“The judiciary exists to advance the public good, protect the rights of citizens, and uphold the rule of law. Not to provide cover for the ambitions of a political class that has largely exhausted its claim to public trust”.
BY OLUSEGUN ADENIYI
I am not much into movies but there are some I can watch numerous times without being bored. Two stand out: ‘The Godfather’ and ‘Titanic’. In the latter, the scene I consider most memorable is where the captain informs the ship owner that they had hit an iceberg. “From this moment, no matter what we do, the Titanic will founder,” the captain said rather solemnly. But the message was lost on the ship owner. Having put so much faith in his own propaganda, he retorted: “But this ship cannot sink.” Without missing a beat, the captain responded: “She is made of iron, Sir. I assure you she can. And she will. It is a mathematical certainty.”
I recall the foregoing as a warning against the background of the shenanigans that daily emerge from our courts. If Nigerians come to regard the judiciary as an extension of the political arena and the institution loses its credibility in the process, then we shall have arrived at a destination from which there is no easy return. That destination is anarchy.
I have written several columns about the corrosive effects of this state of affairs and the danger posed by some Judges
http://www.thisdaylive.com/index.php/2018/01/04/when-judges-imperil-democracy/. But what is unfolding across our judiciary right now deserves special attention, because it threatens the very foundation upon which our democracy rests. Ordinarily, the law court should stand as the ultimate guardian of the rule of law. But in Nigeria today, the law court is fast becoming a convenient tool in the hands of desperate politicians who are ever out to secure an advantage, however unjust.
When Nigerian politicians go to court these days, they do not file suits to seek justice. They file them to create confusion, buy time, destabilise opponents, and manufacture legitimacy through judicial pronouncement rather than popular mandate. Forum shopping, the practice of filing identical or related cases in different courts to secure a favourable ruling, has become so routine that it barely raises eyebrows. Yet when courts of coordinate jurisdiction issue contradictory orders on the same matter, as has happened repeatedly in the crises engulfing the African Democratic Congress (ADC), Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and Labour Party (LP), citizens are left unsure as to which faction to recognize and what authority to respect. This is the raw material for anarchy.
In the past few weeks alone, many of our political parties have been reduced to courtroom exhibits. Their internal affairs have been litigated with such frequency and ferocity that politicians now spend more time before judges than before voters. For instance, the ADC has been trapped in a carousel of conflicting court orders over its leadership since the moment former Senate President David Mark assumed the party’s chairmanship. One court says Mark is in charge; another says he is not. The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has swung like a pendulum, removing names from its portal one week and restoring them the next, all in obedience to whichever judicial directive happens to be most recent.
Section 83 of the Electoral Act 2026 was supposed to address at least part of this problem. It stipulates, in clear terms, that “no court in Nigeria shall entertain jurisdiction over any suit or matter pertaining to the internal affairs of a political party.” The provision was designed precisely to prevent the kind of judicial overreach we are witnessing. Yet barely months after the law’s passage, courts are already entertaining suits that plainly fall within the prohibition. Lawyers are filing them. Judges are granting them. And the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA), which should be the profession’s conscience, has been left to issue statements that carry moral authority but no enforcement power.
In a most recent decision, the Supreme Court attempted to draw a principled line: Courts should generally refrain from interfering in internal party affairs. But with a proviso: Intervention is justified where the dispute involves legal rights arising from statutory compliance. That is a reasonable distinction in theory. In practice, however, it has become a loophole through which every ambitious politician drives a convoy of suits. Any dispute, however, trivially internal, can be dressed up as a question of statutory compliance or constitutional interpretation. And once the suit is filed, the damage is done. Interim orders are sought, parallel proceedings are initiated, and the party in question is thrown into paralysis.
What we are witnessing in Nigeria today has been aptly described as a shift from “ballot democracy” to “bench democracy”—a situation in which political outcomes are increasingly determined not by the votes of citizens but by the rulings of judges, often procured through dubious means. This is dangerous for reasons that go beyond the immediate chaos it produces. When elections can be overturned, party structures dismantled, and leadership installed through litigation rather than a democratic process, voters lose faith in the entire system. If your vote can be negated by a court order secured in a jurisdiction you have never heard of, by a litigant you have never met, why bother voting at all? This is how democracies die, through the slow, deliberate hollowing out of institutions by the very elites who swear to uphold them. Some of us have watched this movie before.
Considering that we live in a country where collective amnesia has become an ideology, let me offer a refresher here. Although Nigerians believed at the time (and rightly so) that General Ibrahim Babangida was only looking for a convenient excuse by blaming the judiciary for the presidential election annulment 33 years ago, many observers also knew he had a point. I once shared my experience of what happened on 16th June 1993 and its worth rehashing. On that day, I was at the defunct National Electoral Commission (NEC) headquarters in Abuja with Mr. Sam Omatseye—then at Concord Press but now Chairman of The Nation’s editorial Board. It was Omatseye’s birthday and we were in a very buoyant mood as the results of the presidential election were coming in with our boss, the late Bashorun M.K.O. Abiola, leading by a comfortable margin. Then we got a shocker: The NEC Chairman, Professor Humphrey Nwosu announced the suspension of the results in difference to an injunction from an Abuja High Court.
With this development, I quickly rushed to the office to call the Social Democratic Party (SDP) Presidential running mate, Ambassador Babagana Kingibe, who had asked me to provide him updates regarding the official results. When I told him that NEC had just issued a statement suspending the result, he asked that I come to Transcorp (then NICON-NOGA) Hilton where I met him with a number of SDP Governors. Immediately I handed the statement to Kingibe, one of the governors put a call to an official in his state whom he directed to go and meet a particular Judge: “Tell him to give you an injunction compelling NEC to release the result. Once you have the paper, call me.”
Hardly had this particular governor concluded his ‘business’ when his colleagues took a cue as they also called officials in their states to secure court injunctions. Each had the name of a specific judge to meet. By nightfall, there were as many as four court injunctions from different states—all compelling NEC to continue to announce the presidential results. Even though I was not a lawyer (I am still not one), I knew what was happening could not be right but as to be expected, the media celebrated the several injunctions compelling Nwosu’s NEC to release the results while excoriating the late Justice Bassey Ikpeme for her equally dubious injunction.
Whenever I reflect on what happened that day, I marvel at the way we find it convenient to rationalise, even justify, the wrongs that align with our expectations. There is a reason the courts are called “the temple of justice.” Temples are sacred spaces. They are not (or at least should not be) marketplaces where power is bartered. When Judges trade injunctions the way hungry lecturers trade ‘handouts’, as I once surmised, society is endangered. And when politicians turn the court of law into a commercial centre, it is profaned, and with it, the very idea of justice.
The judiciary exists to advance the public good, protect the rights of citizens, and uphold the rule of law. Not to provide cover for the ambitions of a political class that has largely exhausted its claim to public trust. If we cannot restore this understanding, and the courts continue to be weaponised by those who should be restrained by them, we are building a house on sand. And when the rains come, as they inevitably will, we shall have no shelter.
…You can follow me on my X (formerly Twitter) handle, @Olusegunverdict and on www.olusegunadeniyi.com.
