jurist.

The decisions at the Supreme Court are rendered by Panels of five and seven as the case may be, so the CJN does not make unilateral decisions as Professor Odinkalu would want the undiscerning public to believe.

Judges may be “Godlike” but they are human beings and members of the Society and cannot therefore be completely insulated from Society because their judgements must continue to reflect the ethos and character of a society that remains dynamic and changing. The most important traits are that the Judex must be fearless and upright and be prepared to deliver justice based on law and equity no matter whose ox is gored. I dare say that the new CJN possesses these qualities and is unlikely to be swayed by her attendance at an event organised by her State of origin to honour her ascendancy to the apex of her profession.

Professor Odinkalu should put his excellent writing skills to better use by putting forward a world-class position paper with specifics and not generalities for consideration by the CJN in her quest to retool the Judiciary .

After all, criticism cannot be for criticism’s sake alone ..it must be constructive.
Professor Odinkalu should let the new CJN breathe!!!!!

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Opinion

Kudisprudence, by Chidi Anselm Odinkalu (Opinion)

by Edit
written by Edit

THE PARTIALITY THAT INEVITABLY AFFECTS JUDGES HAS BEEN NOTED IN CASES WITH A POLITICAL FLAVOUR.

David Pannick, KC, Judges, p. 44 (1987)

The state as we know it enjoys three notional monopolies. One is a monopoly of legitimate taxation. The second is a monopoly of the legitimate instrumentality of violence; and the third is a monopoly of legitimate dispute resolution. In Nigeria, all three monopolies are now contested by non-state entities.

Of these three monopolies, many focus on the legitimate instrumentality of violence but it is the capacity of a state to resolve disputes lawfully and peacefully among those who live in it that makes the other two monopolies worthwhile. That is why courts, administrative and even traditional institutions exist.

David Pannick, KC reminds us that “as part of the function of deciding disputes, the courts provide a public service, at almost no charge to customers (who pay for their lawyers but not for the judge and the courtroom).” This is the ideal. Nigeria’s judicial system is in a profound crisis of legitimacy today because of ample evidence suggesting strongly that the requirement that litigants should not pay for the judge or the courtroom may not apply to certain categories, especially among political litigants.

To be clear, the most important reasons for which people sometimes end up in court often are not things to which it is possible to assign any value – dignity, equity, justice, memory, safety or human life. These are all invaluable. Without them, organized society fails. Jurisprudence is the system for organising knowledge about judicial decisions that ultimately deliver and govern these invaluable public goods.

However, judicial business is not confined to these. Many disputes that end up in court involve property or things of material value, such as land, inheritance, shares, stocks, or chattels. Some others may extend to intangibles of value, such as status or reputation. There could also be cases concerning access to political power from which perch the people involved hope to reap benefits that are material in consequence.

These are all things for which the currency of transaction or exchange is money. In Nigerian parlance, that is called “Kudi”. When a court system prioritises disputes affecting things measured in the currency of money over things that are entirely invaluable, it replaces a system of jurisprudence in favour of a preoccupation with “Kudisprudence”.

By way of full disclosure, I did not invent this expression, “Kudisprudence”. I was introduced to it by a friend and school mate of long standing who also happens to be a diligent Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN). He has not licensed me to disclose his identity, and I am obliged to respect his anonymity.

Two cases occurred this past week to illustrate how this distinction between jurisprudence and Kudisprudence affects judicial decision making in Nigeria. On 30 October, the police arraigned a member of the House of Representatives, Mascot Ikwechegh, on charges of assault against a gig-economy driver working with Bolt. A now viral video clip showed Mr. Ikwechegh had assaulted the driver in words and deed. He called the driver vermin in different forms and threatened to “disappear” him without consequences, before proceeding to satiate on the driver his thirst for physical violence.

For those conversant with that Nigerian rat-killer, the material on the video clip portrayed Mr. Ikwechegh as the member representing “Otapiapia” Federal Constituency in the Rat Killers Assembly. On his arraignment, the court granted him bail on an oral application in the sum of N500,000 with sureties who only had to show evidence of utility bills for proof of their residence. The case was adjourned for one week.

Two days later, on 1 November, another court in the same Abuja was host to proceedings charging at least 114 children according to the British Broadcasting Corporation, BBC, with treasonable felony. These charges arose in connection with the #EndBadGovernment protests which occurred last August around the country. Arrested in different locations in northern Nigeria reportedly, these children were transferred to Abuja where they had been detained en masse for 93 days.

On arraignment, they all looked “visibly unwell and malnourished.” In their short spell in court, at least four of them suffered fainting feats. Having beheld all of this, the presiding judge promptly rewarded the children with bail in the sum of N10 million Naira each or a total of N1.14 billion Naira, with two sureties each of whom must be a senior federal civil servant of at least Grade Level 15. He adjourned the case to 24 January 2025. These terms were manifestly such that none of these children can hope to comply with.

This is a court system in which material things, such as status, make all the difference between receiving justice or being on the end of the administration of law even when it is manifestly unjust. The parliamentarian received jurisprudence from a court system that was happy to serve malnourished children with anything but that.

There is an even more worrying scenario to which the expression “Kudisprudence” may be applied. That can be the case where a judicial decision follows upon a bargain – implicit or explicit – between a judge or magistrate on the one hand and a party (disclosed or undisclosed) on the other. This was the sense in which Stanislav Andrzejewski, the former Polish soldier and prisoner-of-war who founded the Sociology Department at the University of Reading in England coined the word “kleptocracy” in 1968, which he defined as “a system of government [that] consists precisely of the practice of selling what the law forbids to sell.” Among the things a kleptocracy can buy and sell in its political open market, Professor Andrzejewski included “even judges.”

The fact that Kudisprudence in the second sense occurs in certain courts in Nigeria is not in question. Many disciplinary cases concluded by the National Judicial Council (NJC), no less, testify to this fact. The only issue left to be determined is how pervasive this is. One thing seems clear: political cases increasingly appear to suggest – very much as David Pannick writes – a higher predisposition to what look like outcomes of Kudisprudence.

For evidence of how this system of Kudisprudence can work, a recent report by the advocacy group, Citizen Gavel, names a notorious former governor and current minister who has a long track record of “building judicial infrastructure and offering other forms of support” to the judiciary in acts of generosity that “often coincide with periods when he has faced significant legal challenges. This raises the possibility that these actions may have indirectly influenced judicial decisions.” Law professor, Fidelis Oditah, SAN adds that in the courts in the Rivers State disputes may have been “corruptly procured” and that the decision have more than a whiff of “a rat” about them.

In its nature, judicial quid pro quo does not necessarily occur on social media or with receipts. Verified cases are more likely than not to be fewer in fact than the number of actual incidents. Many more followers of the recent goings on in Nigeria’s judicial system may themselves have evidence to conclude that it has evolved from a system of jurisprudence to one preoccupied with Kudisprudence.

On its own, that would be sufficient cause for worry; but the reason the system now suffers an overwhelming sense of crisis of credibility is because it cannot be ruled out that this preoccupation with Kudisprudence in the first sense is not the result (in a significant number particularly of political cases), of Kudisprudence in the second – transactional – sense.

David Pannick concludes that courts offer to “those who are greedy, vexatious, exhibitionist, aspiring to canonisation, or just plain impossible a platform to perform.” Every one of them has a right to a court system that regards the public interest in justice as something that money cannot buy.

A lawyer and a teacher, Odinkalu may be reached at [email protected]

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