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There is a particular cruelty in the corruption of justice in our dear country and I write about it here as someone who has had the opportunity of reporting the judiciary. You see, when a thief steals bread, the hunger is visible and the theft can be named. But when a court of law is purchased, or hijacked, by political power, the theft is invisible, the victim is everyone. Accept it or deny it, Nigeria today stands precisely at a precipice, staring into an abyss of a judicial capture that is so brazen, so structurally embedded, and so casually accepted that many Nigerians, have ceased to expect any objective good from the sacred temple of justice except the confirmation of whatever the ruling party had decided. This is not a magnification of an innocuous deed but a documented, observable, and deeply dangerous reality, which creates a leviathan that threatens the very foundations of the Nigerian state.
For the conscious, the most glaring symptom of this rot manifests in the phenomenon of conflicting judgements from courts of concurrent jurisdiction, particularly in electoral and political matters as well as the brazen disregard for judgements and orders of superior courts by the lower ones. In a functioning constitutional democracy, when two courts of the same level and standing deliver contradictory rulings on the same dispute, it represents a crisis of jurisprudence. Such crisis have sadly become a permanent feature of justice in Nigeria. We have seen candidates in intra-party elections declared both winners and losers by courts occupying the same rung of the judicial ladder. Party executives have been pronounced legitimate by one court and impostors by another. Now, we have heard the President of the Senate, Godswill Akpabio, tell senators that lost primary elections that they can still have their way. He did not whisper this. He spoke authoritatively from his seat as President of the Senate. Never mind the later denial. It was an afterthought.
When conflicting rulings consistently emerge along political fault lines, especially when the court favours the ruling party at critical moments, or, when an injunction that saves the preferred candidate always arrives before the one that would save his opponent, then, the reality is that the courts are in particular pockets. What the ordinary Nigerian reads in such contradictions is not the complexity of law as an ass, but a price list. The bench, in the lived experience of Nigerians, has become a marketplace. For them too, justice is allocated not by merit or evidence but by proximity to power and the depth of the wallet.
Independence of the judiciary is the oxygen of constitutional democracy. It is the guarantee that when a citizen is wronged by the state, od, by the powerful, there exists an impartial arbiter to whom they may appeal. And it must be consistent and constant. No prevarications. Once that guarantee is removed and the courthouse becomes an extension of a party’s secretariat, democracy itself becomes home movie off Nollywood where how the movie ends is known from the first minute. Lawyers who appear before certain courts know in advance how cases with political implications will be decided and SANs whisper what they dare not publish.
The ruling party’s grip on the judiciary did not descend from hades. It was cultivated, methodically and deliberately, through the strategic appointment of pliant judicial officers, the manipulation of postings and elevations, and the weaponisation of relevant judicial bodies as instruments of political gatekeeping. It also stems from the quiet understanding of what is expected of a judge who hopes to rise or survive in the system. These are often communicated through subtle persecution, reward, and threat.
What makes this development especially dangerous is what it does to truth. A society is built on shared acknowledgments of truth. For instance, a contract is binding because the law is consistent and reliable. However, when courts begin to manufacture facts by declaring that a candidate was qualified for an election when he manifestly was not, or that due process was followed when it transparently was not, they do not merely deliver a wrong verdict but outrightly destroy the very foundations of society. They make it impossible to know what is true. They ignore the fact that a society that cannot agree on what is true is a society sliding toward dissolution.
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When the judiciary acts this way, Nigerians resign to fate and wait for the worst. They lose faith in their country. They distrust the electoral commission. They refuse to trust the police. The judiciary ought to be last institution to have its credibility eroded. It ought to be a place where a Nigerian that is wronged should point to and say, at least there, perhaps, I may get justice. Sadly, the systematic politicisation of that institution does not merely snuff out that vestige of credibility but tells the people that there is nowhere left to go. In reality, citizens who believe that there is nowhere else to go within the system, do not quietly accept their dispossession. History, from across the African continent and beyond, is replete with terrible consistency about what happens next. We are living with a form of it.
Again, let me state this clearly, the ruling party is not the first to have attempted to pocket the judiciary. The temptation to control courts is as old as political power itself. But the current administration’s manipulative trait is particularly reckless because it occurs in a period of profound national fragility; at a time of economic desperation, religious and ethnic tensions, security collapse in multiple states, and a deep crisis of institutional legitimacy that have already weakened the social contract and dragged it to breaking point. To eclipse the judiciary in such a circumstance is to remove the last pillar of a house that is already sinking. It is like arson in a house where millions of people live.
But tomorrow will come. So, those who benefit from the trading of the bench should not think themselves as building anything durable. A judiciary that serves the ruling party today will serve the next ruling party tomorrow. The judges who perform today at the command of one patron will do the same with a new patron. The precedents being set, that courts may contradict each other without consequence, that judicial appointments are political transactions, that evidence is subordinate to instruction and technicality, will outlast the current beneficiaries and serve their successors. No captured judiciary remains eternally loyal to one master. A pliant judiciary is available to whoever holds power next in much the same way as a dog is loyal to the anyone that feeds it.
The bad side of this is that young Nigerians are watching. They are educated, connected, and increasingly disposed to the conclusion that the Nigerian state is irredeemably broken and that no path through its institutions leads anywhere except corruption and frustration. Every conflicting political judgement, every transparently partisan ruling, every election result manufactured in a courtroom rather than a polling booth, confirms this. This hardens the cynicism of young Nigerians and quickens the export of the most capable minds to countries where the rule of law is not negotiable. With this, Nigeria does not merely lose itself, it also loses the generation that would reform its institutions.
Time is now to reverse the trend. The reversal requires courage from the judiciary itself. It requires senior judges willing to speak to truth, dissent, and refuse to be items on the supermarket shelf. It requires a bar association that is willing to prosecute, not to tag along. It requires a civil society that is willing to stand firm, not to trade. Lastly, it requires a citizenry that is willing to hold complicit political actors to account at the ballot. Above all, the situation requires that the ruling class understands that the judiciary is not a resource to be mined. It is a foundation.
Those involved in this trade ought to know that a country that loses its courts does not simply become unjust. It becomes ungovernable. Nigeria, with over 200m people, cannot afford to become ungovernable. The pit into which the politicisation of the judiciary is dragging the country is the pit of state failure and of increased militarism. May be, of disintegration too. It is, therefore, trite to argue that justice is not only a moral ideal but a structural necessity. Without it, nothing else holds. Nigeria’s ruling class would do well to remember that those who trade the bench for political advantage are not merely corrupt. They are overtly dangerous. They are systematically dismantling the last pillar upon which the Nigerian project rests.
