Former President Olusegun Obasanjo declared that the judiciary in Nigeria is on a steep and steady decline as well as seriously and deeply compromised.
Obasanjo said that the greatest and worrisome fear of most well-meaning Nigerians and good friends of Nigeria is the fact that ‘justice’ is only available to the highest bidder, thereby creating despair, anarchy, and violence to substitute justice, order, and hope.
This was as he pointedly said that corruption among judges has turned Nigerian courts into “court of corruption rather than courts of justice”.
Obasanjo, who stated these in his new book, ‘Nigeria: Past and Future’, published by the Olusegun Obasanjo Presidential Library, stressed that the reputation of the Nigerian judiciary has steadily gone down from the four eras up till today.
In the words of Obasanjo; “The rapidity of the precipitous fall, particularly in the Fourth Republic, is lamentable. Justice had become commodified in Nigeria with dangerous consequences for the nation’s stability.
“I went to a state in the North about ten years after I left public office. Next to the government guest house was a line of six duplex buildings.
“The governor pointed to the buildings and stated that they belonged to a judge who put them up from the money he made from being the chairman of election tribunals,” he said.
The former president also accused the Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission, Prof Mahmood Yakubu, of undermining the country’s electoral process since 2015.
He further said; “No wonder, politicians do not put much confidence in an election which the INEC of Professor Mahmood Yakubu polluted and grossly undermined to make a charade”.
