By Chidi Anselm Odinkalu
Nigeria has been blessed over the years with a rich supply of towering judicial intellect. The second Chief Justice of post-colonial Nigeria, Taslim Olawale Elias, for instance, was the country’s first law professor. In 1949, he became the first African to take a PhD in law from the University of London. That was five years after his contemporary at the Supreme Court of Nigeria and first African Chief Justice of post-colonial Uganda, Egbert Udo Udoma, became one of the first Africans to take a PhD from Oxford University.
Taslim Elias and Egbert Udo Udoma did not have a monopoly on rarefied qualifications in the annals of the Nigerian judiciary. George Baptist Ayodola (GBA) Coker, who also ended up at the Supreme Court, received his PhD from the University of London in 1955. Eleven years later, in 1966, Augustine Nnamani received his doctorate in law from the London School of Economics. His career in the law would take him from the chambers of the Attorney-General of the Federation to the bench of the Supreme Court, where he served with distinction.
Chief Justice Elias is not the only academic of note or law professor to have sat at the highest levels of Nigeria’s judiciary. Adolphus Karibi-Whyte, who retired as a senior Justice of the Supreme Court, began his judicial career as an academic at the University of Lagos. Okay Achike was a professor of public law at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. Niki Tobi, another notable former Justice of the same court, was Dean of the Faculty of Law at the University of Maiduguri.
These were by no means the only teachers ever to serve at the highest levels of Nigeria’s judiciary. At the Supreme Court, Karibi-Whyte found himself senior to Chukwudifu Oputa, one of the most celebrated judicial careers ever produced by the country, who was his teacher in high school.
These extraordinary judicial careers decorate Nigeria’s law reports with timeless precedents. Despite the durability of their decisions and the coherence of their reasoning, none of their judicial figures managed to earn a brand as such.
In the firmament of Nigeria’s judicial careers, therefore, there has existed for a long time this lingering vacuum of a coherent judicial brand in need of a name. One man changed that.
Born in 1965 in Okpoma, Yala Local Government Area of Cross River State, Peter Lifu became a lawyer in 1990, the same year that Augustine Nnamani died. Two years later, Lifu was his own boss, running his own private law office in Ibadan, the capital of Oyo State. From the famous university located in the same city, he later received two graduate degrees, respectively, in political science and law. Lifu would later join the faculty of law at the same university, specializing in public and international laws. In 2013, he began his judicial career as a judge of the National Industrial Court of Nigeria (NICN). Two years later, in 2015, he became a judge of the Federal High Court.
On the bench of the Federal High Court, Lifu was set up in a courtroom located at an “uncomfortable intersection between law, politics, and (adverse) public perception.” As if connected to a peculiar judicial magnet, he established a reputation for attracting cases with the most exciting political flavour. Lifu quickly made a name for himself as a judge whom the ruling party and allied interests could depend on.
When a faction of a political party goes shopping for a court order to short-circuit party governance, they usually find a ready mall in his courtroom.
When a politician is looking for a judge to kneecap his opponent under a ruse of law, Lifu’s court is likely to be their forum of choice.
How these cases manage with such predictability and effortlessness to end up on his docket must be down to a judicial code shared exclusively between him and the Chief Judge of the Federal High Court.
In a career spanning 13 years on the bench, Lifu has become one of the most discussed judges in Nigeria’s recent judicial history”, no mean achievement for a serving judge in the lower reaches of the judicial hierarchy. He has achieved this on the back of a reputation for what has been described as “a worrying willingness to disregard the very constitutional guardrails that hold our democracy together.”
Lifu’s brand of judicial decision-making seems to be protected by a variety of clientelist practices that cloak a total disregard for guardrails and the impunity reserved for organised crime captains. As a recognisable brand, there is only one name for this: Lifusprudence, which is not a science. In many ways, it is everything that judicial decision-making should not be. It is transparently predictable, purchasable, and predetermined.
The country got a clinical demonstration of the capabilities of Lifusprudence recently in a rather disturbing case seeking to de-register five political parties. Section 225A of Nigeria’s constitution grants the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) “power to de-register a political party.” It does not place it under a duty to do so. This distinction between power and statutory duty should be easily clear to any judge. Apparently, Peter Lifu did not get the memo.
On 15 June, he ordered INEC to de-register the parties. To achieve this result, the judge did something remarkable. He re-drafted the Nigerian constitution. Under section 225A, INEC can de-register a political party that fails to win a certain minimum of seats in various elections or fails to meet other registration requirements. In this case, the claim was that the parties involved had failed to achieve the minimum threshold of seats in elections. But the evidence before the court showed conclusively that the parties had in fact crossed the constitutional thresholds of electoral performance. It was also in evidence that many of those who won seats on the platform of the parties had subsequently defected to the ruling party. Lifu’s response? “Section 225A contemplates those who won and remain and not those who carried their mandate to another political party.”
There was no authority for this proposition – not logic; not precedent; not the text of the Constitution.
This was a casual judicial invention for a predetermined end. On its face, the judgment was a model of Lifusprudence – corrupt, convenient, and casuistic.
The only rationale hidden in his 103-page text was the wondrous assertion that “proliferation of political parties… should be discouraged.” Even this line runs contrary to existing jurisprudence.
Lifusprudence is uniquely supreme in its design and trajectory. It does not reckon with even the discipline of judicial hierarchies or precedent. Twenty-five days before the judgment, on 22 May 2026, the Court of Appeal in Abuja had issued an order “staying further proceedings” in the case before Peter Lifu. But in his judgment, Lifu reduced this to “arrest of judgment” and claimed that “the rules of court do not have provision for arrest of judgment.” However, the terms of the order by the Court of Appeal were clear: they had ordered a stay of proceedings. In Lifu’s head and for his purpose, judgment is not part of the proceedings.
The Court of Appeal was constrained to describe Lifu’s conduct as “the highest form of judicial impertinence,” and “a misfit to the bench.” A writer called him an “embarrassment” to the judiciary, while Columnist Owei Lakemfa called him the author of “anarchism in judicial robes.” Some major newspapers joined the Court of Appeal in calling Peter Lifu a “judicial rascal”.
The suggestion of mischief or cheekiness implicit in the use of “judicial rascal” to describe Peter Lifu misunderstands and misrepresents Lifusprudence, which is the dark art of taking the prudence out of the science of law. It is underpinned by casual willfulness under the colour of judicial pronouncement. That is what makes it so dangerous because although it reads as law, Lifusprudence is actually network crime. The surprise is that it has acquired a distinct identity in a system that should exist to suppress it. Now, as the country gets ready for elections, it is the season for Lifusprudence to thrive and revel in the joint enterprise between politicians and Lifu, their judicial hit-man.
(*A lawyer and a teacher, Prof. Odinkalu can be reached at chidi.odinkalu@tufts.edu)
