The way things are panning out, by the time President Bola Tinubu finishes his course, he will be competing with Mrs Malaprop in serial gaffes. Last week, again, he relapsed into his usual malapropism. At the breaking of fast with members of the House of Representatives at the Villa, he admitted that the “heat was high voltage from the critics” but he and his political party, the APC, eventually weathered the storm. While promising the parliamentarians a second term, subject to an agreement between the APC and the political parties the legislators belonged, he was emphatic that it would be to the exclusion of “the Biobaku party.” Everybody laughed. Someone at the gathering, in the din of grovelling laughter, could be heard wondering what the president meant again by this. What is the “Biobaku party”?

Mrs. Malaprop was a character in Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s 1775 play, The Rivals. Her name was derived from the French phrase mal à propos, which translates to “inappropriate”. In the play, Mrs. Malaprop was notorious for her frequent misspeaks which gave comic effect to the play. 

My childhood friend, Osasere Adagbonyin, gave me my first encounter with malapropism. In Ilesa, Osun State in 1984, shortly after we left high school, he recounted to me the story of a man whose wife was barren but who, in a bombast, and a total deflection from what he meant, upon meeting the doctor, said, “Dr., my wife is un-bear-able; she is in-conceive-able; she is impregnable!”

In the run-up to the 2023 elections, presidential candidate Bola Tinubu was embroiled in a dozen of such speech blunders. It was so bad that opposition political parties cheekily claimed his recurring faux pas indicated he was not mentally fit to administer Africa’s most populous nation. For a finicky people, unpretentious about their choices of sanity in leadership, Nigerians are consensus ad idem with the Òkò-Ìrèsé tribe. They would not want an embarrassment in the Aso Rock Villa.

Òkò-Ìrèsé are a sub-Yoruba group who can be found in Kwara and Oyo States. Oral history, as well as traditional accounts, attribute Òkò’s founding to a hunter prince who was in search of a fertile land. Late Ilorin bard, Odolaye Aremu, popularized Òkò-Ìrèsé people’s carefulness in choices, especially in their historical commercial activities of buying and selling of slaves. Their Oríkì, praise poetry, speaks to those finicky choices made by their forebears, especially their historically recognized meticulous nature in commercial slave sale and purchase transactions. At slave markets for human purchase, their forebears were picky, lest they purchase slovenly slaves who periodically decorated their cheeks with whitish, early morning caked saliva called lala. In chanting the Òkò-Ìrèsé’s Oríkì, Odolaye articulated those finicky and careful choices. They were “Oko Irese ọmọ wòyírà, kò má ba r’ẹrú k’ẹrú, ẹrú k’ẹrú abilala l’ẹnu…”

In January 2022, while addressing some market women who came visiting him, Tinubu announced to them that their Permanent Voter Card (PVC) had expired. “In case they do not announce to you on time, the PVC you have has expired,” he said. INEC had to promptly counter him, resulting in an apology by one of his aides. Again, in March of that year, during his 69th birthday colloquium celebrated in Kano, Tinubu urged Muhammadu Buhari’s Federal Government to recruit 50 million soldiers as booster for the security forces. The suggested recruits, he pontificated, “will eat cassava, àgbàda (real word in Yoruba for corn being àgbàdo) in the morning, yam in the afternoon…” 

As if it was one month, one gaffe, in April of same year, the then presidential aspirant then asked, “Do you know how many of you are tweeting on WhatsApp right now?” Then, on October 15, he said his ally-now-turned-political-foe, then Kaduna State governor, Nasir El Rufai, had “turned a rotten situation into a bad one.” By November 17, he had turned the confetti of gaffe into a way of life. On that day, at a town hall meeting he had in Imo State, Tinubu uttered the infamous doggerel, “Bala Blu, Blu, Bulaba”. Till today, no one can tell what it meant.

On November 25 of the year, eight days after the Imo indecipherable words, the blunder that came thereafter was utterly embarrassing. At Oporoza, Gbaramatu Kingdom, the presidential candidate said then Deputy Senate President, Ovie Omo-Agege, would be the next governor of the “Niger Delta” State. Tinubu then crowned his blistering gaffes at the October 17, 2022 Arewa Stakeholders meeting in Kaduna. Asked of his take on the global climate change by reporters, he said it “is a question of how do you prevent a church rat from eating a poisoned holy communion?”

Many of his supporters were worried. What could be the catalyst for these blunders? While some say it was a calculated attempt to paint himself as an underdog to be pitied and dissemble the ranks of the opposition. Tinubu’s erstwhile estranged deputy as Lagos governor, Femi Pedro, attributed the malaprops to “slips of tongue” which he said were buoyed by fatigue and high campaign pressure. Some also said that as a human being, Tinubu was prone to gaffes. On their face value, the gaffes are potentially fatal.

My initial comparison of Nigerian finicky choice of leadership with the Òkò-Ìrèsé sounds contradictory nevertheless. If they were finicky in their choices of leaders and abhorrent of a leader who constantly descended into malaprops, why did they choose Tinubu?

 At the time when, as presidential candidate, Tinubu offered Nigerians gaffes a la carte, the people were just emerging from similar malapropism afflictions under Buhari. The Daura-born ex-soldier sometimes waffled into nothingness, far away from the content of his engagements. You will recall that in October, 2016, on a visit to Germany, while he stood beside the world’s most powerful woman, Chancellor Angela Merkel, Buhari was asked by journalists to react to his wife, Aisha’s consistent harangue of his government. He had replied: “I don’t know which party my wife belongs to, but she belongs to my kitchen and my living room and za oza room.” If you watched the telecast of that event, fix your gaze at Merkel: She seemed to glare at this inappropriateness from a fellow world leader.

Many people have subjected President Tinubu’s “Biobaku” ad-lib statement to rigorous scrutiny. Their submission, parodying Ola Rotimi’s famous play, is that our president has gone Malapropos again. Three words appeared within the radar that Tinubu could probably be referencing. One is the name of famous pre-independence and post-independence scholar of history, Professor Saburi Oladeni Biobaku. The second he might have meant was “Àbíkú” and the third, “Abóbakú”. The three are Yoruba words. Whichever he meant, it was in bad light and as such, in searching for peripheral linkages to his mind construct among the three, our choice word must not convey positivity.

Professor  Biobaku, known for his rhythmic initials, SOB, the most famous bearer of that name the president referenced, evokes nostalgic, positive historical memory. A Nigerian scholar, historian, and politician who lived between 1918 and 2001, an ex-boy of Government College, Ibadan, was taught by Chief Obafemi Awolowo in his primary school days at the Ogbe Methodist Primary School, Abeokuta. He later became Awolowo’s Secretary of the Premier Executive Council (SPEC) in the Western Region. He was also the first African Registrar of the University of Ibadan. In fact, when Chief Obafemi Awolowo was to actualize his dream of bringing together the then fractious Yoruba people, Biobaku was one of the historians he consulted to establish the Yoruba language society. 

 The most famous story associated with Biobaku is the jostling for the Vice Chancellor position of the University of Lagos in 1965. Having earlier been appointed VC of the University of Zambia, he was dissuaded from accepting the offer by Nigeria’s Prime Minister Abubakar Tafawa Balewa and was instead offered the University of Lagos. It became a huge cauldron of inter-ethnic animosity between the Yoruba and Igbo. At this time, the animosity had reached feverish height.

Apart from campaign ground statements which he made that became instant headlines in the Sketch, Akintola’s visceral campaign against the Igbo involved pun-twisting the name of Ikejiani into a sarcastic Yoruba adaptation, so as to suit his pillory of the race. Akintola, reputed orator and very deep in Yoruba morphology, in this “ìkejì á ní” (second will have) punning, was wont to ask his audience, “The first (Igboman) would have, the second (Igboman) would have; what have you got?” This was used by him to underscore the nepotist character of not only Dr. Ikejiani, but the Igbo man. 

This inter-ethnic battle and allegations of tribal patronage in early Nigerian higher education was notorious in the 1965 battle for the Vice-Chancellorship of the University of Lagos. Playing on both professors’ names, Akintola was said to have told the university academic audience that “we said we would give you a man who would not die (Yoruba translation of Bíòbákú), yet you insisted that it is the man who eats the dead (Yoruba literal translation of Eni Ńjòkú) that you want!”

 On June 8, 1965, Biobaku, then newly appointed VC, was stabbed by a student, Kayode Adams. Adams was an old boy of Ibadan Grammar School. His appointment came at the cusp of non-renewal of the VC tenure of professor of Botany and first vice chancellor of the university, Eni Njoku. Not only was Njoku loved by the entire university, the school felt that Biobaku’s appointment was aimed at feathering Yoruba ethnic nest. The decision led to demonstration by students and request to the then Minister of Education, Chief Richard Akinjide, to rescind the decision. With the help of Chair of Council, Prof Horatio Oritsejolomi Thomas, Biobaku sneaked into the school. 

As narrated by Biobaku himself in his autobiography, When we were no longer young (1999), he was stabbed after his address to the students at Idi-Araba. Biobaku had earlier penned When we were young (1992). Though he later pleaded not guilty, citing insanity, Adams only suffered judicial retribution. This was because of the attempt to life he was charged with, in accordance with sections 229 and 230 of Criminal Procedure Act (CPA). None of his rioting colleagues was touched. The court confined him to the Yaba psychiatry but in October, 1969, Adams was found dead at the Bar Beach.

 So, was it Saburi Biobaku, that highly-placed scholar, one of Yoruba’s most highly placed icons, that Tinubu was referencing in that bad light? It was not likely.

 Could the president have meant the “Àbíkú party”? In poems written by two Nigerian literary prodigies, Wole Soyinka and John Pepper Clark, in their 1967 and 1965 poems, respectively, they explored the Yoruba concept of belief in a spirit child called Abiku. In Yoruba cosmological belief, that child is destined to die and get reborn repeatedly, as a plague to its mother.  Was this what the president meant? Have the “Àbíkú ” political parties become such a pest on the president? Was he interceding with them to retreat from haranguing him like J.P. Clark’s or daring them like Soyinka’s Abiku?

The third of what Tinubu could have meant was “Abóbakú,” also referred to as the Olókùn esin. Meaning, “he who dies with the king,” it is the relic of a practice in the old Oyo Empire. In it, an individual, most times the Aremo, the king’s eldest son, at his demise, was traditionally designated to accompany the monarch on a journey of no return by being buried alive with the Alaafin. The Abóbakú practice was formally halted around 1946, at the death of Alaafin Siyanbola Ladigbolu 1, who reigned from 1911 to 1944. As the Olókùn esin was about to be interred with Oba Siyanbola, the British Colonial Resident, Captain William Ross, intervened, forbidding the reluctant Abóbakú from being buried alive with him. A cow substitute was immediately and subsequently used for the rites. So, did Tinubu mean that the opposition were Abóbakús? Not likely.

Many have read the Tinubu “Bíòbákú party” comment to mean that he was mocking the coalition-backed ADC due to what he regards as its multiple personal interests. But this still does not answer to this particular “ç” word usage. I personally think something is wrong somewhere. It could be a throwback to an ancient Yoruba saying. When a plantain is ripening, it is doing one of two things. Transiting from its unalluring greenery into a beautiful, yellowish colour, the plantain is, at the same time, in preparation for a decay. When you then clap excitedly that the plantain is ripening, you are looking at it with myopia. My people then say, “Ógèdè ńbàjé, è l’ó ńpón”. It is the message of the Agidigbo drum. Only the wise dance to it and the scholarly understand it

The views expressed by contributors are strictly personal and not of Law & Society Magazine.

On August 2, 1100, England’s King William II went hunting in the New Forest in southern England. During the chase, an arrow shot at a stag by his companion, the Norman nobleman Walter Tirel struck an oak tree, ricocheted, and pierced the king’s chest. The king died right there. The spot where he fell is today marked by the Rufus Stone.

History records the episode as an accident. Yet the story has endured for nearly a thousand years as a powerful illustration of unintended consequences. An arrow meant for a stag struck a king instead.

And that is how events far away — sometimes aimed at something else entirely — end up wounding those who thought themselves safely out of range.

It offers a lesson for anyone in Nigeria who thinks a crisis anywhere, especially the ongoing war in Iran, is too far away to hurt them here.

The negation of a Yoruba proverb captures the inevitability of distant consequences: igi kìí dá l’óko k’ó pa ará ilé—a tree does not fall in the bush and kill the city dweller. Events rarely harm those who are truly untouched by them. But in an interconnected world defined by oil, the fall of a tree in the Gulf can shake the political ground in Abuja. The Yoruba also say the ceiling does not cave in and kill the wayfarer (Àjà kìí jìn kó pa èrò ònà). Again, this is working for Nigeria and Nigerians in the reverse.

Donald Trump started the war in Iran because he wanted (wants) a new regime there which will be answerable to him. The war will miss its intended target if history remains a faithful mocker of all-powerful men like Donald Trump. It may even do worse: and, it is already doing it on a global scale. In Nigeria, hundreds of miles away from Iran, personal wellbeing is being upended; family finances are facing ruins because of petrol and its combustible price.

Yet, it may get worse.

A classic warning from the cockpit captures Nigeria’s moment: “We are about to enter a zone of turbulence. Please fasten your seat belts and remain seated.”

The celts of thunder from the Middle East has reached every home. On Saturday, fuel queues returned to major cities in Nigeria. The Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited raised the pump price of petrol again—its second increase in four days. Iran is the culprit.

The widening crisis around the Strait of Hormuz may seem distant from Nigeria’s politics, but history teaches that events in the Persian Gulf often echo loudly in oil-producing states. When tension grips the Gulf and the shipping lanes tremble, the first reaction of the global market is almost instinctive: the price of crude rises.

And what I read is that global oil prices are rising. Brent and West Texas Intermediate climbed above $90 per barrel at the weekend. Ordinarily, Nigerians should celebrate this as good news, but because we are Nigerians, the development can only be celebrated with paradox and oxymoronic songs and dance steps. We sell yam and use the proceeds to buy pounded yam. We cannot profit from increased earnings from our labour tilling the land. NNPC read what I read of global oil price and its domestic petrol price moved from ₦960 to ₦967 per litre, and this was after an earlier jump from ₦875.

The tremor is getting stronger as the Iranian crisis worsens, and lengthens. Reports said on Sunday that across the country, filling stations quickly adjusted their meters. In parts of Southern Nigeria, petrol now sells for about ₦1,080 per litre. Earlier in the week, the Dangote Refinery also raised its gantry price. The cause is the same: higher crude costs driven by war shrieks in the Middle East.

Nigerians, like passengers in rough air, can only brace for rougher bumps ahead.

With spiked petrol prices, homes grappling with sick finances may soon gasp for life as cost of living takes a bash. And that should not be seen as a thief in the night. For a country like Nigeria, whose public finances lean heavily on petroleum exports, and imports, the political consequences of a shift in the price of the economy’s oxygen can be profound. And I can safely make a prediction: Even with a struggling opposition, oil prices abroad may become hostile votes at home in Nigeria. Whether as windfall or hardship, the Iranian crisis may yet tinker (or tamper) with the ballot boxes of Nigeria’s 2027 election.

I say so because where I come from, I grew up to know that afẹ́fẹ́ kìí fẹ́ kó má kan igi oko l’ára—the wind does not blow through the forest without touching the trees of the forest. And a strong wind that blows without ceasing will do more than touch the trees; it will break the branches of the strong and waste the fruits of the fruity.

So, if regime change is Trump’s primary goal in Iran, his arrow may miss the stag and hit kings in all countries where petrol is the giver of life.

I wrote last week that this war may be a long haul. It looks like I may be right. From a war of ego it is morphing into a war in defence of independence for Iran. Donald Trump has openly tied his offensive in Iran to regime change. In an interview with American news site, Axios, he suggested he should be involved in choosing Iran’s next leader. He said he wants “someone that will bring harmony and peace to Iran.”

Days after saying that, Trump doubled down. He loudly called on Iranians to overthrow their government, warning that the alternative is “absolutely guaranteed death.” On Truth Social, he declared that there will be no deal with Iran except “unconditional surrender.”

The irony is striking. During his 2016 campaign, Trump promised to end the American habit of remaking other nations. He vowed to “break the cycle of regime change” and abandon the reckless interventions of the past. In 2019, he repeated the pledge, declaring that America’s era of “never-ending war, regime change, and nation-building” was over and that the U.S. military was not meant to be “the policeman of the world.” Now, the man has become the ultimate kingmaker, and Inspector General of the world, and he flaunts it. What is the definition of discordance if this is not it?

In Venezuela, Trump abducted a president. In Iran, he killed the spiritual and political leader. After Venezuela and Iran, Trump has said he is “looking forward to a great change that will soon be coming to Cuba.” There was no diplomacy in his statement of objective: regime change. He said: “Cuba is at the end of the line. They’re very much at the end of the line. They have no money, they have no oil. They have a bad philosophy. They have a bad regime that’s been bad for a long time. Cuba is in its last moments of life as it was. It’ll have a great new life, but it’s in its last moments of life the way it is.”

The world president has said what he wants from, and with Cuba, and he may get it. But can he succeed with Iran? If he succeeds with Iran, what will be the definition of that success? Will he not be transiting from the house of disease to the home of death? How about a harder anti-American hardliner succeeding today’s unyielding theocrats?

What Trump’s current fixation risks illustrating is what sociologist Robert K. Merton famously described as the law of unintended consequences. Merton argued that political actions often produce outcomes their authors never anticipated. Literature in sociology reminds us that unintended consequences can be positive (unexpected benefits), negative (unplanned harm), or perverse (when an action makes the original problem worse). In Iran, the louder the external calls for regime change, the stronger the regime’s nationalist legitimacy may become. Trump has not benefited from the teachings of that law.

The more one reads Iran’s contemporary political history, the clearer it becomes why America remains a hard sell to large sections of the Iranian public.

It may be true that many Iranians see their regime as repressive, corrupt and unfeeling. Western television networks may keep showing crowds of Iranians cheering American and Israeli strikes against symbols of state power. But wars have their own logic. We have seen how the same conflict has produced a powerful backlash, especially after the mass killing of Iranian schoolgirls early in the fighting. Moments like that often awaken a deeper instinct: when a nation feels attacked from outside, even its fiercest internal critics may close ranks.

Deeper still on the regime change rhetoric of Trump is the question: can a nation whose political identity was forged in resistance to foreign domination truly have its leadership determined from abroad? History suggests the answer may expose the futility of Trump’s objective.

My point is that the US-Iran conflict is more structural and historical than religious. I cite an example. In 1962, the Iranian parliament passed a law granting law-breaking American expatriates living in Iran immunity from prosecution in Iranian courts. A young cleric, Ruhollah Khomeini, (who later became Ayatollah Ruholah Khomeini) reacted with fury. The cleric said, by that law, “If any of them (Americans) commits a crime in Iran, they are immune. If an American servant or cook terrorises your source of religious authority in the middle of the bazaar, the Iranian police do not have the right to stop him. The Iranian courts cannot put him on trial or interrogate him. He should go to America where the masters would decide what to do. . . .

We do not consider this government a government. These are traitors. They are traitors to the country.” Scholars J. S. Ismael and T. Y. Ismael, writing on ‘The Political Thought of Ayatollah Khomeini’ in June 1980, brought in the above lines and further observed that this confrontation helped transform clerical dissent into a wider nationalist resistance movement. It got worse such that by late 1970s, the outrage had matured into a powerful ideological narrative: that Iran must never again become subordinate to external powers. The reality of, and hatred for, American power already embedded in Iran’s political vocabulary crystalised into the action that birthed the 1979 revolution. I do not think that forty seven years after, historically proud Iranians would happily exchange the theocratic dictatorship of a home-bred Ayatollah for a contraption put together by an erratic, exploitative godfather reigning abroad.

This should not be too blurry for me to see, and cannot be too complex, knotty, for me to untie; history explains it: Because the present Iranian state was built on the rejection of foreign domination—especially American domination—external attempts since 1979 to reshape Iran have often reinforced the regime’s founding narrative rather than weakened it. Trump’s present intervention may simply allow the regime in Iran to present and entrench itself as a defender of Iran’s sovereignty against the banditry of outside manipulation.

In other words, Iran’s historical memory of humiliation means that Trump’s loud, lousy attempt to reshape the country in his own image may produce the opposite effect. A revolution born in resistance to foreign privilege rarely surrenders its autonomy to foreign proxies. The louder his calls for regime change, the stronger the regime’s ideological justification may become.

Back to Nigeria and its share of this problem. Non-partisan political economists will warn that if the exchange of bombs in Iran escalates further and the Gulf’s energy arteries remain constrained, if global shipping disruptions deepen and freight costs surge, inflation at home will worsen even as oil prices climb. The paradox would be bitter: our nation earns more from crude while its citizens struggle with higher prices of food, transport and medicine.

One article in the Financial Times yesterday said “oil market prepares for $100 a barrel as Middle East producers cut output.” Another published same day explained “why oil at $200 a barrel is no longer unthinkable.”

Put the mathematics of the two together and the answer is simple: global economic — and possibly political — turmoil. I pity Nigeria, and the Mr Jones of its animal farm who still believes the farm is insulated from the storm.

This is where politicians should worry. Elections are less than twelve months away. A hungry electorate can be costly to court — and even more expensive to buy. Keeping them is costlier still. Yet bribery does not always win. Robert C. Brooks’ The Nature of Political Corruption (1909) warned long ago about the limits and consequences of that path. Nigerian politicians, of course, are not strangers to Philip Nel’s provocative essay, ‘When Bribery Helps the Poor’. Their own takeaway from Nel, appears simpler: in Nigeria, bribery is “the only thing that works.” And indeed, on election day, it often does.

So, the government will continue doing what it does best: ignoring spiralling prices of petrol, etc, advertising dubious statistics as proof of a good life. But elections are rarely decided by macroeconomic indicators; they are decided by how daily life feels to the voter.

Still, politicians are incurable optimists. Even in violent turbulence, they insist the aircraft will land safely. Their counter-incantation in the storm comforts them: Ìjì kìí jà kó da omi inú àgbọn nù— no storm rages fiercely enough to spill the coconut water inside its shell.

They insist that elections are not decided by how daily life feels to the voter. They ask: in our country, is election not ultimately a matter of cash? What money cannot buy, more money will. One day, it just won’t.

That is why we say every action or inaction has consequences. Prebendal optimism has. What happened in the New Forest nine centuries ago reminds us that consequences rarely travel in straight lines. An arrow meant for a stag killed a king. In the same way, a war meant to reshape Iran may yet reshape politics in countries far beyond the Persian Gulf — and that includes Nigeria.

The views expressed by contributors are strictly personal and not of Law & Society Magazine.

By Chidi Anselm Odinkalu

“Judge not, that you be not judged. For with what judgment you judge, you will be judged….”

Bible, Matthew 7:1-2 (NKJV)

In the first six months of 1986, Nigeria’s Supreme Court delivered two judgments with far reaching consequences for the lives and careers of two senior judges of the High Court. If the facts were to recur today, forty years later, neither of these cases would come to trial. This fact says a lot about how the standards of judicial conduct and ethics as well as accountability for both have evolved – for worse – over the intervening period.

Donald Ikomi was a judge and Chairman of the Armed Robbery and Firearms Tribunal of Bendel State when – together with his cook, Reuben Udoh, and one Martins Ekezoka – he was arraigned in December 1985 on a charge of murder.

The case began on 5 July 1985, when Reuben Udoh discovered on the premises of 3 Obeahon Avenue in Benin GRA where Justice Ikomi lived, the remains of the Police Orderly to the judge, Uanlie Agbede. Parts of the body were missing. A post-mortem later revealed that the cause of death was “strangulation and excessive blood loss.”

At the time of the murder, Justice Ikomi was presiding over the trial of Kingsley Eweka, a member of the infamous robbery gang of Lawrence Anini. The coincidence was not immediately apparent to an undiscerning public, caught in the unusual maelstrom of a judge under suspicion for a heinous crime. In November 1985, citing a need “to uphold the dignity of the judiciary”, Ibrahim Babangida’s military regime relieved Justice Ikomi of his judicial appointment.

The following month, on 11 December 1985, the Attorney-General secured permission from the High Court for his trial to begin. In May 1986, the Supreme Court presided over by Anthony Aniagolu threw its not inconsiderable weight behind that decision.

Following a ten-day trial, on 15 July 1985, the High Court of Bendel State discharged and acquitted Justice Ikomi (and his co-defendants). His daughter, Timeyin Baiyekusi, would later reveal that her dad was framed by George Iyamu, a Deputy Superintendent of Police, who “had already succumbed to pressure from (Lawrence) Anini to help ‘kill’ the case (against Kingsley Eweka) in the armed robbery and firearms tribunal headed by Justice Ikomi.”

Earlier in January 1986, a full panel of the Supreme Court presided over by Chief Justice Ayo Irikefe, overturned the conviction of Paul Anyebe, a judge of the High Court of Benue State, on charges of illegal possession of firearms. Following his conviction by the lower court, the Advisory Judicial Committee (AJC), the predecessor to the National Judicial Council (NJC), had Justice Anyebe relieved of his judgeship. He was, however, reinstated after his acquittal, retiring thereafter as an honorable judge.

These two cases showcased the immense challenges associated with accountability for allegations of serious malfeasance against judges. On the positive side, justice was served. Justice Ikomi, in particular, received full exoneration and his family and children retrieved their name with pride and honour. However, his life was ransacked. Born on 14 September 1935, Donald Ikomi died on 11 January 1992. It is difficult not to believe that the circumstances surrounding his trial for murder that he did not commit assuredly contributed to his untimely death at the age of 56.

Both Justice Anyebe and Justice Ikomi had impeccable judicial reputations before their respective ordeals. Yet, rather remarkably, no one suggested then that their office, status, or reputations afforded them immunity against the charges.

In the past week, echoes of aspects of the controversy around accountability of judges in Nigeria have returned as the Code of Conduct Bureau has reportedly begun an investigation into asset declaration compliance by the serving Chief Judge of the Federal High Court, John Tsoho. This followed a report that he had “violated Nigeria’s Code of Conduct law by failing to declare some of his bank accounts in his asset declaration form.” The undeclared assets reportedly included accounts in different banks denominated in both the Naira and in foreign currencies.

Following upon this report, the President of the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA), Afam Osigwe, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN), reportedly wrote to the Chairman of the CCB to tell him that “the bureau lacked constitutional authority” to investigate John Tsoho.

Backing up their president, three branches of the NBA in Benue State followed up in similar language to assert immunity from investigation for John Tsoho, asserting that the CCB “lacks the constitutional authority to summon a sitting Chief Judge. It is settled law that only the National Judicial Council can investigate or discipline a serving judicial officer.” John Tsoho comes from Benue State.

Sadly, however, the claim that the NBA makes under guise of judicial and constitutional authority does not exist in Nigerian law. For clarity, three lines of cases emerged in the 20-year period from 2002 to 2022 to define the scope of law applicable to the accountability of judges in Nigeria.

First, in May 2002, the Supreme Court decided in a case initiated by Chief Gani Fawehinmi that although Governors as state chief executives were immune from legal process under the constitution, that did not preclude institutions of law enforcement from investigating them even while they were in office. In effect, assertions of immunity do not trump the power of investigation.

Second, ten years later, in April 2012, the Supreme Court decided in a case arising from the attempt by the governor and House of Assembly of Kwara State to strong-arm former state Chief Judge, Raliat Elelu-Habeeb, out of office that a Chief Judge could not be removed from office except upon the advice of the NJC.

Third, another ten years later, in May 2022, the same court decided in a case concerning Hyeladzira Nganjiwa, a judge of the Federal High Court, that a serving judge could not be prosecuted except upon a dispositive decision by the NJC. The decision in this case arose from the effort of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission to prosecute the judge on charges of money laundering, corruption, and perverting the cause of justice. The decision was controversial because an investigation committee of the NJC headed by a former Justice of the Supreme Court, Emmanuel Ayoola, had indeed found the judge guilty of serious infractions of the judicial Code of Conduct in 2019.

In raising concerns about the reports swirling around the Chief Judge of the Federal High Court, the NBA recalled the playbook leading to the unlawful removal from office of Chief Justice of Nigeria, Walter Onnoghen, in 2019. The removal of Chief Justice Onnoghen did not pretend, however, to have anything to do with law or legal process. It should not be repeated as a model for judicial accountability nor cited as reason for claims that have no basis in law or common sense.

Part 1(A) of Schedule III of Nigeria’s 1999 Constitution establishes the CCB and endows it with powers to, among other things, “receive complaints about non-compliance with or breach of the provisions of the Code of Conduct or any law in relation thereto, investigate the complaint and, where appropriate, refer such matters to the Code of Conduct Tribunal.” The NJC’s own judicial Code of Conduct requires judges to be “true and faithful to the Constitution and the Law”, while the constitution of the NBA requires it to promote the rule of law.

The position of a High Court judge is high constitutional office. The law requires occupants of the office to make asset disclosures and the constitution confers on the CCB an explicit mandate to investigate and verify such disclosures. The idea of an impunity carve-out for judicial officers from this power of investigation of the CCB is contrary to the constitution, the judicial Code of Conduct; and the NBA Constitution. It is thus clearly unsustainable.

If, however, the CCB’s investigation discloses serious infraction, the state of the law is that they should first file their findings by way of a complaint with the NJC for disciplinary action against any judge involved. That is the only way to balance the interests of the public, the judiciary, and individual judges in this complex landscape of shifting values in search of a judiciary worthy of the name.

A lawyer and a teacher, Odinkalu can be reached at [email protected]

The views expressed by contributors are strictly personal and not of Law & Society Magazine.

By Farooq A. Kperogi

I barely know Daniel Bwala. He came to the forefront of national media attention in 2022 because of his impassioned opposition to the choice of Kashim Shettima as Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s running mate. But beyond his public break from the APC, he came across to me as a voluble, ignorant and opportunistic careerist, not because of his stance on Tinubu’s choice of a Muslim running mate, but because of what struck me as his facileness and self-seeking obsessions.

His dramatic volte-face from being a virulent Tinubu critic to a fawning, vicious Tinubu battering ram has proven that my hunch about him was accurate.

Yet I felt sorry watching him eaten alive by Mehdi Hassan on Al Jazeera on Friday, March 6. He willingly participated in the detonation of what remained of his credibility before the world. In the process, he did incalculable reputational damage to the Tinubu government he is paid to protect.

What viewers saw on Mehdi Hasan’s Head to Head was the spectacle of a presidential spokesman arriving unarmed to a firefight he should have anticipated, then trying to fight back with nervous laughter, evasions, amnesia and the old Nigerian official fallback of whataboutery.

His evasiveness and prevarications were so unnervingly apparent that Hasan was compelled to say, “At the weekend, you put out a video to music of you and your team researching and prepping for this show and…now every time I ask you say you are not aware of that….what were you researching in that video…?”

The most striking thing about Bwala’s performance was not that he was challenged hard. Anyone who agrees to sit opposite Mehdi Hasan knows the interview will not be a tea party. The disgrace was that Bwala looked startled by facts he should have mastered before stepping into the studio.

On insecurity, on corruption, on Tinubu’s own words and even on his own prior statements, he oscillated between denial, deflection and the sort of desperate verbal stalling that makes a government look smaller than its critics claim it is.

The problem was not that Daniel Bwala appeared lazy or obviously unprepared. In fact, he looked prepared, even thoroughly rehearsed and robotic. He had the posture, the confidence and the choreographed mannerisms of a man who believed he had done his homework. But his carefully planned performances collapsed pitifully when they collided with Hasan’s hard, cold, indisputable facts.

Political wordplay can sometimes survive on friendly platforms or on Nigeria’s tame media spaces where assertion is mistaken for argument. It cannot survive a fact-driven, scorched-earthed, bare-knuckle, no-holds-barred interrogation. Facts are facts. And Mehdi Hasan is a man of facts. He has the rare gift of making heavy, devastating facts sound almost light in conversation. That quality made Bwala’s evasions even more painful to watch.

The exchange over “context” illustrated this perfectly. When confronted with evidence that insecurity had worsened under the current administration, Bwala retreated to the mantra that “context matters.” Yet the context he invoked was little more than semantic fog and intentional, self-impressed verbal obfuscation.

Hasan, by contrast, used numbers and reports that any government spokesman worth the title should already know. The moment became absurd when Bwala insisted that the context of worsening statistics was that things were not getting worse. The dialogue is worth reproducing:

Hasan: You are failing. Amnesty International says you are failing at security. The numbers don’t lie.

Bwala: It’s unfortunate and as a government working day and night that situation. I don’t agree to [sic] the fact that it’s getting worse.

Hasan: How can it not get worse if more people die in one year than the previous year?

Bwala: Context matters.

Hasan: What’s the context?

Bwala: The context is not getting worse.

Hasan: What!

Bwala: Yes.

Hasan: The context is not getting worse?

Bwala: The context is that it is not getting worse, because you, you see this is a water [sic], right?….

Forget, for now, Bwala’s inexcusably horrible grammar, especially for a lawyer, his tortured logic and his buffoonish articulation. That was some cringeworthy self-own.

The numbers he tried to wave away are not inventions of hostile foreigners with an anti-Nigerian agenda. Nigeria’s own National Human Rights Commission reported that at least 2,266 people were killed by bandits or insurgents in the first half of 2025 alone. Conflict monitoring groups have recorded even higher totals for the full year. Amnesty International has repeatedly warned that violence has intensified since Tinubu assumed office. In other words, Hasan’s central point was merely a summary of documented reality.

This is what made Bwala’s performance so damaging. He was not merely disputing interpretations. He was disputing arithmetic. When a spokesman tells the world that things are not getting worse while credible datasets show that they are, he is insulting the intelligence of everyone listening, especially Nigerians who bury the dead, pay ransoms, withdraw their children from schools and avoid highways after dark.

But the interview’s most morally satisfying feature was Hasan’s methodical dismantling of Bwala’s denials about his own past words. Bwala tried the trite and tired Nigerian political trick of pretending that statements made in opposition exist in a separate moral universe from statements made in office. Hasan did not let him get away with it.

Bwala denied on air having said Tinubu and his camp created a militia and threatened him. Yet those remarks were widely reported during the 2023 campaign. He also denied saying that bullion vans seen at Tinubu’s Bourdillon residence were ostensibly for vote buying, despite the fact that the comments were carried by multiple Nigerian outlets at the time. So, when Bwala asked who said such things, the answer was brutally simple. Daniel Bwala said them.

The same pattern appeared on corruption. Tinubu did in fact proclaim at a public event that Nigeria had “no more corruption,” a line that was widely reported and widely mocked and that proved Omoyele Sowore to call Tinubu a “criminal” for which he is being tried now. Bwala’s attempt to rescue the statement by retroactively inventing a narrower meaning was not the contextual clarification he wanted it to be. It was out-and-out mendacity.

On the appointment of Abubakar Bagudu as minister of budget and economic planning, Bwala again reached for evasion. Yet the record is clear that Bagudu returned about $163 million linked to the Abacha loot investigations in a settlement with authorities. Whether or not one calls that a conviction, the public controversy around his appointment cannot honestly be dismissed as drunken rumour.

Then there is the overarching irony that electrified the interview. Bwala was confronted with the fossil record of his own mouth. Before joining Tinubu’s camp, he publicly attacked the same man over allegations of corruption, the drug forfeiture case in the United States and the bullion van episode. What Hasan exposed was the speed with which partisan appetite can digest prior conviction and call the indigestion growth.

Bwala’s performance mattered for a reason larger than one man’s embarrassment. It showed in concentrated form the disease afflicting Nigerian political communication. Too many spokesmen believe their job is not to illuminate but to survive the segment. So, they deny what is documented, nervously laugh when cornered, compare Nigeria with unrelated countries, abuse the word “context” and hope that shamelessness can do the work preparation cannot.

Daniel Bwala went to London to defend the government. Instead, he displayed its worst habits: contempt for evidence, indifference to contradiction and the assumption that public memory is so short that a man can disown his own recorded words without consequence.

Mehdi Hasan did not disgrace him. Bwala did that himself. Hasan merely kept the receipts.

The views expressed by contributors are strictly personal and not of Law & Society Magazine.