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As he settled in to deliver the judgment of the Edo State Governorship Election Petition Tribunal on 2 April, presiding judge, Wilfred Kpochi, felt obliged to get one ritual out of the way. Glancing left and right, he asked each of his two colleagues on the three-person tribunal to confirm that the judgment he was […]
Continue ReadingNuman, the town that lends its name to one of the 21 Local Government Areas in Adamawa State in north-east Nigeria, is home to the Bwatiye (Bachama), a transnational identity group stretching into parts of Cameroon. Located in the basin of Benue River and one of its tributaries, River Taraba, Numan’s fecund lands play host […]
Continue ReadingAs part of its golden jubilee, the University of Calabar is said to have held a special convocation ceremony on Saturday, 22 March, 2025 where it handed out honours to all manner of persons. The Chancellor of the University is Aminu Ado Bayero, the deposed Emir of Kano. Present at that event also were Nyesom […]
Continue ReadingThe 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 […]
Continue ReadingIn 1954 Sir John Verity lost his job because he won an argument. It was in his ninth year in office as Chief Justice of colonial Nigeria. Sir John arrived in Nigeria in October 1945 from the British Guyana, where he had served in a similar position since 1941. At the time, Nigeria was still a […]
Continue ReadingDepending on what view one takes of the matter, 10 February promises to be Proxy Wars Day at the Supreme Court of Nigeria in Abuja. On that day, a panel of five Justices of the Supreme Court will take arguments on seven appeals connected with the synthetic political crisis in Rivers State. The issues that the […]
Continue Reading57 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 […]
Continue ReadingBy the time Muhammadu Buhari ran for a second presidential term in 2019, it seemed clear that the judicial process in many parts of the country had been actively co-opted in the intimidation of civic opponents of the government, both real and imagined. The case of Steven Kefas was a defining moment in that process. […]
Continue ReadingIn 1991, Nigeria was in the full throes of the interminable transition to civil rule programme of General Ibrahim Babangida. The effort by the regime in 1991 to relocate their terminal date from 1992 to 1993 coincided with a planned meeting in Ibadan, South-West Nigeria, of the leadership of the National Association of Nigerian Students […]
Continue ReadingPaul 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 […]
Continue Reading“A Judge shall avoid developing excessively close relationship with frequent litigants – such as government ministers or their officials, municipal officials, police prosecutors in any Court where the Judge often sits, if such relationship could reasonably create an appearance of partiality.” Rule 2.8, Revised Code of Conduct for Judicial Officers in Nigeria (2016) Sylvanus Nsofor was […]
Continue ReadingIn 1982, on the foothills of the road to Nigeria’s 1983 general elections, it was quite clear that the ruling National Party of Nigeria (NPN) had no plans to declare a vacancy in any significant political office around the country. Instead, they seemed bent on consolidating power in order to avoid a remake of the […]
Continue ReadingOn 7 June 1911, the High Court of Australia decided a very interesting case. It arose from a publication issued two months earlier, on 7 April 1911, by a newspaper called The Mercury, published from Hobart, in Tasmania. Under the title “A Modest Judge,” the newspaper took aim at Mr Justice Higgins, a senior judge of the […]
Continue ReadingWhen Major-General Muhammadu Buhari overthrew the elected civilian administration of President Shehu Shagari on the last day of 1983, he inherited an economy in a mess and a political system in a turmoil. This crisis of a dysfunctional political economy was Buhari’s principal reason for sacking the Shagari administration. For Buhari, Nigeria’s crisis of balance […]
Continue ReadingAround 26 May 2020, the Police in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) announced that Raphael Yanyi, a senior judge, “had suffered a suspected heart attack” leading to his death. The Ministry of Justice quickly clarified, however, that the remains of the judge “did not exhibit any toxic substances.” Following an autopsy, Justice minister, Celestin Tunda […]
Continue ReadingAt the beginning of March 2020, Nigeria’s Supreme Court dismissed an application for the review of its seven-week old decision to judicially install Hope Uzodinma as the Governor of Imo State, citing as its main reason the need to preserve the authority and finality of decisions of the apex court. The court issued what appeared […]
Continue ReadingAt the end of July 2017, the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime (UNODC) and Nigeria’s National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) issued a joint report on the public experience of and response to bribery in Nigeria. Among its findings, the report ranked several institutions with reference to public perceptions or experience of demand for bribes from […]
Continue Reading“The judiciary has immense power. In the nature of things, judges cannot be democratically accountable for their decisions. It therefore matters very much that their role should be regarded as legitimate by the public at large.” — Jonathan Sumption, Law in a Time of Crisis, 121 (2021) FOR a cumulative period of 17 years between […]
Continue ReadingMuhammad Ali, the American boxing phenomenon whom the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) voted the Sports Personality of the 20th Century in 1999, often promoted the pugilistic enterprise in verse. When then ruler of the country formerly known as Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo), Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu wa za Banga, invited him to a […]
Continue ReadingMohammed Ladan Tsamiya probably believed he was a commodities trader who happened also to moonlight as a Justice of the Court of Appeal. To him, both vocations seemed to provide mutually reinforcing revenue streams. Sometimes, he transacted business as one, while doing the other. In keeping with this tendency, it was an unsuccessful transaction in […]
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