Tag: Judges

 

*By Chidi Anselm Odinkalu*

Abdul Leigh Balogun became a judge of the High Court of Lagos State in 1976. In a career as a trial judge spanning 17 years and three different decades, the man better known as A.L.A.L Balogun earned a deserved reputation as one of the most knowledgeable trial judges of the Nigerian judiciary. His reputation for fairness was unquestioned. That ultimately saved his judicial career.

On 9 March 1979, Justice Balogun delivered judgment in a land matter originally filed in 1975, the year before he became a judge. His judgment decided the case against the original claimants. The following day, on 10 March, Abdul Balogun showed up at the law office of the counsel to the claimants. It was a Saturday. The claimants, who had lost the case, were in consultation with their lawyers when the judge visited.

During the visit, Justice Balogun invited the claimant’s lawyers to attend court the next working day. On Monday, 12 March 1979, the court proposed to hear submissions from lawyers as it considered the “recall” of its earlier judgment of 10 March to correct errors he had spotted in it.

On the appointed day, the lawyers for the claimants did not attend court. The defendants, who had won the case, were represented and addressed the court through their lawyers. The judge had also invited them.

Thereafter, Justice Balogun delivered a lengthy and well-researched judgment in which he claimed an inherent jurisdiction to correct errors he said he had identified in his original judgment, but his original verdict remained unchanged. So, in two separate judgments over two working days, the claimants lost twice. They had good reason to be irate.

The claimants appealed, asking the appellate courts to nullify both judgments of 9 and 12 March 1979 and order a retrial. When it decided the appeal seven years later on 17 June 1986, the Supreme Court was at pains to point out that the motive of the judge in this case was not bias, but what it called the “laudable aspiration” of perfection. However, the Supreme Court described the conduct of a judge choosing to go to the law office of counsel involved in litigation before him as both “reproachable and irregular”, noting that this caused “erosion of confidence in the judicial process.” The apex court warned that “a trial judge ought to know that he is on trial for any improper conduct during the trial of a case before him and immediately thereafter.”

In the judicial traditions of those days, the idea of extra-judicial mingling or intercourse between litigants or their counsel on the one hand and appellate judges on the other was unheard of. So, the court was content to confine its admonition to trial judges. Today, the ethics of judging in Nigeria appear to know of no such distinctions anymore.

Justice Balogun recovered from this case and went on to have a stellar career on the High Court of Lagos, from where he retired in 1993. He lived for another 20 years thereafter, before he died in August 2013. Six months before his death, in February 2013, the National Judicial Council (NJC) terminated the judicial career of Thomas Naron, a judge of the High Court of Plateau State, because  “there were constant and regular voice calls and exchange of mms and sms (text) messages between Hon. Justice Naron and one of the lead counsel for one of the parties to the suit in the Osun State Gubernatorial Election Tribunal, contrary to the Code of Conduct for Judicial Officers of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.”

In the wake of an unprecedented operation by the State Security Service (SSS) against some senior judges in the country in October 2016, a serving Justice of the Supreme Court, Inyang Okoro, was reported to have informed the then Chief Justice of Nigeria (CJN), Mahmud Mohammed, in February of the same year of a nocturnal visit to his home by the then-Transport Minister and former governor of Rivers State, Rotimi Amaechi.

During the visit, Mr Amaechi reportedly claimed that his party, the All-Progressives Congress (APC), had “mandated him to inform (the judge) that they must win their election appeals in Rivers State, Akwa Ibom and Abia State at all costs.” Mr Amaechi’s media spokespersons publicly denied these claims in colourful language. Despite the best efforts of civil society advocates to ensure a transparent investigation, the allegations appear to have been swept under the proverbial carpet.

The latest public disclosure of extra-judicial dalliance involving senior judges and litigants before them came last week from that most durable phenomenon in contemporary Kano politics, Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso.

In March 2019, the contest for the governor of Kano State pitted the then-incumbent, Abdullahi Gabduje of the APC, against Kwankwaso’s protégé, Abba Kabir Yusuf, of the Peoples’ Democratic Party (PDP). With about 100,000 votes left to harvest, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) declared the contest inconclusive. At that point, Yusuf was ahead with 26,655 votes.

When INEC concluded the supplementary vote, it awarded 45,876 votes to Ganduje and 10,239 votes to Yusuf, enabling it to declare the latter the loser with a margin of just 8,982 votes out of 2,242,396 votes cast. The contest ultimately ended in January 2020 when the Supreme Court affirmed Ganduje as duly elected.

In the wake of last week’s feckless embrace by Kabir Abba Yusuf of his former nemesis, Abdullahi Ganduje, a heartbroken Kwankwaso disclosed that in the struggle for what they believed to be their mandate in 2019, he went with Abba Yusuf “to the homes of all the Supreme Court judges in Nigeria to beg them…. in their villages and towns.”

Muhammad Dattijo, who memorably retired from the Supreme Court in 2023 and was on the Court in 2019, promptly issued a rebuttal challenging Kwankwaso’s claim and denying ever having met him or Abba Yusuf. He has also rightly challenged Kwankwaso to disclose the names of the Justices of the Supreme Court whom he claims to have met. The Supreme Court chooses to maintain eloquent silence on this matter.

Judges, according to the United Nations Basic Principles on the Independence of the Judiciary, “shall decide matters before them impartially, on the basis of facts and in accordance with the law, without any restrictions, improper influences, inducements, pressures, threats or interferences, direct or indirect, from any quarter or for any reason.”

In June 2023, Senator Adamu Bulkachuwa confessed on the floor of Nigeria’s Senate that indeed, some important cases may have been decided in the bedroom that he shared with his wife, Zainab, who was President of the Court of Appeal for over six years until 2020. It would be surprising if this species of concupiscent jurisprudence were exclusively brewed chez Bulkachuwa.

There was a time when this would have attracted consequences in Nigeria. But after a few news headlines, Adamu Bulkachuwa’s disclosures were buried in the sepulchre of the NJC’s complicit silence.

Forty years ago, the Supreme Court found that Justice Balogun’s quest for perfection mitigated his transgression. The erosion of public confidence in the judiciary, which the Supreme Court was conscious to safeguard against, has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Today, a predominant species of judicial vagabondage pursues perfidy.

The NJC’s own Judicial Code of Conduct indeed requires that “(a) Judge shall avoid developing excessively close relationships with frequent litigants – such as government ministers or their officials, municipal officials, and police prosecutors in any Court where the Judge often sits.”

In November 2023, the Chief Judge of the Federal High Court, John Tsoho, turned up in the office of the Minister of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), Nyesom Wike, to heartily congratulate the minister for his “bias” for judges and beg him to allocate choice land in Abuja to them. Apparently, no one informed the Chief Judge that his posture was injudiciously intimate or that Mr Wike was exactly what the Judicial Code of Conduct described as both a Minister and a “frequent litigant” before his court.

The norms of acceptable judicial conduct have been re-made. Yet many live in denial of the reality that, increasingly, cases before many courts in Nigeria are no longer decided in the courtrooms but in worshipful processions to the homes of the people we call “My Lord”.

 

(*A lawyer and a teacher, Odinkalu can be reached at chidi.odinkalu@tufts.edu*)

 

*By Chidi Anselm Odinkalu*

 

*If you wanna live* *- treat me good*
*If you wanna live, live*
*I beg you, treat me good*

*I’m like a walking razor*
*Don’t you watch my size*
*I’m dangerous…,*

*I’m like a walking razor*
*Don’t you watch my size*
*I’m dangerous, dangerous*

*-Peter Tosh, Steppin’ Razor (1977)*

Winston Hubert McIntosh, the Jamaican martial arts exponent better known by his stage name Peter Tosh, was one of the trio who, together with Robert Nesta (Bob) Marley and Neville Livingstone (Bunny Wailer), founded the legendary Reggae band, the Wailers, in 1963. By 1974, the group was all but dissipated. First Bob Marley and then Peter Tosh launched off into what would become epochal solo careers.

Their respective paths as solo artists telegraphed the ideological conflicts that ultimately sundered the Wailers. While Bob Marley’s music offered a medley of reconciliation, romance and regroup, Peter Tosh was muscular in protesting the injustices of his environment. His solo debut in 1976, which came out under the title “Legalize it”, was way ahead of its time in making the political and clinical case for the legalization of Marijuana.

The following year, in 1977, Peter Tosh’s second album, which came out under the title “Equal Rights”, was to become the anthem of an international movement for social justice whose birth coincided with the launch of the album. One of the tracks in this album was “Steppin’ Razor”, a perspicacious dirge of self-assertion which was to define his identity in life as well as his legacy upon his untimely killing ten years later in 1987.

Musicians, of course, have an entitlement to artistic licence in framing themselves in the public imagination, which is not necessarily available to other vocations. Forsaking the rules that control their own vocation, it now seems that some judges in Nigeria may prefer, like Peter Tosh, to exercise both artistic licence and faux testicularity in judicially inventing themselves as Mr Justice Steppin’ Razor.

In August 2023, for instance, Flora Azinge, a senior judge of the High Court of Delta State presiding over election petitions in Kano, north-west Nigeria, complained publicly for the second time in open court that “a senior member of the bar offered one of her staff a sum of 10 million Naira bribes for onward delivery to the panel.” On an earlier occasion, she claimed that an unnamed senior lawyer had asked her to provide him with her account for the transmission of a seasonal gift.

Preferring instead to flex her credentials as Madam Justice Steppin’ Razor, the judge was reported as having threatened that she “would no longer take any attempt to bribe judges, saying that attempts to pervert the cause of justice through the back door is not tenable in her court.” She did not say what she would be prepared to do or how many importunations it would take for her to do them.

In the court hall where the judge voiced these claims, there were lawyers present, but none had the courage or presence of mind to remind her that she had powers to deal summarily with the complaints that she raised or that by choosing not to exercise those and instead burying them in anonymous allegations, she was actively involved in bringing her judicial office into disrepute.

This past week, Polycarp Nwite, a judge, sitting in the Federal High Court in the Federal Capital Territory, Abuja, also chose to join the ranks of the judicial Steppin’ Razor, announcing that he is “dangerous”. This was in the adjourned hearing of the application for bail in the trial of former Attorney-General of the Federation, Abubakar Malami, his wife, and his son on charges of money laundering and aggravated pillage of Nigeria’s patrimony.

After granting the application of the accused for bail, the judge is reported to have launched into what can at best be described as a performance-enhanced monologue, suggesting that he had been importuned by some senior lawyers to compromise the case or to “go easy” on the accused: “When I am handling any case, please don’t approach me. When you are doing your case, you can get the best lawyers in this country to do your case, but don’t attempt to approach me for any help. I am not the type of judge. I know what God has done for me by giving me this job, and I have vowed to do it to the best of my ability. I have sworn before Almighty God and man that I am going to do my duty without fear or favour.” He added, with a touch of hyper-ventilation, that “any attempt to try this will be vehemently resisted.”

His audition for the position of Mr Justice Steppin’ Razor this time was a tad more pathetic than the earlier example. In one stroke, the judge undermined his claim that he is not the type of judge who can be influenced and made his promise of vehement resistance to such sound desperately shameful.

To understand why, it is relevant to recall that Nigeria’s Constitution makes it a human right that all courts must be “independent and impartial.” The Judicial Code of Conduct requires all judges to “preserve transparently, the integrity and respect for the independence of the Judiciary.” According to the United Nations Basic Principles on the Independence of the Judiciary, judges “shall decide matters before them impartially, based on facts and in accordance with the law, without any restrictions, improper influences, inducements, pressures, threats or interferences, direct or indirect, from any quarter or for any reason.”

It amounts to a perversion of the cause of justice to seek to influence a judge in the performance of his or her judicial functions. There are many options for dealing with this. One, the affected judge can report the matter to the police or to the Attorney-General for investigation and prosecution. Two, the affected judge is also endowed with powers to punish it summarily as an act of criminal contempt for which the guilty person may be sent to prison. Three, if the perpetrator is a lawyer, a public servant, or other regulated professional, the judge may additionally refer the conduct for disciplinary process before the mechanisms of professional sanction. Four, the judge could use his or her judicial bully pulpit for naming and shaming by inviting the perpetrator to allocute to, or admit the facts in open court and simply reprimand thereafter.

Our latest “Mr Justice Steppin’ Razor” is so endowed with courage that he managed in this case to not consider any of these options worthy of his exertions. Instead, he bloviated, threatened, and auditioned for the role of Steppin’ Razor, and became so dissipated by the colossal effort required that he could not even manage to name the person or persons to whom his threat or resistance was addressed.

On the whole, this shameful show was a squalid advertisement of judicial malpractice. A judge who finds himself or herself in a position to make the kind of public declamations that our latest Mr. Justice Steppin’ Razor made in court has two options: to disclose the identity of the perpetrators and subject them to sanction or to recuse himself or herself from further participation in the case.

However, in this present case of Malami et fils, the judge was unwilling or unable to muster either. Instead, he chose to threaten consequences for a future contingency whose occurrence, on the evidence of the current one, we are unlikely to ever hear of. The only thing the judge managed to accomplish in this case, therefore, was to publicly advertise his availability to be nobbled. Peter Tosh, the original Mr Steppin’ Razor, will suffer no fear that his title is about to be taken away. The most recent judicial candidate failed the audition hopelessly; it was not even close.

*(A lawyer and a teacher, Odinkalu can be reached at chidi.odinkalu@tufts.edu*)

 

By Abdul Mahmud

One month ago, in Abuja, a small circle of friends, literary enthusiasts, human rights activists, politicians, public intellectuals and thinkers gathered to listen to Chidi Odinkalu read from his latest offering, The Selectorate: When Judges Topple the People. It was a private reading, but the ideas Chidi graciously espoused belong in the public domain. They concern us, citizens of this ruined Republic.

Odinkalu is no stranger to judicial criticism. I have often described him both as a restless ruffler of the judicial nest and a flamethrower who scorches the dark recesses of our judicial quarters, casting light into corners long hidden from public view, so that citizens may, if only for a moment, glimpse the shadows that dwell within. Rightly so. He has spent the better part of his sterling career in the academe and public activism, exposing the inconsistencies, betrayals, and quiet capitulations of the judicial branch. But The Selectorate is more than a critique. It is a mirror, held up to a country whose judicial branch is in utter disrepute.

Odinkalu’s rendering is consistent with the Selectorate Theory popularised by Bueno de Mesquita, Alastair Smith, Randolph Siverson, and James Morrow in their landmark book, The Logic of Political Survival. They divide society into three groups: the nominal selectorate (everyone with formal rights to choose leaders), the real selectorate (those who actually vote or participate), and the essentials – the critical few without whom no leader can hold power.

In functioning democracies, the “essentials” are usually the voting public. In our case, Odinkalu argues that the courts have quietly taken over that role. The judges, especially those presiding over electoral disputes, now determine who governs. Not the people. This shift means power is no longer derived from the consent of the governed but from the decisions of judges that often defy logic or law.

Judges have become kings who sit on imperial thrones where they measure justice by the Shekels.

Odinkalu lays out his arguments methodically. He does not scream. He squares the bull’s eye and scores it well, without being vindictive. He lays accusations where he needs to. He illustrates. Case after case, election after election, state after state, Odinkalu shows how the judicial branch transformed itself into a class of The Selectorate.

Judges now act both as kings and kingmakers. They wield more influence than ballots. They decide on contests that citizens thought they had settled at the polling units. He advances the reason, among others, for this, or to put it more simply, he provides an account for the state of affairs, concluding: “This combination of factors was well suited to inspire the onset of a new trend in the cultivation of clientelist relationships between politicians and judicial officers underpinned by bargains, both implicit and sometimes explicit”.

Odinkalu’s position is not founded on legal abstractions. He excavates the upper crust of judicial adjudication with the dexterity of the Foucauldian archaeologist, seeking to uncover what lies beneath the surface of mere observations, thereby exposing bargains hidden by client relations.
What he exposes presents itself as the real, clear, present and growing danger to our democracy. But, there’s a point about hegemony and power to be made here, a point that he didn’t allude to, which underpin his arguments.

The Italian scholar, Antonio Gramsci, argued in his Prison Notebooks that power can be seized, constructed, and sustained through the subtle architecture of hegemony. He showed that ruling classes rule by force and also by manufacturing consent to legitimise its authority.

Once power is seized, it does not serve the common good, but answers only to those who possess and perpetuate it through dubious means, as the Selectorate Theory explains. The danger, again, is that the moral foundations of the state are hollowed out and the institutions of justice are reduced to performances for the powerful. It is through these dubious performances for the powerful that judicial hegemons have taken our country’s democracy.

Drawing from political science, constitutional law, and Nigeria’s political history, Odinkalu makes a powerful case for restraining the judicial branch instead of exalting it. His critique is interdisciplinary, and there lies its strength. He does not merely point out errors of law; he explains how those errors consolidate power in the hands of a few, and how that consolidation hollows out our Republic. He tells the truth, many dare not whisper that judges now select councillors, chairmen, governors, senators, representatives and presidents.

Nigeria’s citizens have been turned into mere subjects without the power to decide who represents them. Simply put, they have become a formality in the democratic rituals. They queue in the sun to vote, but the real verdict emerges later from obsequious courts and decisions delivered by judges who do not “act justly, love mercy, and walk humbly”, as Prophet Micah expressed in the Holy Book.

Odinkalu’s work strikes at the core of Nigeria’s political dysfunction. It speaks to the question of legitimacy.

A government chosen by judicial fiat is not a government of the people; It is a government of the court. He is not the first to observe this, but he may be the first to frame it so sharply and so brilliantly. By situating his analysis in the Selectorate Theory, he shows that the problem is not only corruption or incompetence. It is also structural and systemic. It is also about how political actors engineer political survival in Nigeria through the manipulation of legal instruments by counting judges among their favourites. In this way, the judges have also transformed themselves from kingmakers into kings.
This is not an attack on the judicial branch. It is a call to conscience. Judges are meant to be neutral arbiters.

In Odinkalu’s offering, too many have become embedded in the arena of electoral conflict.  They do not interpret the rules; they change them and enter forged scores on results sheets. They act as though democracy begins and ends in their courtrooms. While inside the arena of conflict, their roles aren’t about reviewing the actions of burglars of elections; it is simply about taking sides with election bandits and extending the geography of banditry and the boundaries of judicial conquest.

Odinkalu highlights the notion of “judicial essentials”: those judges whose decisions determine whether a political actor rises or falls. In a country where elections are frequently flawed and where the process is often tainted by violence and rigging, it is easy for judges to claim the role of final referee. But what happens when that referee takes sides? Odinkalu answers this with clarity.
Democracy collapses not with the squeal of “Fellow Nigerians”, martial music, and the bang of a coup, but with the gavel of a judge. Quietly. Slowly. Fatally. He does not argue that all judges are corrupt. Rather, he shows how a politicised judicial process invites corruption. When judges are seen as gatekeepers to power, the temptation to influence them becomes overwhelming.

The judiciary, once the last hope of the common man, has become a marketplace of elite bargains.

Some will say Odinkalu exaggerates, but the evidence says otherwise. He documents cases in which politicians whose names were not on the ballot ended up being our representatives – with help from the courts, of course. He documents cases in which political careers were extinguished, not by voters, but by panels of judges whose decisions stretched the limits of interpretation. Some of these rulings contradicted precedents. Others ignored the evidence. All of them had political consequences.

What makes The Selectorate compelling is that it does not end in despair. Odinkalu offers suggestions. He calls for transparency in the appointment and disciplinary processes for judges. He urges the Bar to be more assertive in defending judicial integrity. He wants the public to demand better. Most of all, he believes the judiciary must return to its proper role: interpreting the will of the people, not supplanting it. And the citizens must be at the heart of electoral disputes, as parties. It’s a tough ask in a country where institutions are routinely hijacked. But it is necessary.

As I listened to him read that Saturday, I was struck by his calm tone. There was no bitterness. Only resolve. He has written this book not to condemn, but to warn compatriots. He asks citizens to reckon with what the country has become and to confront how that becoming has trumped electoral justice. What was once a noble exercise of the power of choice at the ballot box has, in his offering, turned into absurdity. Here, power is no longer secured through the choices of citizens at the ballot box, but through the meticulous choreography of legal arguments staged not for the people, but for those robed in black who now hold the final say. The will of the electorate has been displaced by shenanigans, which play out in courtrooms that have become the true closets of judicial corruption.

Ours is a democracy where the people vote, but the judges choose.
It is easy to look away, and easier still to rationalise.

But the consequences are already here. Disillusionment. Voter apathy and Cynicism. When citizens no longer believe their votes count, democracy dies. Odinkalu is urging them to fight back, not with violence, but with vigilance. Not with slogans, but with civic courage.

The judicial branch is vital. Its independence must be protected. But that independence is meaningless if it is used to serve power instead of the citizens.

The Selectorate is not just a book about judges. It is about us: our passivity, our complicity, and our silence. It urges us to look at the judicial branch and ask, “Whose interests does it now serve?” In that question lies our fate, our country’s fate and the fate of democracy.

*A lawyer and a writer, Abdul Mahmud is the President of Public Interest Lawyers League (PILL)*

 

 

*By Chidi Anselm Odinkalu

FLOWERBUDNEWS:  When he was a Justice the Court of Appeal in the Port Harcourt Division, during the tenure of Mohammed Bello as Chief Justice of Nigeria (CJN) 1987-1995.

Alloysius Katsina-Alu was the subject of allegations of serious misconduct which ended up before the Advisory Judicial Committee (AJC), the predecessor to the National Judicial Council (NJC). Upon finding the allegations established, the AJC determined that Katsina-

Alu would be denied elevation beyond the Court of Appeal. Less than one decade later, he was a Justice of the Supreme Court. In 2009, he assumed the office of CJN.

On 30 April 2025, the NJC, this time under the leadership of a different CJN, announced that it would similarly ban from elevation for a period of five years, Inyang Ekwo, a judge of the Federal High Court in Abuja. Additionally, the Council decided to place him on a “watch list” for five years and to suspend him from judicial functions for one year.

According to the NJC, these measures became necessary because in a 2023 case, Inyang Ekwo “delivered a ruling in a pending application without hearing the parties” and “ignored an application to set aside the proceedings of the Court conducted in the absence of the parties.” These, the Council found, violate Rules 3.1 and 3.3 of the Revised Code of Conduct for Judicial Officers in Nigeria.

For the avoidance of doubt, Rule 3.1 of the Judicial Code of Conduct requires judges to be “true and faithful to the Constitution and the law and [to] uphold the course of justice….” Nigeria’s 1999 Constitution guarantees fair hearing in judicial and legal proceedings as a fundamental right. Accordingly, Rule 3.3 of the Judicial Code of Conduct requires all judges to ensure that they afford to all parties in proceedings before them a “full right to be heard according to law.”

A judge holds office under the constitution. Before assuming office, the judge publicly swears to an oath to uphold that constitution and to do justice to all persons in accordance with it. Put differently, Inyang Ekwo violated the most basic expectations entitlements of litigants before a court and a judge.

Inyang Ekwo became a lawyer in 1991 after graduating with a degree in law from University of Cross River State. After a career spent mostly on the staff of the Corporate Affairs Commission in Abuja, he was translated to the bench of the Federal High Court on 3 January, 2008. His path to this judicial sinecure was smoothed in no small measure by family networks which lock-in closely with the founding military administrator of the South-Eastern State (the legacy state of both Cross River and Akwa Ibom States).

By 2023 when the facts of his latest misconduct arose, Inyang Ekwo had been a judge for over 15 years. Judicial inexperience was not one of his liabilities.

The measures announced by the NJC against Inyang Ekwo this past week were the second in eleven months. On May 16 2024, the same NJC found the same Inyang Ekwo guilty of “abuse of discretionary power of a judge by wrongly granting an ex parte order.” He was therefore “barred from being elevated to a higher Bench for a period of two years.” That decision of the NJC had not spent its first year when they found the same judge guilty of even more egregious violations this time. This suggests that Inyang Ekwo is a compulsive recidivist in judicial misconduct. Even now, there remain other serious complaints against the same judge still under investigation with the NJC and many more pending questions to resolve.

First, it is not clear whether the Council reminded itself of the subsisting punishment when it decided on its dispositions in the latest one.

Second, if the NJC determined last year to preclude Inyang Ekwo from elevation for two years; and this year in another case to do the same thing for five years, are these to run concurrently or consecutively?

Third, it is not exactly clear what placing a judge on an NJC “watch-list” means or why anyone would consider the proposition anything other than absurd.

Fourth, what would it take to persuade the NJC that a person is too crooked for judicial office?

This last question is at the heart of the problem with what the NJC claims to have done in this latest instalment of a pattern of decision-making that enables judicial corruption instead of curbing it.

Inyang Ekwo was one of three judges suspended by the NJC this time. Jane Inyang (no relation of Inyang Ekwo) was appointed a Justice of the Court of Appeal in September 2023 after eight years as a Judge of the Federal High Court. According to the NJC, while a case was still pending before her at the Federal High Court, Jane Inyang “issued inappropriate ex parte orders for the sale of a petrol station and other businesses” in dispute in the case. This was the same kind of misconduct for which the Council issued Inyang Ekwo with a letter of caution in May 2024.

This time, however, the NJC decided to suspend Jane Inyang from judging for one year and without pay. Like Inyang Ekwo, she will also be denied elevation for five years. That means that after five years and with this record, she could find herself as a Justice of the Supreme Court. The fact that a judge with this kind of record was promoted to the Court of Appeal while the complaint against her misconduct was – in all likelihood – pending says all that anyone needs to know about the state of disrepute into which judicial appointments in Nigeria have fallen.

In the case of Aminu Baffa Aliyu, another judge of the Federal High Court to whom the NJC applied similar measures, the Council found that he unlawfully restrained the security services from performing their statutory functions and, even worse, effectively overruled the Supreme Court in order to do so. The NJC decided in addition to suspending him without pay for one year, to preclude him from elevation for three.

In August 2017, when the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime (UNODC) and the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) issued a joint report naming the Nigerian judiciary as “the second highest receiver of bribes in the Country” after the Nigeria Police Force (NPF), the NJC bristled, dismissing the conclusion as “not only subjective but speculative.”

The NPF is the oldest institution in the country and also the largest employer. A standard cover-up procedure in the Force is to transfer out of station officers against whom serious allegations of misconduct subsist, granting them a cooling off sabbatical during which they are reported as unaccounted for. A not-too-dis-similar practice occurred in parts of the Catholic Church in the past to cover-up for priests caught in allegations of clerical abuse.

Academics sometimes also take sabbaticals with or without pay to enable them recharge their intellectual batteries or pursue other interests for the advancement of knowledge.

These latest dispositions by the NJC are worse than slaps on the wrist of errant judges. Far from discouraging judicial misconduct, the Council consecrates a ninth Beatitude: blessed are the crooked judges for they shall be entitled to a sabbatical. Put differently, the NJC seeks the beatification of judicial corruption into high virtue for which recidivist judges like Inyang Ekwo or rampant ones like Jane Inyang receive a year-long sabbatical. Judges who prize fidelity to their judicial oaths must wonder why they bother.

This institutionalizes cover-up under cover of judicial ceremony. Two words describe what the NJC now does on judicial discipline: complicit scandal. It is a tendency that deserves close attention and study as a model of how the judiciary accomplishes its own evisceration.

(A lawyer and a teacher, Odinkalu can be reached at chidi.odinkalu@tufts.edu)