By Dr. Tonye Clinton Jaja

Vicarious Liability is defined as follows:

“Vicarious liability, also known as imputed liability, is a legal doctrine where one party (often an employer) is held responsible for the actions or omissions of another party (often an employee or agent) with whom they have a specific relationship, even if the first party is not personally at fault.”

From the foregoing definition, a major pre-condition before application of the law of vicarious liability, is that there must be established a prior”specific relationship” between parties!!!

In this regard, President Tinubu and the Attorney-General of the Federation (AGF) failed to establish that Governor Fubara maintained any prior specific relationship with the said militants who ALLEGEDLY blew up crude oil pipelines which served as justification for declaration of a State of Emergency in Rivers State on 18th March 2025.

To the contrary, by virtue of Section 3 of the Nigerian Security and Civil Defence Corps Act, 2007, it is the responsibility of the Nigerian Security and Civil Defence Corps to protect and prevent vandalism of all crude oil pipelines anywhere within Nigeria.

Considering that the Commandant-General of the said Nigerian Security and Civil Defence Corps is a direct appointee of the President, it logically follows that the ultimate responsibility for protection of the said crude oil pipelines rests squarely with the President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.

Therefore, if anyone was to be penalised for dereliction of duty it is President Bola Ahmed Tinubu (PBAT).

In contrast with the alacrity with which PBAT imposed penalties upon Governor Fubara in the name of application of the law of vicarious liability, some weeks ago, Boko Haram terrorists attacked a Nigerian Army base in Borno State and vandalised their facilities as well as killing soldiers. Till today, the PBAT has not imposed penalties upon the Governor of Borno State.

On 16th of March 2025 or thereabouts, some officials of the Edo State owned and established Edo State Security Corps and Vigilante Group (and others) were involved in the killing and setting ablaze of 16 hunters who were traveling from Port Harcourt to Kano State!!!

Up till today, PBAT and the AGF have not imposed any penalties upon the Governor of Edo State for the vicarious liability of the said officials of the Edo State Security Corps and Vigilante Group!!!

On 13th January 2025, the Governor of Lagos State sponsored the impeachment and removal of Mr. Obasa, who is the Speaker of the Lagos State House of Assembly.

This singular action triggered a series of insecurity, unrest, actual breach and threat to the public peace such as the invasion of the premises of the Lagos State House of Assembly by both militant thugs, and policemen and officials of the Department of State Security Services (DSS).

Till today neither the PBAT or the AGF has imposed any sort of penalty upon the Governor of Lagos State under the guise of vicarious liability!!!

During the month of February 2025, some members of the Benue State House of Assembly ALLEGEDLY deployed unconstitutional methods to impeach and remove from office the Chief Judge of Benue State (without any input from the National Judicial Council-NJC)!!!

Up until today PBAT has not suspended the members of the Benue State House of Assembly who applied unconstitutional methods to prevent the functioning of the chief official of another arm of government namely the judiciary!!!

In contrast, one of the grounds for suspension of Governor Fubara is the allegation by both the Supreme Court of Nigeria’s judgment of 28th February 2025 and the PBAT and the AGF, that he prevented the functioning of another arm of government namely the legislature (Rivers State House of Assembly)!!!

In the case of the Lagos State House of Assembly, instead of declaration of a State of Emergency in Lagos State, PBAT explored and exhausted all amicable informal and formal methods to resolve the said dispute between the Governor of Lagos State and members of the Lagos State House of Assembly.

The first step was to convene meetings of all the warring parties with the Lagos State Governor’s Advisory Council (GAC).

When this failed, the PBAT took the second step of appointment of two former Governors to hold series of meetings with all members of the warring parties.

The outcome of this meeting with the two former Governors was submitted to the President.

Then finally, at his Aso Rock villain Abuja, the President himself held a meeting with all the warring parties wherein a Resolution was agreed.

Why were similar steps not applied in the case of Governor Fubara?

This is a question that plagues the minds of all reasonable right-thinking Nigerians!!!

By Chidi Anselm Odinkalu

As he settled in to deliver the judgment of the Edo State Governorship Election Petition Tribunal on 2 April 2025, presiding judge Wilfred Kpochi felt obliged to get one ritual out of the way. Glancing left and right, he asked each of his two colleagues on the three-person tribunal to confirm that the judgment he was about to deliver was unanimous. Justice Kpochi only proceeded after each, one to his left and the other to his right, nodded their affirmation.

The judge had good reason for this preliminary ritual. 48 hours before it was due, a leaked document purporting to be the judgment of the tribunal went into circulation. Ahead of judgment day, both leading parties in the electoral contest, which had inexorably mutated into a judicial one – the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and the All Progressives Congress (APC) – felt compelled to issue duelling statements denouncing the leak and blaming the other for it. The APC claimed that “the PDP leaked a fake judgment, knowing they would lose”, while the PDP “accused the APC of using the leaked fake document to gauge public reaction.”

The leaked document suggested that the tribunal would deliver a split verdict, with one of the three judges dissenting from the majority of two who were supposed to decide against the petition of the PDP and its candidate, Asue Ighodalo. When, therefore, the presiding judge asked his colleagues to affirm that the judgment was unanimous, he sought to telegraph that tales of the leak of their judgment were unfounded or, in any case, had misdescribed the decision of the tribunal. Instead of a split decision suggested by the leak, this was a unanimous court.

This was far from the first time that the decision of an election petition tribunal in Nigeria would be foreshadowed by suggestions or allegations of a leak ahead of its delivery.

At the onset of presidentialism in Nigeria in 1979, the contest between Shehu Shagari of the National Party of Nigeria (NPN) and Obafemi Awolowo of the Unity Party of Nigeria (UPN) ended up before the presidential election tribunal. On 20 August 1979, Obafemi Awolowo filed his petition against the declaration of Shehu Shagari as the winner of the election. The following day, military ruler, General Olusegun Obasanjo, invited Atanda Fatayi Williams to the Dodan Barracks (as the seat of government then in Lagos was called) and offered him the office of the Chief Justice of Nigeria (CJN).

Fatayi Williams’ first task was to adjudicate Chief Awolowo’s petition. The military had committed to handing over power on 1 October, a mere 40 days later. General Obasanjo, who was overseeing arrangements for a high profile handover to an elected successor, was anxious to know that the Supreme Court would not torpedo his plans. It was credibly suspected that he received the necessary assurances from his hand-picked CJN well ahead of the judgment.

In March 2008, Action Congress (AC), the party then led by Bola Ahmed Tinubu, vigorously alleged that the outcome of the presidential election petition challenging the announcement of Umaru Musa Yar’Adua of the PDP as the winner of the 2007 presidential election had leaked. Lai Mohammed, the spokesperson of the party at the time, denounced the leak, proclaiming that the judgment would “not stand the test of time.”

15 years later, as the Presidential Election Petition Tribunal issued a 48-hour notice of the delivery of its judgment on 4 September 2023, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, the candidate of the APC, whose announcement on 1 March as the winner of the presidential election was under challenge, departed for New Delhi, India, to attend the G-20 Summit. He arrived India on 5 September, the day before the judgment, guaranteeing that he was going to be outside the country when the tribunal delivered its judgment. Many people believed that Tinubu traveled to India with the confidence of a man who had been assured ahead of schedule of the outcome that the tribunal would announce the day after he landed in India.

Whether these allegations were true in any specific case is a subject for another day. Far from diminishing over the years, however, credible suspicions of breach of the deliberative confidentiality of judicial decision-making in election disputes and political cases in Nigeria have grown. They enjoy high credulity with the public, an indication of a deep-seated deficit of credibility that now clearly afflicts the business of what judges do in political and electoral disputes in Nigeria.

At the valedictory session of the 9^th Senate in June 2023, Adamu Bulkachuwa, the senator for Bauchi North, confirmed suspicions of unconscionably intimate dalliances between judges and politicians when he appreciated his colleagues “whom (sic) have come to me and sought for my help when my wife was the President of the Court of Appeal.” Senator Bulkachuwa did not forget to thank his wife “whose freedom and independence I encroached upon while she was in office…. She has been very tolerant and accepted my encroachment and extended her help to my colleagues.” His wife, Zainab, was President of the Court of Appeal from 2014 to 2020.

For insisting on calling attention to this kind of criminal acccessorisation of judges, Nyesom Wike, the Minister of the Federal Capital Territory who is also a member of Nigeria’s Body of Benchers (BoB), invited the grandees of the BoB who visited him in his office at the end of last month to dispense with basic niceties of process and “punish” me. His 36 minute-long harangue to the old men and women of the BoB who were his guests was occasionally punctuated with enthusiastic applause belying the average age of the group as well as the kind of undisguised ridicule which they had to endure for both themselves and the institutions of the judicial process in Nigeria. Such cravenness from the leadership of the self-described “body of practitioners of the highest distinction in the legal profession in Nigeria” bodes ill for judicial credibility and independence.

As Mr. Wike was busy advertising his undisguised contempt for them and telling the leaders of Nigeria’s legal profession that they were no better than deodorized sex workers with an inflated price-tag, an advocate who had spent his life campaigning against that tendency took a characteristically unpretentious leave.

Raised in Agbor, Delta State, by a father who was a high school teacher from Imo State, Joseph Otteh was one of the first two colleagues whom I engaged in the legal directorate of the Civil Liberties Organisation (CLO) in Lagos in 1991. He brought tremendous integrity, intellect, and industry to the role, and had remarkable reserves of empathy.

In 1999, Joe founded the group Access to Justice “to work towards rebuilding the institutional credibility of the Nigerian legal and justice system, restoring public faith in its institutions.” He approached that task with both courage and single-mindedness, doing a lot of good along the way.

Joe epitomized the lawyer as a gentleman and professional of civic virtue. On 28 March, he succumbed reportedly to complications from Diabetes, leaving behind an aged mother, wife and three children.

30 years ago, in 1995, Joe authored a defining study of the customary court system in the 17 states of southern Nigeria under the title The Fading Lights of Justice. As an advocate, Joseph Otteh did his utmost to ensure that those lights were kept aflame. That title could only have come from a man who was well ahead of his time and had the acuity to see the future. The Heavens will be enriched by the acquisition of this incredible angel.

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

By Calixthus Okoruwa

I will not watch the videos of the events that took place in Uromi, in which travelers were lynched on the suspicion of being terrorists and kidnappers. The reports emanating from the media are gruesome enough. The incident dehumanizes us all as Nigerians and is yet another commentary on our country’s rapid descent to the barbaric. It is sad. My unqualified sympathies go to the victims of this mob justice and the sundry other victims of mob justice all over our country.

It is fitting that the entire country has been united in its condemnation of mob justice. Mob lynchings of fellow citizens ought to belong in ancient history.

Incidentally, as usual, the government whose duplicity and ineptitude have led to this pathetic state of affairs in Nigeria, has been busy in their well-oiled machination to deflect blame for the development. Vigilante groups have been quickly disbanded. Police commissioners have been redeployed. And there have been well-commended visits by the Edo State Governor to his Kano counterpart as well as bereaved families with promises of compensation.

The Uromi incident, however, ought to help redirect our attention as a country to the sundry contradictions that collectively act as the “cause” of the growing epidemic of insecurity in our country (the “effect”). It is to these contradictions, these deliberate failings by government that Nigeria ought to target its most vociferous outrage.

One of the most glaring contradictions is that the biggest perpetrators of terrorism and kidnappings in Nigeria are known and reachable. In 2022, at least two media organizations, the BBC (“the bandit warlords of Zamfara”) and Daily Trust (“Nigeria’s banditry, the inside story) conducted discrete investigations into banditry in northern Nigeria. In the course of these investigations, they conducted one-on-one interviews with terrorist leaders. Yes, journalists were able to track and engage the leadership of various terrorist gangs holding huge swathes of Nigeria to ransom. The face-saving reaction of the Federal Government at the time, was to impose a fine of N5million on the BBC and Daily Trust, respectively.

In a more recent incident, the Kaduna State Government announced a peace deal with dozens of known terrorists. In so doing, terrorists whose scope of operations and escapades including killings and kidnappings are well-known and documented were fished out and invited to a round-table. Some of the terrorists at the “peace meeting”, which was also graced by the military and the security forces, were armed.

The Kaduna State “peace deal” with terrorists follows in the footsteps of similar dalliances between government and terrorists over the years. A particularly instructive deal is one that Nigerians appear to have forgotten. On February 18, 2018, terrorists abducted over 100 school girls from their school in Dapchi, a town in Yobe State. Five girls lost their lives to the emotional and physical trauma of that event. By March 21 of the same year, all the abducted girls with the exception of one, Leah Sharibu, were released to the Federal Government. What could have been responsible for the sudden change of heart of the terrorists? Compassion for the kidnapped girls? A generous ransom by the government? We will never know, but what is clear is that the government via some formal or informal channels negotiated the release of the girls with the terrorists. The same terrorists it repeatedly claims it is fighting and bombing and “decimating”.

According to the Nigerian Bureau of Statistics, Nigeria’s kidnapping industry helped to amass well over N2 trillion for its perpetrators between May 2023 and April 2024. A huge proportion of such monies apparently goes into the purchase of the sophisticated arms which these bandits bear and with which they often unabashedly raze entire villages to the ground. Worse still, released victims of kidnappings often lament that these terrorists are better armed than the military who are saddled with the task of neutralizing and eliminating them. Banditry documentaries so far aired indicate that security agencies often delay in responding to attacks by these terrorists on communities, ostensibly on account of the superior fire power of the terrorists.

No media house has yet produced an investigative documentary on the state of the Nigerian military, including how well-equipped and -motivated its operatives are. However, the circumstantial evidence of the occasional videos made by a handful of soldiers on the battlefront who lament their lack of equipment, poor motivation and lack of support by the military high command for hospitalized colleagues coupled with the apparent hesitancy of security forces to respond to distress calls in villages under attack by terrorists, strongly suggests that the Nigerian military and security forces are morbidly under-resourced and ill-prepared to tackle the monstrosity of terrorism.

But Nigeria has in the last 15 years since the gradual incursion of terrorism into our polity budgeted the equivalent of billions of dollars annually towards defence and security. Where has all the money gone? Has defence spending ever been audited and by whom? Have the heads of the several defence agencies ever been requested to account for defence spending over the last decade and half?

So clearly, government chicanery and incompetence in tracking and eliminating terrorists and bandits from the polity is worsened by corruption. Going by the operating manual in the Nigerian public sector, it is reasonable to infer that only a small fraction of the annual budgetary provisions for defence and security may have actually been deployed to defence and security since 2009.

Amidst the incompetence, corruption and insincerity of government, therefore, citizens across the country have over the years been left no choice but to take over community policing and security, by forming vigilante groups among others. But community policing is a specialized role. It is a role that is meant for trained professionals within a system that ought to be properly overseen by unbiased operatives and reasonably well-funded. It is a role for the police and security forces, not groups of untrained operatives called “vigilantes”, formed out of desperation by citizens. Little wonder, therefore, that vigilante policing despite pockets of successes has often created bigger societal challenges.

It is the selfish and hypocritical dithering by politicians towards eliminating terrorism that has fueled the expansion and increasing brazenness of the terrorists. If they strike nocturnal deals with the presidency and attend “peace meetings” with governors decked in their fake military fatigues while brandishing military grade rifles, why should they spare a thought for the victims they beat up, rob, extort, rape and decapitate? Or those whose homes they raze to the ground? Why should they bother when they invade farms, uproot tubers and feed them to their herds? It is most heart-rending that the same politicians who are fully conversant with the genocidal inclinations of these kidnappers and terrorists and know how and where to reach them, continue to deceive Nigerians; enabling the specter of insecurity to fester nationwide.

The Uromi incident ought to mark a turning point for our country in the protracted and badly prosecuted war against terrorism. Why are our politicians, like the Roman Emperor Nero, fiddling while the country burns? Why is Nigerian politics so laden with corruption, incompetence and deceit? How many more Nigerians need to die needlessly before Nigeria decides to call its politicians to order?

• Okoruwa works for the communications company, XLR8