Nigeria and the hungry justice lights, by Chidi Odinkalu

As he settled to issue the sentence of the Court of Electoral Petitions of the State of the State Edo on April 2, 2025, the chaste judge, Wilfred Kpochi, felt obliged to remove a ritual. Getting left and right, he asked each of his two colleagues from the Court of three to confirm that the judgment he was about to give was unanimous. Judge KPochi continued only after each one, one on his left and the other on his right, nodded their statement.

The judge had good reasons for this preliminary ritual. 48 hours before it was due, a leaked document that claimed to be the judgment of the court went into circulation. Before the day of judgment, both the main parties of the electoral competition that had inexorably changed in a judicial – the Democratic Party of the peoples (PDP) and the all progressive Congress (APC) – they felt obliged to issue duel statements that denounced the loss and blamed the other. The APC said that “the PDP has leaked a false judgment, knowing that they would lose”, while the PDP “accused the APC of using the false document leak to evaluate the public reaction”.

The leaked document suggested that the Court would issue a divided verdict, with one of the three judges who would disagree with the majority of two who should have decided against the petition of the PDP and its candidate, Asue Ighodalo. When, therefore, the chair judge asked his colleagues to affirm that the judgment was unanimous, he tried to telegraph that the stories of the loss of their judgment were unfounded or, in any case, had mistakenly described the decision of the court. Instead of a divided decision suggested by the loss, this was a unanimous court.

This was far from the decision of an electoral petition court in Nigeria would have been prefigured by suggestions or accusations of a loss before its delivery.

At the beginning of the presidency in Nigeria in 1979, the race between Shehu Shagari of the Nigeria National Party (NPN) and Obafemi Awolowo of the Unity Party of Nigeria (UPN) ended before the presidential electoral court. On August 20, 1979, Obafemi Awolowo presented his petition against the declaration of Shehu Shagari as the winner of the elections. The following day, the military sovereign, General Olusgun Obasanjo, invited Aanda Fatayi Williams to the Dodan barracks (as he was called the government headquarters in Lagos) and offered him the office of Chief Justice of Nigeria (CJN).

Fatayi Williams’ first task was to judge the petition of the head Awolowo. The military had committed themselves to delivering power on October 1st, only 40 days later. General Obasanjo, who was supervising the agreements for a high -profile delivery to an elected successor, was anxious to know that the Supreme Court would not have torpedoed his plans. It was credibly suspected of having received the necessary insurance from his hand collected CJN long before the judgment.

In March 2008, Action Congress (AC), the party then led by Bola Ahmed Tinubu, vigorously supported that the result of the presidential electoral petition that contested the announcement of Umaru Musa Yar’adua of the PDP as the winner of the presidential elections of 2007, had been leaked. Lai Mohammed, the party spokesman at the time, denounced the loss, proclaiming that the judgment “would not resist the test of time”.

Fifteen years later, while the Presidential Petitions Court issued a 48-hour notice on the delivery of his sentence on September 4, 2023, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, a candidate for the APC, whose announcement on March 1 as winner of the presidential elections was under the challenge, he left for New Delhi, India, to attend the G-20 Summit. He arrived in India on September 5, the day before the sentence, ensuring that he would be out of the country when the court issued his judgment. Many people believed that Tinubu had traveled to India with the trust of a man who had been assured before the program of the result that the court would announce the day after he had landed in India.

If these accusations were true in any specific case it is a topic for another day. Far from decreasing over the years, however, the credible suspicions of violation of the deliberative confidentiality of the judicial decision -making process in electoral disputes and political cases in Nigeria have grown. They enjoy a high credibility with the public, an indication of a deep deficit of credibility that now clearly afflicts the business of what the judges are in political and electoral controversies in Nigeria.

In the session of various 9th Senate of June 2023, Adamu Bulkachuwa, Senator of Bauchi North, confirmed the suspicions of Dalciance inconcearly intimate between judges and politicians when he appreciated his colleagues “who (sic) came to me and sought my help when my wife was the president of the breeding court”. The senator Bulkachuwa did not forget to thank his wife “whose freedom and independence I invaded me while in office … it was very tolerant and accepted my invasion and extended his help to my colleagues”. His wife, Zainab, was president of the Court of Appeal from 2014 to 2020.

For insisting to attract attention to this type of criminal grass of judges, Nyesom Wike, minister of the territory of the federal capital who is also a member of the body of Bencher of Nigeria (Bob), he invited the greats of the Bob who visited him in his office at the end of last month to dispense with the basic banknotes and the “punishment”.

His 36 -minute hargia for the elderly and the women of Bob who were his guests, were occasionally punctuated by an enthusiastic applause that made a good average age of the group and the type of ridicule without mask that had to bear both for themselves and for the institutions of the judicial process in Nigeria. This courage from the leadership of the “corpus of self -excluded practitioners of the highest distinction in the legal profession in Nigeria”, hurts credibility and judicial independence.

Given that Mr. Wike was committed to advertising his undisputed contempt for them and telling the leaders of the legal profession of Nigeria who were not better than the prostitutes deodorrates with a swollen price tag, a lawyer who had spent his life to make a campaign against that trend had taken a typically without pretension leave.

Raised in Agbor, in the state of the delta, by a father who was a high school teacher of the state of imo, Joseph Otteh was one of the first two colleagues that I engaged in the legal direction of the organization for civil freedoms (CLO) in Lagos in 1991

In 1999, Joe founded the access of the group to justice “to work to reconstruct the institutional credibility of the Nigerian legal and judicial system, restoring public trust in its institutions”. He approached that task with courage and mentality, doing very well along the way.

Joe commissioned the lawyer as a gentleman and professional of civic virtue. On March 28, according to what reported, he sold to the complications from diabetes, leaving a mother, wife and three children behind.

Thirty years ago, in 1995, Joe wrote a distinctive study of the customary judicial system in the 17 states of southern Nigeria with the title “The hungry justice lights”. As a lawyer, Joseph Otteh made his best to ensure that those lights had been kept on fire. That title could only have come from a man who was very early on time and had the acuity of seeing the future. The skies will be enriched by the acquisition of this incredible angel.

● You can reach a lawyer and a teacher, Odinkalu [email protected]