By Richard Odusanya

As a young man growing up in the 1990s, I had the rare privilege of coming under the mentorship of one of Nigeria’s most accomplished military officers and elder statesmen, the late General Mohammed Wushishi. Beyond his distinguished service as Chief of Army Staff, General Wushishi was an accomplished corporate leader who chaired the boards of major Nigerian companies, including UAC of Nigeria. More importantly, he was a man of uncommon wisdom, discipline, integrity and vision.

The lessons he imparted to me have remained enduring guideposts in my personal and professional life. He taught leadership without arrogance, patriotism without fanaticism, and loyalty without the surrender of conscience. Among these lessons, one stands out today with remarkable relevance: patriotism must never be confused with blind loyalty.

True patriotism is the sincere love of one’s country and a commitment to its progress. It is the desire to see one’s nation become more just, prosperous, secure and united. Patriotism is not measured by the volume of applause offered to leaders or governments. Rather, it is demonstrated by the courage to support what is right, challenge what is wrong and contribute to the common good.

The danger arises when loyalty ceases to be guided by principle and becomes attached solely to personalities, parties or ideologies. At that point, constructive criticism is viewed as betrayal, while unquestioning praise becomes the standard of acceptance. Leaders are elevated beyond scrutiny, and followers begin to treat them as though they are incapable of error.

History teaches that such environments are unhealthy for institutions and dangerous for societies. Once loyalty becomes blind, critical thinking is replaced by emotional attachment. Facts become secondary to sentiments. Accountability is weakened, and legitimate concerns are dismissed merely because they are inconvenient.

General Wushishi often emphasized that genuine leadership should welcome scrutiny rather than fear it. Accountability, he taught, is not an enemy of leadership but one of its strongest pillars. Leaders who cannot be questioned eventually become insulated from reality, while followers who cannot question lose the capacity for independent judgment.

A nation cannot be built on loyalty alone. It must be sustained by competence, integrity, merit, justice and responsibility. When loyalty is elevated above truth, it becomes a shield for misconduct and a refuge for mediocrity. Institutions weaken because individuals become more important than principles.

Perhaps this is why one of my favourite quotations comes from former United States Secretary of State, George Shultz, who advised: “Be sure, but not certain.” The wisdom behind that statement is profound. It encourages conviction without dogmatism, confidence without arrogance, and commitment without intellectual rigidity. It reminds us to remain open to evidence, willing to reassess our positions and humble enough to acknowledge when we are wrong.

In today’s increasingly polarized environment, this distinction between patriotism and blind loyalty has become more important than ever. Support for a leader or government should never require the abandonment of reason. Likewise, criticism should not automatically be interpreted as hostility. Democracies thrive when citizens are able to hold leaders accountable while remaining committed to the success of their nation.

The greatest societies are not built by unquestioning followers but by thoughtful citizens and principled leaders who understand that truth and accountability are indispensable companions of progress.

As General Wushishi taught, patriotism is a constructive love of country anchored on values and principles. Blind loyalty, on the other hand, demands obedience without reflection and allegiance without accountability. One strengthens nations; the other gradually undermines them.

As we confront the challenges facing our institutions and our country, we must choose carefully between the two. Support should be given with open eyes, not closed minds. Loyalty should be to principles before personalities. And patriotism should always be measured by our commitment to building a better nation, not by our willingness to defend every action of those who govern it.

Only then can we create the kind of society that future generations will be proud to inherit.

Odusanya can be reached via [email protected]

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

For no reason beyond bad belle, Orishala urged Ogun to pull down Orunmila’s house. Why? Ogun asked. Orishala hinted that Orunmila had become a dangerous rival to his dominance in the pantheon of the gods.

Like a hired killer, Ogun agreed. But how would he recognise Orunmila’s house? He had never been there. Orishala gave detailed directions and added one crucial clue: Orunmila’s house, unlike his own, had no white cloth on its roof.

But Orunmila had ears everywhere. He heard the plot and acted swiftly. Under cover of darkness, he removed the white cloth from Orishala’s roof and placed it on his own.

So when Ogun arrived in fury, the house he smashed belonged to Orishala, his client. Ogun killed everyone inside and left Orunmila untouched. Then Orunmila danced and sang: Aseni n se ara è. From that day, Orunmila became the boss.

A few weeks ago, while writing about the splintering of opposition parties and the coronation songs in the APC, I wrote about a man who set fire to his neighbours’ huts, forgetting that flames obey no boundaries; they usually consume their owner too.

I apply the Orishala-Orunmila story to Nigeria’s party politics.

Read Also: Odinkalu: Abia escaped a quarter-century of ‘un-government’, must not return there

Orunmila’s survival sense is lacking in opposition parties. He survived because he saw the danger coming and acted. Nigeria’s opposition parties, by contrast, have often behaved like victims waiting patiently for the executioner.

But karma is real, even the neck of one who beheads is not immune to the sharp sword of death. The APC once celebrated the demolition of its rivals’ political homes. Today, the bell tolls for the demolisher.

And those leaving are not limping quietly into the night. They are talking; using words that de-market. A former Inspector-General of Police, Mohammed Abubakar Adamu, who resigned from the APC days after losing the party’s governorship primary in Nasarawa, said internal democracy, fairness, transparency and equal opportunity that should guide a democratic political party were absent in the ruling party. That is not a good testimonial for a party that wears ‘progressive’ on its forehead.

Adamu was not alone.

For the same reason, former Deputy Senate President, Ovie Omo-Agege, announced his resignation from the party. A day later, a former Speaker of the Delta State House of Assembly also quit. Their departure is not the issue. The issue is that the ruling party could itself suffer what it once mocked others for suffering.

Even then, APC should worry less about those quitting; its death may be those who are staying put like the pest that has vowed to destroy kolanut from inside. Political parties are usually damaged more by the wounded who remain than by the angry who leave.

So, from Nasarawa to Delta, and across much of the federation where primaries were conducted, the APC is struggling to contain the inferno ignited by the very process it called primaries. What was meant to be a season of coronation has become a season of rebellion. The fire it lit in other people’s compounds has found its way back home.

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

In Oyo State, a woman has four grandchildren and a daughter-in-law abducted from a school by terrorists. They are still in the bush; their abductors are unyielding.

An Ekiti man took N10.5 million to kidnappers and still failed to secure the release of his 80-year-old mother.

On Saturday in Katsina, a Major General, former spokesman of the Nigerian military and his wife were abducted in broad daylight and dragged into the bush.

The woman with four grandchildren and a daughter-in-law in captivity was a ghostly sight to behold. Sobbing, she told Governor Seyi Makinde during his visit to her village on Saturday:

“E nwo mi? As you are looking at me like this, I am naked; my four grandchildren and daughter-in-law who teaches at the school were taken away. My son’s wife is the one with a child in the video (released by the terrorists). We have never witnessed anything like this in our community. It is so sad. My grandchildren are there in the bush. The government should help bring them back safely. You are the only one who can do it.”

Read Also: 16 feared dead in Katsina Eid massacre as critics ask why outrage targets dissent more than terrorists

As the woman sobbed, her tears echoed across the field. Even if you have feasted on the tortoise’s jinxed head and become immune to pity, the video I watched and the photographs of victims’ relatives who met the governor should still break your heart.

Nigeria personifies Shakespeare’s words in Hamlet where we learn that grief with its synonym – heartache – can be unremitting in occurrence. The playwright writes that “sorrow comes not single spies, but in battalions.” What bandits have put in the Ogbomoso area is a full barn of woes.

Death brings grief; unresolved abduction brings endless torment. Disappearance keeps hope and despair locked in a ceaseless struggle. As the Yoruba say, “Omo eni kú, ó sàn ju ọmọ eni nù lọ” — painful as the death of a child may be, it is still better than the agony of knowing that the child lives in the house of death.

As in the classical elegies, grief moved through the Oyo community like a dark procession, leaving behind shattered families, yet unanswered prayers and cries heavy with loss.

Like Macduff’s Scotland, Nigeria weeps and bleeds; each day adds a fresh wound to its many scars.

In April, the kidnappers in Ekiti demanded N10.5 million. They collected the money in a Kwara forest and still refused to release the 80-year-old woman and other captives, insisting that the community must produce another N40 million. Ogundele Ojo, the man who led the team that took the ransom to the bandits, is from a village called Eda Oniyo in Ekiti State. His ordeal was narrated to a radio presenter and is captured in a video now circulating online.

The man said his mother, Rachael Aina, his younger brother’s wife, her only child, and several other villagers were abducted during a church service. The presiding pastor was shot in the back, the bullet tearing through his chest. In 2026 Nigeria, a place of prayer became a house of mourning; a gathering for worship ended in tears, terror and blood.

“This is my mother’s photo, she just came back from the hospital the day she was abducted,” the man said and broke down in tears.

Two weeks ago, Emeritus Professor Toyin Falola told me in an interview that Nigeria suffers from an epidemic of insecurity and an epidemic of death. He was right; his words perfectly capture a country where every day brings fresh tragedy.

Shakespeare, writing in Macbeth, describes a broken nation where “each new morn, new widows howl, new orphans cry, new sorrows strike heaven on the face that it resounds…and yelled out like syllable of dolor.” Four centuries after Macbeth was written, the line reads like a dispatch from Nigeria. Each new morning in Nigeria brings fresh widows, new orphans and new griefs. Sorrow, in relentless fury, seems to strike heaven itself in the face, compelling even the skies to cry out in anguish.

The dam has broken.

A friend and I asked ourselves last night: how many Nigerians are chained in forests, camps and hideouts across this country?

Nobody knows. Not the communities. Not the security agencies. Not the government. If a figure is announced at 8 a.m., it becomes obsolete by nine.

The abduction statistics are more elusive than Nigeria’s ‘faithless’ primary election figures. We have become a nation counting victims without knowing their number. Horror has become our country’s daily companion.

Even as we speak, the epidemic spreads. Before Oyo, Ekiti and Katsina came other afflictions, arriving in waves like the plagues of Egypt, each one more frightening than the last.

The tragedies are so many that one easily loses count. But Amnesty International, made of sterner stuff, keeps a tally. I have here some of the entries in its ledger of Nigerian sorrow:

On 3 January 2026, gunmen attacked Kasuwan Daji community in Niger State’s Borgu Local Government Area and abducted 57 people.

On 3 February 2026, armed men invaded Woro village in Kaiama Local Government Area of Kwara State, killing about 200 people and abducting 176 others.

On 3 March, Boko Haram fighters attacked Ngoshe town in Borno State’s Gwoza Local Government Area, abducted more than 400 people and laid siege to the town.

In the first week of March, gunmen stormed Kurfa Danya and Kurfan Magaji villages in Zamfara State’s Bukkuyum Local Government Area and abducted 150 people, most of them women and children.

On 19 March, Boko Haram fighters seized more than 100 displaced persons working in Kumbul Forest near Mafa in Borno State.

On 22 March, gunmen attacked three churches in Kaduna State’s Kachia Local Government Area and abducted 30 worshippers.

The list is long, as long as the line of hungry almajirai waiting for food in a northern town. These are not mere statistics.

They are fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, neighbours and friends. They are Nigerians swallowed daily by a widening geography of fear.

The dead are not worse off than the living; the abducted are as traumatised as the spared. The grief of the afflicted is beyond words. Yet Amnesty International captured some of their voices:

“They didn’t just kill; they stole our lives away. They abducted 176 people, including my second wife and my three daughters. One of them is only two years old. I have seen the video they posted on social media. I heard my wife’s voice. I saw my people. It has been almost two months now, and they are still in that forest,” said a man from Woro community in Kwara State.

Another resident described the wider tragedy:

“In almost all cases of these abductions, people were also killed while homes and shops were looted and razed. In some cases, families have had to dispose of everything they own to pay ransom, while villages often crowd-fund to rescue their people. Those who cannot pay are sometimes killed, disappeared or subjected to further torture. What we are witnessing in northern Nigeria today is an abduction crisis that increasingly endangers lives.”

Those northern voices were recorded in April 2026. We are now in June, and the tears have spread beyond the North. The West is drenched. Last week, I said I feared a convulsion or a combustion. I still do. Each day of anxiety, grief and pain deepens a dangerous perception in the South: that the violence tormenting its communities is being imported from elsewhere. Every fresh abduction, every killing, every shattered family pushes more people towards a conclusion that the terror afflicting their communities comes from outside their homeland. That is a dangerous road for any country to travel.

And the Nigerian state appears helpless – stuck and sinking in the mud of unregulated violence. Where do we go from here? Should citizens be trained and licensed to carry arms for self-defence? Increasingly, these are questions which frightened communities are asking.

History offers an intriguing parallel to what we suffer. The Spanish countryside of the eighteenth century was insecure and poorly policed. Farmers and their harvests, travellers and their wares, were easy prey for bandits. In 1769, King Charles III of Spain responded by issuing a decree prohibiting the carrying of arms in the countryside after the hunting season. But he exempted farmers and travellers.

The exemption was revealing. As Henk Driessen (1983) notes, it amounted to an implicit admission that rural areas were insecure and could not be efficiently policed by the state. The king restricted weapons, but he also understood that those who worked the land and travelled lonely roads deserved safety and needed the means to defend themselves.

The question for Nigeria is whether we have reached the same point as eighteenth-century Spain, where the state tacitly admitted its inability to secure the countryside, or whether our rulers still refuse to accept that much of the country beyond the cities is unsafe and effectively abandoned to its fate.

Above, I quoted Shakespeare’s “syllable of dolor.” In today’s English, the phrase means a cry of grief, a sound made by sorrow itself. As I write this elegy for a wounded country, the feeling is that every abduction, every ransom demand and every fresh grave adds another note to Nigeria’s long song of dolor.

Something must change before that sad song becomes our permanent national anthem.

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

By Max Amuchie | The Sunday Stew

There is a specific kind of validation that academia confers and another that the world confers. The academy signals acceptance through citation, peer review, and the slow machinery of scholarly publication. The world signals it differently — through use. When a scholar picks up your framework not merely to interrogate it, but to build with it, something important has shifted. That is not endorsement. That is adoption.
That is what happened when Dr. Omoniyi Ibietan — Secretary General of the African Public Relations Association (APRA) and a Fellow of the Nigerian Institute of Public Relations (NIPR)—reached for The Insecurity Triad to anchor the theoretical foundations of his paper on crisis communication in the Agatu conflict. He did not cite it as a curiosity. More importantly for this discourse, Ibietan is a member of doctoral faculty at Rome Business School’s DBA programme.

He used it as a load-bearing wall.
His words, addressed to Premium Times editorial page editor Ololade Bamidele, are worth sitting with: the framework took him back to Mbembe, offered fresh insight into, and — and then did something rarer. It shaped what he was about to write. “So compelling was it,” Ibietan noted, “that it shaped my theoretical framing for a new paper I just submitted.”
Ibietan’s message to Bamidele was in response to last week’s edition of The Sunday Stew entiteld: ‘The Insecurity Triad: Azikiwe, Awolowo, and Chinweizu — Nigeria’s Elite Class of Framework Builders’.

Dr Ibietan’s words: “Thank you ⁨Ololade Bamidele. Please tell Dr. Amuchie to keep it coming. The first part of this took me back to Mbembe (one of Africa’s leading representation of activistic scholarship). Amuchie offered me a refreshing, lovely insight of the works of (Ali) Mazrui, (Claude) Ake, (Jean-François) Bayart, (William) Reno, especially his treatise on the ‘Relocation of Authority’ and of course Mbembe. It was a meta-analytical enterprise. So, compelling was it that it shaped my theoretical framing for a new paper I just submitted on Crisis Communication in the Agatu Crisis. Needless to say this is also beautiful.”

This is not simply a compliment from a respected scholar. It is evidence of intellectual utility. Scholars are exposed to thousands of ideas during their careers. Very few are incorporated into ongoing research. Fewer still alter the theoretical architecture of work already in development. When an established academic changes the lens through which he interprets a conflict because of a framework he has encountered, that framework has crossed an important threshold. It has moved from proposition to application.

What makes Ibietan’s validation particularly significant is his position within African scholarly and professional networks. He occupies a rare intersection of communication studies, governance research, public policy, and professional practice. His adoption therefore functions as more than an individual scholarly decision. It is an early signal that the Insecurity Triad possesses interdisciplinary reach. A framework developed primarily to explain insecurity and conflict dynamics has proven capable of informing crisis communication research. That is not a small achievement. It suggests conceptual elasticity without sacrificing analytical precision.

What makes this moment even more consequential is that the Insecurity Triad was never designed as a self-contained theoretical exercise. It was built to travel. Its three pillars — Money, Land, and Mind — were deliberately constructed to be analytically portable across conflict environments, governance challenges, and security ecosystems. Ibietan applied it to the Agatu crisis, a deeply localised conflict in Benue State with its own history of farmer-herder tensions, displacement, and contested narratives. The framework held. It supplied categories capable of explaining not only the drivers of insecurity but also the communicative environment surrounding conflict.

That portability is often what separates enduring frameworks from temporary concepts. Many theories explain a single case. The most influential frameworks explain multiple cases without losing explanatory power. They move across disciplines. They generate new questions. They create intellectual bridges between fields that previously appeared unrelated. The early evidence suggests that the Insecurity Triad possesses precisely these qualities.

There is also a broader significance to this moment. African intellectual production has long suffered from a structural asymmetry. Frameworks generated in Europe and North America routinely become the default lenses through which African realities are interpreted, while concepts generated from African experience often struggle to achieve comparable visibility. As a result, African scholars frequently find themselves applying imported theories to indigenous problems rather than exporting indigenous theories to the wider world.

The Insecurity Triad represents an attempt to reverse that flow. It is a framework theorised from Nigerian and Sahelian realities, derived from empirical observations of conflict, governance failures, criminal economies, and social fragmentation. Its ambition is not merely to describe Africa but to contribute to the global vocabulary of security studies.
That is why Ibietan’s engagement matters. Validation from a scholar of his standing demonstrates that the framework is not circulating solely because of media visibility or public debate. It is entering scholarly workflows. It is influencing research design. It is becoming part of the knowledge-production process itself.

His comparison to Mbembe is instructive. Achille Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics did not become influential because people admired it. It became influential because scholars found it useful. It provided explanatory power where existing frameworks fell short. Researchers adopted it, tested it, extended it, and applied it across contexts far removed from its original formulation.

The Insecurity Triad is not Mbembe, nor should it be measured against the trajectory of a mature global theory. But the comparison illuminates an important principle: intellectual influence begins when a framework starts solving analytical problems for other scholars. Ibietan’s adoption suggests that this process may already be underway.
The Agatu application is therefore more than a citation. It is proof of concept. It demonstrates that the framework can survive contact with a different discipline, a different methodology, and a different research question. In academic terms, that is often the first indication that a concept has genuine staying power.

What the scholarly community should watch is not whether the Insecurity Triad receives more praise — praise is abundant and often fleeting — but whether it continues to be used. Frameworks earn their place in the canon not through applause but through repeated deployment. They become influential when researchers begin treating them as tools rather than subjects.

Ibietan’s paper carries the architecture of the Triad into the literature on public relations, crisis communication, and conflict management. Tomorrow another scholar may apply it to political economy, peacebuilding, migration, state legitimacy, or violent extremism. Each application expands the framework’s reach. Each successful application increases its explanatory credibility.
That is how ideas compound. That is how indigenous theories become established traditions. That is how a framework moves from being an author’s insight to becoming part of a field’s intellectual infrastructure.
The Insecurity Triad is now in motion. The significance of Ibietan’s validation lies not simply in who endorsed it, but in what he did with it. He built upon it. He carried it into new terrain. He demonstrated that it travels.
The question is no longer whether the framework can move beyond its point of origin. It already has.
The question now is how far it will travel.

Unveiling the DSI in The Sunday Stew

​As an undergraduate at the University of Calabar, one of the first sets of books to catch my attention was The Open Society and Its Enemies, Karl Popper’s landmark two-volume 1945 work of political philosophy. In it, he passionately defended liberal democracy and mounted a fierce critique of totalitarianism. The other book of his I picked up was The Poverty of Historicism published in 1957, where he attacked the intellectual and logical validity of authoritarian teleology. While The Poverty of Historicism targeted the foundational logic, The Open Society dismantled the devastating political consequences of totalitarian rule.

However, long before he turned his sights on totalitarianism, the Austrian-British philosopher had already revolutionised western epistemology. In his groundbreaking 1934 book, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (Logik der Forschung), Popper introduced the concept of falsifiability as a solution to the demarcation problem—the question of how to distinguish between genuine science and non-science (such as pseudoscience, metaphysics, or myth). At its core, the concept insists that for a theory to be considered scientific, it must be falsifiable. This means there must be at least one logically possible observation, metric, or experiment that could prove the theory wrong. A theory that explains everything, explains nothing.

For three consecutive weeks in this column beginning on April 26, I laid bare the Trinity of State Decay (TSD)—a macro-diagnostic theory mapping how nations fracture into dual or competing sovereignties. I analysed how this structural deterioration plays out in Nigeria and across the wider Sahelian context. Yet, the theory is fundamentally scalable; it applies to all contexts and geographies where the devastating conditions of the Insecurity Triad take root, from the fault lines of Latin America to the fragile corridors of Southeast Asia.

But to save the Trinity of State Decay from the graveyard of mere political commentary or fluid narrative, it must meet Popper’s uncompromising standard. It must be measurable. It must be testable. It must expose itself to empirical refutation.
By anchoring the theoretical formulation to quantitative metrics, I provide international organisations and the global scholarly, policymaking and intelligence communities with a verifiable yardstick. If the state’s legal authority and empirical reality remain tightly bound, the index will prove it; if they are violently drifting apart, the index will map the velocity of that separation.

Next week, therefore, I cross that scientific Rubicon. I will unveil the Decoupling Sovereignty Index (DSI).

I am moving from description to diagnosis.

Trust is sacred. Stay seasoned.

•Dr. Max Amuchie is the CEO of Sundiata Post and architect of The Insecurity Triad and Trinity of State Decay. He writes The Sunday Stew, a weekly syndicated column on faith, character, and the forces that shape society, with a focus on Nigeria and Africa in a global context.
X — @MaxAmuchie | Email: [email protected] | Tel: +234(0)8053069436

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

By Chidi Anselm Odinkalu

1993 was the year that changed Nigeria’s judiciary. Over a period of a mere five months, the military in that year contrived to overthrow government twice. First, in June, Ibrahim Babangida, the army General who was Nigeria’s military ruler at the time, nullified an election organized to determine who would succeed him. Five months later, in November of the same year, another General and then Defence Minister, Sani Abacha, overthrew the Interim National Government (ING) installed in the aftermath of Babangida’s shameful abdication from power. On both occasions, the judiciary authored the overthrow.

At the end of an interminable transition, the ballot to elect a civilian successor to Babangida was scheduled to occur on 12 June 1993. But two days before the vote, on 10 June, the regime procured a group known as Association for Better Nigeria (ABN) to secure a court order prohibiting the National Electoral Commission (NEC) from undertaking the election.

The defendants included the NEC and its chairman, Humphrey Nwosu, a professor of political science; as well as Babangida and his federal Attorney-General, Clement Akpamgbo, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN). Rather unusually, both Babangida and Akpamgbo failed to enter appearance or contest the case. Lawyers from the Federal Ministry of Justice who usually represent them in such cases unusually were missing in action. Omo Omoruyi, a close adviser to Ibrahim Babangida at the time recalled that “this ambivalent position of the President and the Attorney-General has never been explained.”

According to Professor Omoruyi, the judge, Bassey Ikpeme, “was mobilized to commit (mischief) in the name of the judiciary.” He does not disclose by whom, but it was known that Bassey Ikpeme had worked in the law office of Clement Akpamgbo. Bassey Ikpeme decided to issue what was described as a “candle-light judgment” because she delivered her judgment “between 9 p.m. and 10 p.m. on the day of judgment.” Those are not court hours.

In her decision, Bassey Ikpeme observed that “the planned election can no longer be free and fair.” With no need to say why or how so, she casually restrained the NEC “from conducting the presidential election pending the determination of the substantive suit before the court.” The military decrees under which the election was to be organised expressly prohibited such orders.

A coincidence of public pressure and disagreement among members of the ruling Armed Forces Ruling Council (AFRC) stayed the hand of the regime, allowing voting to proceed as originally scheduled. But, four days after the vote, while the NEC was busy collating the returns, the ABN returned to court in Abuja, the Federal Capital Territory and secured another court order prohibiting the Commission from continuing with the collation and declaration of the results.

10 days after the ballot, on 22 June 1993, the regime announced the annulment. The following day, Ibrahim Babangida issued two military decrees effectively terminating the transition to civil rule. In their official explanation, the regime claimed it took these steps to save the country from “judicial anarchy” and “rescue the judiciary from…. an unfortunate and unwarranted situation which is fast eroding the esteem, honour and confidence with which the public holds the nation’s judiciary.”

The nullification of that election terminated the raison d’être of the Babangida regime. Civic unrest thereafter forced him to “step aside” on the eighth anniversary of his regime on 27 August 1993. The day preceding his departure from power, however, Babangida issued four decrees. Among these, Decree No. 59 terminated his rule while Decree No. 61 instituted an Interim National Government (ING). On 10 November 1993, the High Court of Lagos ruled that having abrogated his power to rule by Decree No. 59 of 26 August, Ibrahim Babangida lacked the power thereafter to institute the ING by Decree No. 61. The result, the Court held, was that the ING was illegal and void. Seven days after this judgment, Sani Abacha toppled the ING and installed himself the military ruler.

Three things were significant about the judicial interventions that created these outcomes. First, all the decisions and orders came from high courts. They may not have required the actions that followed but it was sufficient that their orders created chaotic disorder that abhorred political vacuum. Second, these developments crystallized the political relevance of judges whether acting alone or in cahoots with those in power. Third, if judges could be used to terminate power in this manner, it was only a matter of time before they could become themselves the explicit authors or determinants of who took or seized it.

The return of Nigeria to civil rule turned over to politicians the levers of control over these logics. Kano State provides a recent theatre of the politics of judicial anarchy. When the Government of the State decided to engineer succession to the stool of the Kano Emirate in 2024, the matter quickly evolved into a legal dispute. A chieftaincy matter such as this was ordinarily one for the High Court of Kano State but one judge of the Federal High Court chose to invent federal jurisdiction over it.

By himself, this judge confectioned a succession of bizarre orders that could only exist in the realm of judicial sorcery. His profusion of court orders saddled Kano with two Emirs presiding over one Emirate; one under the authority of the State government and another under the authority of the Federal High Court. For his efforts, the judge involved would get elevated to the Court of Appeal and may even have come within a hair’s breadth of becoming Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC).

The latest site of judicial disorder appears to be the political timetable for Nigeria’s 2027 elections. On 20 May, Mohammed Garba Umar, a judge of the Federal High Court, nullified substantial parts of the guidelines and timetable released by the INEC for the election. The judge held that the powers of the Commission “do not extend to fixing or prescribing the timetable within which political parties may conduct their primary elections for the purpose of nominating candidates for the 2027 general elections.” He also ruled that the Commission cannot “lawfully abridge or limit that statutory period” of 120 days to the election by which time the Electoral Act 2026 requires the parties to submit the personal details of their candidates.

Six days later, James Omotosho, another judge of the same court, hit back, ruling that “the timetable and schedule of activities for the conduct of the 2027 General Election issued by the [INEC] is valid and legally issued.” He held that the parties must comply with INEC’s abridged timetable for the conduct of primaries but ordered the Commission to adjust its timelines for submission of candidates’ information to comply with the statutory 120 days under the Electoral Act. Like the federal judge who gave Kano two Emirs for one stool, this judge has given the parties two timetables for one election. He has also been recently named for elevation to the Court of Appeal.

The real question for the judges was whether INEC could lawfully compress the time within which the parties must organize their primaries. The Commission’s time-table insists this must be completed by the end of May. That begs the question why they must wait until September or October to submit the names of their candidates to the INEC candidates’ portal. From one court, two different cases have produced two mutually contradictory answers to this question. Instead of clarity, the Federal High Court offers confusion to the candidates and their parties.

The convenient answer from lawyers is that this confusion will be remedied on appeal. By the time that happens, however, the parties, candidates and citizens would have made massive commitments in resources and emotions. If the issues get resolved after the elections, they could even alter the destination of electoral outcomes. Such a result could be more than an injustice. It could also produce political instability.

In 1993, the country escaped ruination by the skin of its teeth. That would have been a prohibitive price to pay for what the soldiers indelicately called “judicial anarchy”. Whether it will be as lucky in 2027 could be a matter for the sorcerers.

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.