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“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 […]
Continue Reading“Fools at the top would cause damage to any system not to talk of the fragile institutions of a fledgling democracy.” – Charles Archibong, A Stranger in Their Midst: A Memoir, 97 (2021) In the last week of April, Chief Justice of Nigeria (CJN) Olukayode Ariwoola co-convened and chaired a “National Summit on Justice” in Abuja, Nigeria’s […]
Continue ReadingIn 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 […]
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