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In January 2014, a coalition of advocates, including Femi Falana, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN); Jiti Ogunye and Tokunbo Mumuni, both senior lawyers; and I wrote to the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), inviting it to “to investigate the allegations of fraud detailed by the two committees set up by President Goodluck Jonathan in the […]
Continue ReadingOn 27 February, Nigeria’s National Judicial Institute (NJI) in Abuja opened a continuing education course for judges. The opening featured an address by the Chief Justice of Nigeria (CJN), Olukayode Ariwoola, who invited the participants to eschew “unethical conduct that could expose the judiciary to ridicule.” Beneath his text, it seemed as if the Chief Justice desired […]
Continue ReadingNearly one year after the country began voting in February last year, Nigeria’s Supreme Court is still casting the final votes in the 2023 elections. It has been a long, tortured and traumatic election season. First the people voted. Then the Independent National Election (INEC) decided what it announced as the results. By March last […]
Continue ReadingNigeria’s Supreme Court held a special session on November 27, 2023 to formally usher in a new legal year. It provided an occasion for a retrospective on the performance of Nigeria’s judiciary by its leaders in a season of unprecedented levels of public angst over the political weaponisation of judges and a set piece moment to […]
Continue ReadingJoyce Banda, Malawi’s fourth (and first female) president, was in Nigeria earlier this month as guest of the Nnamdi Azikiwe University in Awka, Anambra State in South-East Nigeria, where she spoke at the 12th annual lecture in memory of the man after whom the university is named. It was also the 119th birthday of Nnamdi Benjamin Azikiwe, Nigeria’s founding […]
Continue ReadingIn July 1977, the Organisation of African Unity adopted a Convention for the Elimination of Mercenarism in Africa. It offered a definition of a mercenary to include someone who “is motivated to take part in hostilities essentially by the desire for private gain and in fact is promised by or on behalf of a party to the […]
Continue ReadingIn 1968, Stanislav Andrzejewski, the former Polish soldier and prisoner-of-war, who later founded the Sociology Department at the University of Reading in England, coined the word ‘kleptocracy”, which he defined as “a system of government [that] consists precisely of the practice of selling what the law forbids to sell.” He saw in the system of Nigeria’s First […]
Continue ReadingWhen Ogbonnaya Ukeje died in Lagos two days after Christmas Day in 1981, Bode Rhodes-Vivour was a 30-year-old lawyer making his way up the rungs of public service in the Ministry of Justice in Lagos State. Mr. Rhodes-Vivour had been called to the Nigerian Bar a mere six years earlier, in 1975. In 1989, when […]
Continue ReadingSince well before Nigeria’s return to elective governance in 1999, the country has been overtaken by a progressive escalation of what Hannah Arendt in her classic On Violence called “a massive intrusion of criminal violence into politics.” In contemporary Nigerianism, the word for this is “banditry”. “Bandits” is a conveniently capacious bogeyman for insecurity in Nigeria that precludes […]
Continue ReadingOn 31 December 1983, Sani Abacha, then an unknown Brigadier in the Nigerian Army, went on radio to announce the overthrow of the elected civilian administration of President Shehu Shagari, claiming that the military had done so “in the discharge of our national role as promoters and protectors of our national interest” because of “the great economic […]
Continue ReadingHaving gone to London to watch the crowning of England’s King Charles III earlier this month, a friend joked last week, President Muhammadu Buhari extended his stay so his dentist could crown his teeth. That was how he read the line from the presidency that the General Buhari had stayed back in London for a dental […]
Continue ReadingOn 17 August, 1980, the 6th Commonwealth Law Conference convened in Lagos, then capital of Nigeria. After the arrival courtesies were dispensed with, it fell upon Shehu Shagari, civilian president of Nigeria, then in office for ten-and-a-half months, to declare the conference open. The keynote speaker was Jeremiah Obafemi Awolowo, Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN) and leader of the […]
Continue ReadingEvidence of the scope of the mess created by Nigeria’s Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) under the crooked leadership of Mahmood Yakubu began to emerge this past week. It all suggests network egregiousness on a monumental scale that easily rivals the elections of 2007, until now seen as the nadir in Nigeria’s journey of elective […]
Continue ReadingThis week, the opening salvo will be fired to signal the onset of the final round of voting in Nigeria’s electoral marathon. This is not a reference to the state-level ballots that occurred around the country on Saturday, 18 March. I refer instead to something far more consequential. Democracy may be about choices and decisions […]
Continue ReadingDespite recent advances in Malawi and Zambia, elective government stutters and sputters to the uncertain rhythms of pathogens and politicians across Africa. The onset of 2022 served notice that #NigeriaDecides2023 is likely to be the most complex and most watched in a brutal biennium for elective governance in the continent. In Mali and Guinea, these uncertainties have produced […]
Continue ReadingNigeria first voted in presidential elections just over 43 years ago in October 1979. The introduction to this form of government was not very auspicious. Four years into the experience, in December 1983, Muhammadu Buhari, then a Major-General in the Nigerian Army, overthrew the system. Soldiers thereafter ran the barn for another 14 and a […]
Continue Reading“The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.” – William Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part 2, Act IV, Scene 2 Tamuno Igbikiberebima is an unlikely star in an action movie. He is a lawyer employed by Nigeria’s national hydro-carbons monopoly. On 17 December, 2020, Tamuno was at home in Rumuigbo, in Obio/Akpor Local Government Area (LGA) of Rivers […]
Continue Reading“Indeed, it can be claimed with a large measure of truth, that rigging of elections has become part of our political culture.” Report of the Judicial Commission of Inquiry into the Affairs of the Federal Electoral Commission (FEDECO), 1979-1983, Main Report, Paragraph 10:10 (1986) The electoral landslide of President Shehu Shagari’s National Party of Nigeria (NPN) […]
Continue ReadingDemocratic politics is by far the most brutal competitive sport invented. Unlike other sports where the combination of individual skill, perspiration, inspiration, and experience or team ethic can be dispositive, outcomes in politics can hinge on externalities unrelated to these, such as the security services, voters, the media, electoral management bodies or all of the […]
Continue ReadingThis past week, education came to a halt in Abuja, Nigeria’s Federal Capital Territory (FCT). It began with the order by the Minister of Education, Adamu Adamu, on July 25, closing down all six Federal Government Colleges (better known as Unity Schools) in the FCT, while the students were in the middle of their end of year examinations. […]
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