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She was sentenced to death for killing her British lover. Then Nigeria gave Esther Johnson a second chance

The extraordinary story of Ada Ocha Ntu, the young Lagos woman whose colonial-era murder case became a national sensation and ended with a pardon from Nnamdi Azikiwe

In the Lagos of the 1950s, where colonial power shaped almost every aspect of public life, the killing of a British railway worker by a young Nigerian woman became much more than a murder case.

It was a story of love and betrayal, money and anger, race and power — and eventually, mercy.

The woman at the centre of it was Ada Ocha Ntu, better known as Esther Johnson. She was about 22 when her relationship with British railway worker Mark Hall ended in violence, after a sequence of events that would send her to death row at Broad Street Prison and turn her into one of the most remembered inmates in the history of the prison, now the site of Freedom Park in Lagos.

More than seven decades later, the story remains alive in Nigerian popular memory and has even been adapted into the stage production Esther’s Revenge, which has taken the case to audiences in Nigeria and abroad.

The £400 that changed everything

The details of the relationship have survived largely through historical accounts and later retellings, but the central story has remained remarkably consistent.

Johnson had fallen deeply in love with Hall, a British railway worker who was preparing to return to England on leave. She reportedly entrusted him with £400 — described in several accounts as her savings — for the purchase of a car that would enable her to start a business.

Hall returned to Lagos with devastating news.

He had married an English woman while in Britain.

Worse still, according to the accounts, Johnson’s money had been used in connection with the new marriage, including the purchase of a car for his new wife.

For a young woman who had invested both her savings and her hopes in the relationship, the revelation was devastating.

What happened next became the subject of one of colonial Nigeria’s most sensational criminal cases.

During a confrontation, Johnson attacked Hall with a pair of scissors. He suffered fatal injuries.

The prosecution treated the incident in the matter of The Queen v. Esther Johnson (1953) as murder. The defence, according to later accounts, raised provocation and self-defence, portraying the killing as the culmination of an explosive confrontation rather than a coldly planned act.

Death sentence in colonial Lagos

Johnson was arrested, prosecuted and eventually convicted of murder and sentenced to death.

She was held at Broad Street Prison in Lagos, the colonial institution whose history would later become intertwined with Nigeria’s political and social history.

The prison housed ordinary criminals as well as political prisoners during the colonial period. Johnson’s presence there, however, acquired an unusual place in public memory because her case had already generated widespread fascination.

The racial dimension was impossible to ignore.

A young Nigerian woman had been convicted of killing a British man at a time when colonial society was structured around profound inequalities of power and status. Later accounts and theatrical interpretations of the case have consequently examined it not only as a crime of passion but through the wider questions of race, gender, colonial authority and the treatment of Nigerian women.

Her death sentence was eventually commuted to life imprisonment.

She remained in custody as Nigeria moved towards independence.

Azikiwe’s pardon

Nigeria became independent on October 1, 1960.

One year later, on October 1, 1961, Johnson received a full pardon from Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe, then Governor-General of Nigeria.

The pardon was granted within the constitutional arrangements of the period, when Azikiwe represented the Crown as Governor-General. Historical accounts record that Johnson was released after spending years in prison.

The timing gave the pardon a significance that extended beyond one prisoner.

A woman condemned under the colonial justice system was being released during the early years of an independent Nigeria, and the case consequently acquired a place in the country’s larger story of transition from colonial rule to self-government.

For Johnson, however, the significance was intensely personal. She was free.

She gave love another chance

Four years after her release, Johnson married again.

On April 23, 1964, she married Nigerian police officer Joshua Ayeni, according to accounts of her life.

The image is striking: a woman who had once been condemned to death after a disastrous relationship with a British man eventually rebuilt her life and entered another marriage, this time with a Nigerian policeman.

It is perhaps the least expected ending to a story that had begun with betrayal and bloodshed.

Johnson’s story did not disappear with her release.

At Freedom Park, created on the former site of Broad Street Prison, a section associated with her is known as “Esther’s Revenge.” The former prison has since been transformed from a colonial place of incarceration into a memorial and cultural site.

The name itself captures the way popular memory has interpreted the case, although the real history is considerably more complicated than the phrase suggests.

More than a murder story

It would be easy, more than 70 years later, to reduce Esther Johnson’s story to a familiar tale of a woman betrayed by a lover who responded with violence.

The historical record and its later interpretations suggest something larger.

Her case unfolded in a colonial society where race and social status profoundly influenced relationships between Europeans and Nigerians. It raised questions about the vulnerability of Nigerian women involved with European men, the harshness of colonial criminal justice and the extent to which public sympathy could influence the fate of a condemned prisoner.

The case has survived because it contains all of those tensions at once.

It is a murder story, but also a story about colonial Nigeria.

It is a story about betrayal, but also about economic vulnerability and unequal relationships.

And it is ultimately a story about what happened after the sentence was passed: a commutation, a pardon, freedom and an unexpected second chapter.

Esther Johnson entered Broad Street Prison as a young woman facing death.

She left years later with the chance to begin again.

And in 1964, she married Joshua Ayeni, giving a remarkable life story one final twist: The woman whose first great love ended in a colonial murder trial found a way to give love another chance.

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Stop Begging For What You Already Own: The Kagame challenge to Nigeria

By Citizen Richard Odusanya

Paul Kagame said it plainly:

“I would rather argue that we need to mobilize the right mindsets, rather than more funding… We are even begging for things we already have.”

Read that again. _Begging for things we already have._

THE HARD TRUTH
Nigeria is not poor. Nigeria is distracted. 
We have oil, gas, gold, lithium, arable land, and 200+ million minds. 
Rwanda in 1994 had genocide, debt, and no resources. Today they export discipline. 

The difference? MINDSET.

We are mentally married to external finance. 
To foreign consultants. 
To “donor agencies” to do what we can do ourselves.

That marriage is why visions fail. Because we don’t believe we are the answer.

3 THINGS KAGAME IS TEACHING US

1. LOCAL POWER
Use what God gave us first. Our wealth is underground and in our heads. 
A nation that cannot trust its own engineers will always import bridges.

2. PRIDE AND ACTIONl
“Made in Nigeria” is not a slogan. It is a value. 
When we value our own skills, we stop outsourcing our future.

3. LESS BEGGING
Begging is a mindset. 
_”Please build our road”_ 
_”Please fix our power”_ 
_”Please come and teach us”_ 
Self-reliance starts when we say: “We can. And we will.”

THE CONNECTION
This is _Values Before Vision_. 
You cannot have a vision of a self-reliant Nigeria with a mindset of dependency.

Until we divorce ourselves from the idea that “nothing moves without foreign money,” 
no amount of funding will save us.

THE CHALLENGE
Let this week be different. 
In your office, community, business: Solve one problem with what you already have. 
Before you ask for help, ask: _”What do we already own?”_

Because the truth is simple: 
We don’t need more money. We need more belief in us.

When the mind is right, the vision will work. 
When the values are right, the nation will rise.

CITIZEN RICHARD ODUSANYA
_Essayist | Architect of Dialogue_ 
_For: Truth Without Bitterness & Criticism Without Hate_ 
_Building: Freedom from segregation. Liberty from plunderers.

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

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Unending years, one child and a justice system still searching for evidence

  • * AWLA Nigeria President Caroline Ibharuneafe decries weak forensic capacity, prolonged trials and children held in adult prisons

More than five years after a primary-school girl was allegedly sexually assaulted by a teacher, the case is still before the courts, now on appeal — a delay the National President of the African Women Lawyers Association, Nigeria, (AWLA) Mrs. Caroline Ibharuneafe, cited as evidence of the difficulties confronting the prosecution of crimes against children.

Speaking at a recent Nigerian Bar Association-UNICEF, justice-sector gathering in Abuja, Ibharuneafe said the case involved a teacher who allegedly assaulted the child with his finger and argued that Nigeria must do far more to deploy forensic science and technology in the investigation of sexual offences.

In countries with stronger forensic systems, she noted, investigators have access to sophisticated methods for recovering and analysing biological and other trace evidence that can help establish what happened.

Nigeria, she argued, cannot continue to rely so heavily on conventional investigation when modern forensic tools could strengthen the evidence presented before the courts.

The point is not to replace testimony with technology, but to give investigators and prosecutors every credible means of establishing the facts, particularly in cases involving children where the passage of time can make evidence more difficult to recover and memories harder to test.

Research into Nigeria’s criminal investigations has similarly identified inadequate adoption of forensic technology as a factor affecting the effectiveness and speed of criminal prosecutions.

For Ibharuneafe, the problem extends beyond forensic science. She also condemned the continued detention of children in adult prisons, warning that a justice system cannot claim to protect children while exposing them to custodial environments designed for adults.

The two concerns point to the same weakness: Nigeria has laws intended to protect children, but the institutions, technology and professional capacity required to enforce those protections remain inadequate.

A child who has allegedly suffered sexual violence should not have to wait years for justice because the system cannot gather and process evidence efficiently. And a child accused of an offence should not be placed among adult prisoners because the country has failed to provide appropriate alternatives.

Nigeria does not need more promises about child protection alone. It needs the forensic capacity, specialised personnel and functioning institutions capable of turning those promises into justice.

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When Nigeria puts children behind adult prison walls, what future is it creating?

The shortage of specialised facilities, weak social-welfare services and inadequate rehabilitation programmes are leaving children in conflict with the law dangerously exposed

A child who comes into conflict with the law is supposed to encounter a justice system that recognises the difference between childhood and adulthood, protects the child’s dignity and seeks, wherever possible, to correct behaviour without destroying the young person’s prospects of returning to society.

In Nigeria, however, that principle can become difficult to sustain once the child leaves the courtroom.

Concerns raised at a recent Nigerian Bar Association-UNICEF, justice-sector gathering in Abuja point to a deeper institutional problem: the country has recognised in law that children require special treatment, but has not built enough of the infrastructure needed to make that protection meaningful.

There are too few specialised facilities, inadequate rehabilitation programmes and a serious shortage of professionally trained social workers, while children who should be kept apart from adult offenders can still find themselves within the correctional system alongside people many years their senior.

The Federal Capital Territory, participants noted, does not have a borstal institution, leaving Kaduna as the nearest facility for children requiring such placement. They also put the number of borstal institutions nationwide at only three, while citing the closure of a facility in Enugu after funding became insufficient to keep it operating.

For a country with millions of children and a legal framework that recognises their particular vulnerability, the gap between what the law prescribes and what the state can actually provide is difficult to overlook.

A system built around adults

Nigeria’s laws do not treat children in conflict with the law as ordinary adult offenders. The Child Rights Act and the Nigerian Correctional Service Act provide safeguards intended to ensure that children are treated according to their age and circumstances, including separation from adult inmates and access to specialised correctional and rehabilitation arrangements.

The same principle is reflected in international law. Article 37 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child provides that deprivation of liberty should be used for children only as a measure of last resort and for the shortest appropriate period, while children deprived of their liberty should generally be separated from adults.

The problem emerges when a child reaches a point at which the law requires a specialised response but the necessary institution is unavailable.

A court may determine that a child should be placed somewhere appropriate, yet an appropriate facility may be hundreds of kilometres away or, in practical terms, unavailable. A social worker may recommend an alternative to detention, but there may be no properly funded programme capable of taking responsibility for the child.

The result can be a justice process in which institutional limitations gradually determine the outcome.

When a building is mistaken for rehabilitation

The situation reportedly encountered in Enugu illustrates another weakness in the country’s approach to juvenile detention. Participants at the Abuja gathering said a borstal facility had been built but was subsequently shut because there was not enough money to operate it.

The lesson extends beyond Enugu.

A rehabilitation institution is not created simply by putting up walls, installing beds and attaching an official name to a building. Children placed there require teachers and counsellors, healthcare and vocational training, social workers and properly trained correctional personnel, together with programmes that keep them connected to their families and prepare them for life outside the institution.

Without those services, the physical facility may provide somewhere to keep a child without providing much of what the child actually needs.

UNICEF’s assessment of children and young adults deprived of liberty in Nigeria has previously identified gaps in detention facilities, services and institutional capacity, underscoring the need for alternatives to detention and stronger rehabilitation arrangements.

The consequence is a familiar one in public administration: infrastructure is easier to announce than the sustained investment required to keep it functioning.

The danger of putting children among adults

Few failures in the juvenile justice system carry more serious consequences than the detention of children alongside adults.

An adult correctional facility is designed around a population with different needs, experiences and risks. A child placed there may be exposed to violence, intimidation and criminal influences at precisely the stage of life when the state should be helping the child develop the skills and discipline necessary for adulthood.

The consequences may continue after release. A child who spends months in detention can lose valuable time in school, become disconnected from family and return to the community carrying the stigma and psychological effects of imprisonment. Exposure to adult offenders can also introduce young people to criminal networks and behaviour that they might otherwise never have encountered.

UNICEF has previously warned against children being held in adult correctional facilities in Nigeria. In November 2024, following the detention of children and young people in connection with the #EndBadGovernance protests, the organisation welcomed President Bola Tinubu’s directive for their release and reiterated the need to keep children away from adult correctional facilities.

The consequences of getting this wrong are therefore not confined to the period of detention. They can shape the child’s prospects long after the prison gate opens.

Why should a child be taken far from home?

The concerns raised in Abuja also included the movement of children across state boundaries for prosecution, sometimes leaving them far from their parents and communities.

There can be legitimate reasons for moving an accused person, particularly where safety or jurisdiction is involved. But when the accused is a child, distance carries consequences that deserve careful consideration.

Parents may struggle to attend proceedings or find a lawyer. Relatives may be unable to visit regularly. The court may receive less information about the child’s home circumstances, while the child loses the support of the people most likely to help with rehabilitation.

The family is not simply an audience to a child’s case. In many circumstances, it is part of the solution.

A juvenile justice system that separates a child from that support without compelling reason risks making rehabilitation harder than it needs to be.

The social workers who are missing from the picture

Much of the public conversation about criminal justice revolves around police officers, prosecutors, lawyers, judges and correctional officials. Less attention is paid to the professionals who can help determine what happens to a vulnerable child before the case becomes a custodial matter.

A properly trained social worker can investigate a child’s circumstances, trace parents or relatives, assess the home environment, identify abuse or neglect and advise the authorities on what intervention would best serve the child.

That work should not begin after a child has spent weeks in detention.

Participants at the Abuja gathering argued that trained social workers should be available at police stations, where early intervention could help identify children who need protection, family support, counselling or other forms of assistance rather than being pushed further into the criminal justice process.

The quality of that intervention matters. Social work cannot be treated as a convenient administrative function that can be handed to anyone available. It requires professional training and an understanding of child development, family dynamics, abuse, neglect and rehabilitation.

UNICEF’s child-protection work in Nigeria similarly emphasises the need to strengthen social-welfare services and professional capacity in dealing with vulnerable children.

A child who arrives at a police station because of homelessness, neglect, abuse, poverty or family breakdown may need protection long before the state decides whether the child should be prosecuted.

If the first substantial intervention comes only after arrest, an opportunity to deal with the underlying problem may already have been lost.

Who bears the cost of imprisonment?

The question of funding also surfaced during the Abuja discussions, with participants arguing that states should contribute to the feeding and care of inmates committed to correctional facilities through their courts instead of leaving the financial burden largely to the Federal Government.

The debate is broader than the cost of feeding prisoners.

When a state prosecutes an offence and its court orders detention, there is an obvious public cost attached to that decision. The same applies when children are remanded following proceedings before state courts. Yet responsibility for financing correctional facilities and maintaining prisoners has historically been caught in the wider tension between federal and state responsibilities.

The funding question becomes even more important when governments are expected to provide alternatives to imprisonment.

Diversion programmes, family interventions, social workers, counselling, vocational training and rehabilitation all require money. So does incarceration.

The choice is therefore not between spending and not spending. It is partly a choice between spending on rehabilitation and spending later on the consequences of failed rehabilitation.

The reported closure of the Enugu facility demonstrates what happens when capital expenditure is not matched by sustainable operational funding. A government may build a facility, but unless it can pay the people who work there, maintain the infrastructure and provide the programmes that give the institution a purpose, the investment will not achieve what it was intended to achieve.

What happens after the child leaves custody?

The real measure of a juvenile justice system should extend beyond the courtroom and beyond the prison gate.

A child who has been accused of an offence may eventually be released, acquitted, diverted or convicted. Whatever the outcome, the state still has to confront the question of what happens next.

Is the child able to return to school? Is there a family capable of providing support? Has abuse or neglect been addressed? Does the child have access to counselling or vocational training? Is there anyone monitoring the child’s reintegration into the community?

Without answers to those questions, release can amount to little more than a return to the circumstances that produced the original problem.

A child who has spent time in detention and returns to the same poverty, family instability, lack of education or harmful environment may be no better prepared to avoid another encounter with the law.

That is where rehabilitation becomes more than a slogan.

It is a long process that begins with understanding why the child came into conflict with the law and continues until the child has a realistic chance of rebuilding a normal life.

The cost of giving up on children

There is a temptation to regard children accused of offences primarily through the lens of the harm they may have caused. Victims deserve justice, and communities have a legitimate interest in safety. None of that should be diminished.

But public safety also depends on what happens to young offenders.

A child who can be redirected away from crime represents a future problem prevented. A child who is exposed to adult criminal environments, removed from school and returned to an unstable home without meaningful support may become considerably harder to reintegrate.

The choice is therefore not between being soft on crime and protecting children.

It is about recognising that rehabilitation can itself be an instrument of public safety.

The state cannot legislate rehabilitation into existence

Nigeria has already accepted, through its laws and international commitments, that children require a justice response different from that applied to adults.

What remains inadequate is the machinery needed to deliver that promise.

Specialised facilities must not only be constructed but kept open. Social workers must be properly trained, employed and deployed where children first come into contact with the state. Rehabilitation programmes need predictable funding, while federal and state authorities must resolve the financial responsibilities attached to custody.

Courts, police, correctional institutions and social-welfare agencies also need to work as parts of the same child-protection chain rather than as disconnected offices that encounter the child at different stages.

The question facing Nigeria is therefore larger than where to keep children accused of offences.

It is whether the country is prepared to invest in what happens to them before, during and after their encounter with the law.

A child who enters the justice system has not ceased to be a child. The state may have a duty to hold that child accountable where an offence has been established, but it also has a responsibility to ensure that the punishment does not become a permanent sentence against the child’s future.

If Nigeria wants safer communities tomorrow, it cannot afford to abandon vulnerable children today.

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Every Child Deserves a Lawyer: NBA, UNICEF launch pro bono drive to rebuild Nigeria’s child justice system

  • * The Bar, UNICEF demand child-sensitive justice as thousands of vulnerable children confront detention, delays and inadequate legal representation

The Nigerian Bar Association and UNICEF have launched a nationwide partnership to expand free legal representation for children, warning that a justice system that leaves vulnerable children without lawyers risks turning legal vulnerability into a lifelong disadvantage.

The partnership, formally launched in Abuja on Monday, is designed to mobilise lawyers across the country to provide pro bono representation to children, strengthen links between the justice and child-protection systems and improve the ability of legal practitioners to handle cases involving children.

For the NBA President, Mazi Afam Osigwe, SAN, the initiative goes to the heart of what the legal profession is supposed to do.

He said the absence of legal representation for a child who cannot afford a lawyer was not simply a gap in service but a failure of the justice system.

“Access to justice is not a privilege. It is the fundamental right of every child,” was the thrust of the message delivered at the gathering on behalf of the Attorney-General of the Federation, as stakeholders pressed for a justice system that treats children differently from adults.

UNICEF Country Representative in Nigeria, Wafaa Saeed, said children encountering the justice system continue to face detention without legal representation, prolonged case delays, weak referral systems and inadequate access to diversion and support services.

“Access to justice is not simply a legal issue. It is a child protection issue, a development issue, and a matter of human dignity,” Saeed said.

The partnership seeks to address that gap by strengthening pro bono legal services, building the capacity of lawyers, improving referral pathways and supporting diversion and rehabilitation for children in conflict with the law.

When the law arrives without a lawyer

The stakes are particularly high for children who come into contact with the criminal justice system.

A child who does not understand the proceedings, has no lawyer to make an application for bail or diversion and remains in detention while a case moves slowly through the courts can spend months in custody for an offence that might ultimately attract a non-custodial response.

UNICEF’s national assessment of children and young adults deprived of liberty in Nigeria identified detention, institutional weaknesses and gaps in services as significant problems requiring coordinated reform.

The organisation’s own example is stark: a child can spend months in detention for a minor offence simply because nobody is available to advocate for diversion or alternative care, only for a lawyer’s intervention to result in release, reunification with family and a return to school.

For the NBA, that is precisely where pro bono service must become practical rather than ceremonial.

Osigwe called on NBA branches to establish or strengthen child-focused pro bono schemes, urged law firms to dedicate professional time to child-protection cases and asked Senior Advocates of Nigeria to mentor younger lawyers in child-sensitive practice.

He also challenged lawyers to regard pro bono work as part of the profession’s public responsibility, rather than as an optional act of charity.

The missing child-sensitive approach

The stakeholders’ concern goes beyond the availability of lawyers.

Several speakers at the meeting questioned practices that can turn ordinary court procedures into disproportionately harsh experiences for children, including the reluctance to entertain oral applications for bail and the continued tendency to process children through systems designed primarily for adults.

The NBA President argued that courts should function as enablers of justice and questioned why an oral application for bail should be rejected where circumstances make immediate intervention necessary.

The debate reflects a wider concern over whether procedure is sometimes being allowed to overshadow the central question: what serves the best interests of the child?

UNICEF has urged judicial officers to adopt child-sensitive procedures, including mandatory age determination and consideration of diversion where a child is brought before a court.

That proposal is significant because age can determine whether a child is protected by the special safeguards of child justice or processed as an adult offender.

Presumption of innocence cannot disappear

Another concern raised at the meeting was the apparent erosion of the presumption of innocence in the treatment of children accused of offences.

Speakers questioned the practice of moving children away from their parents and communities to face prosecution in distant states, and the tendency to attach the label of “criminal” to children whose cases have not been determined by a court.

A child accused of an offence remains entitled to due process.

That principle does not disappear because the accused is poor, without representation or unable to navigate the justice system.

Nor should the fact that a child has been accused become a justification for exposing that child to an environment likely to cause further harm.

UNICEF’s position is explicit: every child who is a victim, survivor, witness or accused deserves fair treatment, due process and the opportunity to have their voice heard.

Beyond the courtroom

The partnership also recognises that lawyers cannot repair the child justice system alone.

The NBA’s opening remarks specifically identified government institutions, the judiciary, police, correctional authorities, Legal Aid Council, civil society organisations, development partners and community actors as essential to the process.

UNICEF similarly called for stronger coordination among lawyers, social workers, police officers, correctional personnel and judicial officers, with diversion and rehabilitation prioritised where appropriate.

That multidisciplinary approach matters because a child who enters the justice system often needs far more than a lawyer.

The child may need a social worker to trace the family, a counsellor to address trauma, a police officer trained in child protection, a court equipped to hear the matter appropriately and a system capable of ensuring that the child can return safely to school and community life.

Nigeria’s child-protection system remains under considerable pressure. UNICEF’s 2025 data showed that two out of every three Nigerian children live in multidimensional poverty, while the organisation has repeatedly called for stronger investment in child protection, social welfare and public services.

The test is what happens after launch day

The NBA-UNICEF partnership is significant, but its success will ultimately be measured outside the conference room.

It will be measured by the child who gets a lawyer before spending months in detention.

It will be measured by the child whose age is properly established before arraignment.

It will be measured by the child diverted from custody and reunited with family.

It will be measured by the survivor of abuse who is able to navigate the justice system without being further traumatised.

And it will be measured by whether children who come into contact with the law emerge with a future rather than a criminal identity.

Saeed put the test plainly: the partnership should produce a justice system in which no child faces the law alone, detention remains a last resort and rehabilitation takes precedence over stigma.

For the NBA, the challenge is equally clear. As Osigwe said, every child should have a lawyer ready to stand beside them when their rights are violated.

The question now is whether Nigeria can build the machinery around that lawyer capable of ensuring that the child’s rights survive every stage of the justice process.

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Nadia Built the Home. Who will build the system Nigeria’s vulnerable children need?

At 16, the daughter of Senator Natasha Akpoti-Uduaghan has built and equipped an orphanage in Kogi — an act of generosity that also exposes the harsh reality facing millions of Nigerian children and the people struggling to care for them

At 15, when many teenagers are still deciding what they want to do with their weekends, Nadia Zakaria had already decided that she wanted to build a home for children who had not been as fortunate as she was.

A year later, the idea has become a building.

Nadia, the 16-year-old daughter of Senator Natasha Akpoti-Uduaghan, representing Kogi Central Senatorial District, has built, furnished and equipped an orphanage home for Oyiza-Salem Divine Orphanage Home in Etahi Community, Okene Local Government Area of Kogi State, raising funds through donations from family, friends and members of the public.

The facility was commissioned on Sunday and formally handed over to the management of the orphanage, giving children who had previously lived in difficult conditions a safer and more dignified place to sleep, study and grow.

For Nadia, however, the building represents more than a completed project.

It began with a question.

She had grown up in what she described as a loving and supportive home and, as she became increasingly aware of children whose circumstances were very different from hers, began wondering why some children should have to grow up without the security and opportunities she had taken for granted.

“Don’t they deserve to feel safe, loved and cared for too?” she asked.

That question eventually became a fundraising campaign, a construction project and, finally, a home.

But it also raises a much larger question about the millions of Nigerian children whose welfare depends on families, charities, religious organisations, community groups and individuals who often operate with limited resources and little institutional support.

A gift that exposes a much bigger problem

Nigeria’s child-welfare crisis is considerably larger than the number of children living in formal orphanages.

The latest UNICEF Nigerian Child 2025 report found that two out of every three children in Nigeria live in multidimensional poverty, meaning they lack access to some of the essentials needed to grow and thrive, including adequate healthcare, education, nutrition, protection, clean water and proper living conditions.

The problem is not confined to children who have lost both parents.

Millions of children live in households where parents are struggling to provide food, school fees, healthcare, adequate housing and protection. Others are affected by displacement, violence, child labour, disability, family breakdown and other circumstances that can leave them vulnerable.

An earlier national analysis by the Federal Government and UNICEF found that 54 per cent of Nigerian children were multidimensionally poor, with deprivation considerably higher in rural communities than in urban areas.

That makes what happened in Etahi more significant than a new building.

The home may accommodate a limited number of children, but the circumstances that produced the need for such homes affect millions.

Before Nadia arrived

The founder of Oyiza-Salem Divine Orphanage Home, Pastor Kisito Zuberu, offered the clearest picture of the conditions from which the children were being sheltered.

“When they came last year, the children were sleeping on the ground,” he said.

That sentence says more about the problem than the size of the new building.

The orphanage had continued to support the children’s education and development despite financial difficulties, according to Zuberu. Its challenge was not necessarily a lack of commitment to the children but the resources required to translate that commitment into adequate living conditions.

Nadia’s intervention has now changed the physical environment.

The larger challenge is ensuring that the organisation can sustain the standard of care.

An orphanage is not simply a roof, beds and furniture. Children who have lost parental care need food, healthcare, education, psychosocial support, protection, trained caregivers and systems capable of responding when they are abused, become ill or face other vulnerabilities.

That requires money, professional support and consistent oversight.

The people who care for the children

This is one part of Nigeria’s child-welfare debate that receives comparatively little public attention.

The country often celebrates donors who construct buildings or provide food, school materials and other immediate assistance. Much less attention goes to the people who remain after the cameras leave: caregivers, social workers, teachers, counsellors, health professionals and administrators who have to meet the children’s needs every day.

Their work cannot be sustained by goodwill alone.

A functioning child-protection system requires trained social workers who can assess children’s circumstances, monitor their welfare, work with families, arrange appropriate care and intervene when children face abuse or neglect.

It also requires properly funded public institutions capable of supervising residential care and ensuring that children are not simply moved from one vulnerable environment into another.

UNICEF’s work on social policy in Nigeria has repeatedly stressed the need for stronger child-sensitive policies, public financing and social-protection systems capable of reaching vulnerable children and families.

The issue is therefore not whether private individuals should build orphanages.

They should be encouraged to help.

The issue is whether charity should have to carry such a large share of a responsibility that ultimately belongs to the wider child-protection system.

Nigeria’s missing safety net

A functioning social-welfare system is supposed to intervene before a child’s circumstances become a crisis.

When a family loses its income, social protection should help prevent children from being pushed out of school.

When parents cannot afford healthcare, the system should help prevent illness from becoming a catastrophe.

When a child is abandoned, abused or separated from family, trained social workers and child-protection agencies should be able to identify the child, assess the circumstances and arrange appropriate care.

When a family is struggling, the first response should ideally be support that keeps children safely within their families and communities whenever that is in their best interests.

Residential care has a place, but it should not become a substitute for a functioning family-support and child-protection system.

UNICEF’s research makes the connection clear: child poverty is not simply a question of household income. It encompasses deprivation in housing, nutrition, education, healthcare, sanitation, water and protection, which means the response must extend beyond occasional donations.

Charity cannot carry the entire burden

Nadia’s story is inspiring precisely because she did something tangible.

She did not simply speak about vulnerable children. She raised money, found support and turned an idea into a physical structure.

She also demonstrated something that is often lost in discussions about young Nigerians: age does not necessarily determine the capacity to contribute meaningfully to society.

She acknowledged that fundraising initially appeared almost impossible because she was only 15 and had never undertaken such a project.

Yet family members, friends and strangers contributed, enabling her to complete the construction and furnish the building.

Her mother, Senator Akpoti-Uduaghan, said she did not contribute financially to the project and that Nadia independently raised the money used to construct and furnish the facility.

The senator also disclosed that her daughter was already developing plans for another humanitarian project, this time aimed at pregnant women in Kogi Central.

Those efforts deserve recognition.

But they should not allow government to retreat further from its responsibilities.

The existence of generous citizens is not evidence that a social-welfare system is unnecessary. In a properly functioning system, private generosity should complement public protection rather than substitute for it.

The child behind the statistic

It is easy to read that two out of every three Nigerian children live in multidimensional poverty and move on to the next statistic.

The children at Oyiza-Salem make the numbers tangible.

A child sleeping on a bare floor is not a statistic.

A child missing school because there is no money for fees or books is not a statistic.

A child who cannot receive medical attention when sick is not a statistic.

A child growing up without a stable adult capable of protecting and guiding them is not a statistic.

Each represents a failure of a support system that is supposed to prevent circumstances beyond a child’s control from determining the rest of his or her life.

UNICEF’s 2025 assessment of Nigerian children similarly found persistent gaps in education, healthcare, nutrition, protection and other areas, despite progress in some indicators.

What happens after the cameras leave?

The new building should therefore be the beginning of another conversation.

Who will pay for the children’s food six months from now?

Who will provide healthcare when one of them becomes seriously ill?

Who will ensure that every child remains in school?

Who will provide counselling to children dealing with grief, abandonment or trauma?

Who will train and support the caregivers?

Who will inspect the home and ensure that the children are safe?

And when a child reaches adulthood, what happens next?

These are not questions Nadia, at 16, should be expected to answer.

They are questions for the institutions responsible for child welfare.

The Nigerian state has obligations to children under its laws and international commitments, while social-protection policy is increasingly recognised as an essential part of protecting children from poverty and exclusion. UNICEF has continued to call for stronger systems that combine financial support with access to health, education and other essential services.

A home is a beginning

For now, there is reason to celebrate what Nadia has achieved.

Children who were reportedly sleeping on the ground have a new home. Rooms have been furnished. A community has witnessed a teenager turn an idea into something tangible.

That is no small achievement.

But perhaps the most important lesson from Etahi is not that a 16-year-old can build an orphanage.

It is that she saw a problem that adults and institutions have struggled to solve and decided that her age was not a reason to look away.

The building she handed over may shelter a relatively small number of children.

The need outside its walls is vastly greater.

Nigeria’s challenge is to ensure that children do not have to depend on the extraordinary generosity of individual teenagers, philanthropists or overwhelmed caregivers to obtain what should be basic guarantees of childhood: safety, food, education, healthcare, dignity and the chance to grow into adulthood without poverty deciding their future.

Nadia has built a home.

The larger task is to build the system that makes such homes less necessary, while ensuring that every child who does need one is protected, supported and given a genuine chance to thrive.

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Onaiyekan, President’s aroko and an enemy’s playbook, By Lanre Adewole

In his successful re-election run in 2019, then-Kaduna governor, Nasir El-Rufai, cocked a snook at the Holy Quran’s prodding in Surah An-Nisa (4:36), which expressly commands believers to be good to near neighbours, distant neighbours and companions.

El-Rufai is Muslim. In a state of about 10 million dwellers, with a slight majority being of his faith, his near and distant neighbours are bound to be Muslims and non-Muslims alike, particularly Christians who make up almost half of the population.

The Holy Bible also teaches good neighbourliness with the parable of the Good Samaritan. Jesus admonishes us to love our neighbours as ourselves.

But El-Rufai chose to firm up the “house” on just one side, as the Yoruba will describe deliberate, mean one-sidedness, scripted favouritism to aid a side in a plural setting or a jaundiced opinion.

Governors before him reckoned the state a metaphoric bird, which would only fly successfully with two “wings”, and Muslim-Christian governorship pairing became somewhat of a creed.

In fairness, he tried to sustain the arrangement, starting out as governor in 2015 with faith-balancing in the government house. But you can only pretend for so long. What is not in you isn’t in you. What is not you is not you. If El-Rufai has love in his heart for his neighbours, it isn’t borderless. His love isn’t faith-blind and before the expiration of his first term, he was done pretending to “love” his Christian neighbours.

My people will say “eni amori i ba ku” (roughly translates as “who cares”). He ditched the “creed” for his re-election and, though aware of likely consequences, he chose to ride the storm. And he survived; successfully keeping millions of Christians in the state away from governance mainstream for four years. And to demonstrate his total conviction that the seeming aberration should be the norm, he tied the same arrangement around the waist of his hand-picked successor, now-sworn enemy, Uba Sani.

The Yoruba will say a prawn thief hardly stops at just one crunch. If a bite is sweet, even if a bit rattling for the molars, it’s certain there will be another go at it. Possibly sensing his Muslim pick for the Christian replacement as some kind of lucky charm, he added her to the succeeding APC ticket of 2023, but unlike four years earlier, when the sail was manageably turbulent, the Muslim-Muslim ticket of the ruling party was practically ripped to pieces before it was scrapped together by the jurisprudential ingenuity of one man.

El-Rufai, or more like the one who inherited his divisive ticket, found out the hard way that there is a limit to being polarising. There are times it’s wise to let sleeping dogs lie, regardless of the bile in the soul.

That four years ago, El-Rufai was also an active promoter of the APC Muslim-Muslim presidential ticket, headed by today’s incumbent, Bola Tinubu. When the election was over and the ticket “succeeded”, he was seen in viral videos boasting in Hausa language to Islamic clerics that the “one-sided” option would be the national template, going forward. He seemed to have his blueprint and appeared to be coasting until the ministerial confirmation crisis and he became a virulent opponent of the Muslim-Muslim presidency and Kaduna government he helped make.

Riro ni teniyan (Man proposes, God disposes). The man who didn’t want an inclusive national and sub-national leadership is today in forced seclusion, almost forgotten by all, save his family. This is not mocking him. But the man should check his heart. I overheard some of his new political associates in ADC rejoicing he’s locked up because he was already becoming a disruptive figure. Some are praying he won’t be out until after the general election.

Kaduna is also leaving his “legacy” in the bin, with practically all leading candidates for the 2027 governorship, including the incumbent Sani, settling for a “mixed” Muslim-Christian ticket. That was total repudiation back home.

But at the federal level, the presidential ticket of the ruling party remains a relic of El-Rufai’s playbook. And APC is the only party fielding it!

To be clear, APC’s no-Christian presidential ticket isn’t novel. And the “victorious” Muslim-Muslim ticket of 2023 wasn’t even the first time such an idea would “succeed” in Nigeria’s political ecosystem.

MKO Abiola and Babagana Kingibe “succeeded” with it in 1993, only that they didn’t become President and Vice. They had an unexecuted mandate. Tinubu and Shettima were, however, luckier 30 years after.

But the Nigeria of 30 years ago was different. Rats were somewhat squeaking like rats. Birds also chirping the way they should, as my tribe would couch a settling situation. There was no Boko Haram, which started by targeting non-Muslims and now operating without borders. There were no organised banditry syndicates. Occasional kidnappings then had little or nothing to do with an industry-like crime of today. Miyetti Allah, as a pressure/advocacy group, fighting for cow rights, only existed deep into the grazing forests (though it was actually formed in 1979), unlike today, where its leaders shape national policies. Yes, there were occasional bloody inter-tribal wars and even sprinkles of religious bloodletting, but never on the scale being witnessed today.

Everybody is now trying to put their money where their mouth is to ensure their portion isn’t used as toppings for others who already have in excess and you are trying to remove their mouth? How does that guarantee peace and unity?

In many majority-Muslim Northern states, their official protocol list is always a one-sided compilation, regardless of the population of the adherents of other faiths. In Kebbi, for example, the first 10 citizens of the state under the current administration are of the same faith. The question is, who speaks for the rest, in a system the Yoruba will describe as everybody grabbing, holding and steadying their heads. A less conservative rendering will put it as everybody carrying their mother’s breasts.

When El-Rufai was running the Muslim-Muslim governorship, all the heads of the three arms of government in the state and at least the first five citizens were of the same faith! He was governor. Hadiza Balarabe was deputy. Two assembly speakers who served during his terms; Aminu Shagali and Yusuf Ibrahim Zailani. Then the state chief judge; Muhammad Bello Lawal!

This is in a state almost evenly split between the two major faiths! While Muslims dominate 12 local governments, Christians are mostly found in 11, with a very visible presence in the Kaduna metropolis (you can mistake some parts of the city for Onitsha. Nearly all the shops I branched into during my last visit had non-Muslim Igbo operators. The shoes I got were from a charming Igbo lady).

So how about the El-Rufai model for fairness in a state where the Christian community has shouted itself hoarse over alleged sustained persecution? Same for Kebbi, where a whole emirate is almost 90% Christian, densely located in multiple local governments. This is the part where Sani is handed his flowers for course-correcting.

In any state in Nigeria where the minority, by faith or tribe, is up to 25% of the population, it should become a documented convention for the minority to be represented at least among the first three citizens of the state, regardless of faith or tribe domination. The Kaduna, Kebbi situation isn’t limited to Muslim-majority states. Christian-majority states with enough population of non-Christians should also stop the majority-take-all approach. Without inclusion, there won’t be peace, except if there are other agendas beyond the minority trying to get their voice heard.

With the retention of the Muslim-Muslim ticket by President Tinubu, he has stopped being pretentious with agitators, including Washington, for a “mixed” ticket for his re-election. And he’s confident of the “untainted” ticket taking him through, though things are likely to be rougher than last time in 2023. Just like El-Rufai, the first win had bolstered the confidence of the President. If he could do it as a private citizen, just like he boasted the other day to his party men, what or who would stop him now, as president? The Catholic Bishops who went to “see” him didn’t factor his current mindset into presenting their worries. And then their leader went and sprinkled frankincense on a smouldering situation. What was the Kabba-born cardinal expecting? A hug and a peck?

Yes, in 2023, Asiwaju’s camp would have found ways of deodorising the effects of such criticism without appearing to be damning the over 40-million Catholic faithful in Nigeria, about one-sixth of the country’s assumed population. But who needs the Catholics now, even with their numbers?

An election had been won without their open support, so what can their open opposition do? And the President apparently sanctioning the skewering and stewing of Onaiyekan should be a warning to other faith leaders, who might want to tutor the Nigerian leader on governance. They would have to moderate themselves or be challenged to throw off the cassock and find a way to be on the ballot. That was what El-Rufai did in 2019 and repeated in 2023.

But APC, his party then, almost paid dearly for it. Isa Ashiru of then-PDP and now of ADC (the one El-Rufai fought just about four years ago, all the way to the Supreme Court on Uba Sani’s behalf, is now the governorship candidate of El-Rufai’s party and embracing a Muslim-Christian ticket), who stayed with the “balanced” Muslim-Christian ticket, is widely believed to have lost the election to sleighting by the party at the centre, controlling critical election infrastructure.

As ADC candidate for the next-year poll, Ashiru is staying the course. Uba is also now a “believer”, with his new Christian running mate, Jerry Adam. Only the President is holding on to his political “faith” and the gloves are off.

Christian leaders, caveat emptor!

Even at the risk of sounding immodest, I will say my South West represents the closest to the model of ticket “unity” being preached here.

Currently, it has five Christian governors with one Chrislam. The five govs all have five Muslim deputies. For my state’s Chrislam gov, his deputy is Christian. The equitable “ticketing” is likely to subsist beyond 2027 as projections favour a mix, though of the four APC candidates seeking to rule Osun, Oyo, Lagos and Ogun, where governorship elections are pending, only Solomon Adeola of Ogun is Christian. This can’t be deliberate. Or is it?

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

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Fayose’s bedroom electrification, By Lasisi Olagunju

Starting a week with the joke of a joke can be very distressing. The ‘architect of modern Ekiti State’, Mr Ayodele Fayose, started his job as chairman of the Rural Electrification Agency board with a farce. And he is trending. At his farcical best, he reduced rural electrification to nights, nightlife and baby-making. Give the people electricity and they will stop uncontrolled procreation, he said on national television.

Coming from Fayose, I am not shocked by the indelicacy of the ‘joke’; the shock is in the poverty of thought behind it. Electricity, to the genius of Ekiti, is not about powering factories, farms and rural businesses; it is about keeping husbands away from their wives after 7 p.m. ‘Bedroom electrification’ and ‘sexualisation of electricity’. These are the latest additions to ‘stomach infrastructure’, Fayose’s earlier contribution to the lexicon of our democracy.

Beyond orgies and the carnality of the night, I hope Fayose knows that he is chairman of the agency’s board, and not its chief executive. I hope he knows the difference between full and half-full. His new seat may not be as royal and golden as the gubernatorial throne he sat on in Ado Ekiti. I pray that the spirit of fight does not enter the agency. I pray against sparks between the boardroom and the management, against short circuits of authority, and against the spirit of smelly farts and viral scandals.

“Allow not nature more than nature needs…” With that line from Shakespeare’s King Lear, I move from Fayose’s unrestrained sex talk to his interesting philosophy of need, excess and entitlement.

Days before his “inaugural lecture” on the conjugality of rural electrification, Fayose was in Ekiti asserting the right of the god he imagines himself to be to the till of his poor state.

“We have served this state. Priority must be given to former governors going forward. You must take very good care of me henceforth. I am growing old, almost 70, my strength is failing, I must be taken care of very well because I have paid my dues for this state.

“I need more medical care; I should travel abroad to enjoy myself, and also, I should be given an official vehicle with a pilot vehicle. The law as passed by the House of Assembly stipulates that the government should be changing our vehicles every three years. You are almost four years in office, I am yet to be given one. You must do that, Mr Governor.”

Fayose, former governor of Ekiti State and the new chairman of REA, publicly made the above demand of the Ekiti State governor last week. While he insists we must understand electricity in terms of sex and nightlife, he constructs his welfare as entitlement to state resources.

Ekiti’s ex-governor would reject any word that teaches moderation. That is why the operative word in his demand is the imperative: “must.” Fayose ordered the gentleman governor to “take very good care” of him with the state’s resources. And he was loud about it. His justification is that as governor for almost four-plus-four years, he has “paid his dues” and therefore deserves to be pampered.

I thought it was settled in Yorubaland that one does not get out of the way for ‘I-used-to-ride-a-horse’. What level of “care” would ever be enough for a yesterday’s horseman? If you ask me, who should I ask? Certainly not the audience that heard Fayose. They did not find his open expression of entitlement funny. I watched the video for clues. The faces told their own story.

I pity his colleagues, former governors who did not ask him to do babiallah (alms-begging) on their behalf but are nevertheless drenched in the ‘gbas gbos’ rainfall that follows. His unfeeling demands are magnets for umbrage. And resentment is corrosive to politics and democracy. A demand such as the one from the professor of stomach infrastructure is bound to provoke proverbs.

And proverbs are the horses of words. This moment, the words that come to me ask: What is an egungun doing with baskets near people’s farms? Elders who observe that masquerade would quickly warn farmers who have yams in their heaps: Do not sleep with both eyes closed. The proverb is shorter and more elegant when said in Yoruba: Eegun alágbọ̀n tí ó fi ọ̀nà oko ṣe ìgbàlẹ̀, àgbẹ̀ tó bá ní iṣu l’ébè kó má ṣ’àfira.

The definition of greed is what Fayose said and how he said it. For his ‘services’ to the Villa, the president rewarded him with the chairmanship of an agency with projects across the country. The combined 2026 budget of Fayose’s REA exceeds half a trillion naira. The 2026 budget document says it is N531 billion. Presiding over such a chest for a roving hyena is hardly a token blessing. Yet, like Oliver Twist in the workhouse, the former governor is asking for “some more” from Ekiti State whose 2026 budget is a paltry N415.57 billion.

I know that you, reading or listening to Fayose, would ask: Is this former governor a perennial child who must be fed for the rest of his life at public expense? Does public office create a lifetime entitlement to the taxpayers’ purse? If political service is truly service, should it become an endless claim on the commonwealth? And, the prebendal audacity that made that open demand, where did it come from?

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Section 124 (5) of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria 1999 states that “Provisions may be made by law of a House of Assembly for the grant of a pension or gratuity to or in respect of a person who had held office as governor or deputy governor and was not removed from office as a result of impeachment; and any pension granted by virtue of any provision made in pursuance of this sub-section shall be made in a charge upon the consolidated revenue of the state.” There is a similar provision for the president and vice president.

In the above provision, the constitution has already provided for the post-office life of a governor without a second address. The abuse of that provision is captured in two Yoruba names: Oladejo, which means Ola has become eight, and Oladeji, which translates as Ola is doubled. Politicians would rather bear Oladejo; Oladeji is too meagre for the life they live. Caustic criticism would say it is greed that makes a man bear Oladejo when two should be enough.

They have continued to abuse the constitution, and they are not going to say sorry for the assault. What can we do about those abused provisions of the Constitution? Nothing, unfortunately. The provisions and the abusive children they birthed in state laws will not disappear because their beneficiaries — ex-governors — make up the big boys in the Senate. No child willingly smashes the pricey feeding bottle from which he sucks.

The constitution permits some privileges. Yes. But, as someone said, permission is not prescription, and provision is not a blank cheque. Besides, if all the horses are given to the king, what will his subjects ride? The constitution, which permits states to legislate pensions, does not constitutionalise an unlimited duty to pamper former governors.

What is it that an ex-governor did for the state that entitles him to an eternity of entitlement? Can a democracy sustainably carry a political class that will never stop drawing from the public trough long after it has left elective office? When is enough enough?

In one of the Aláwìíyé series, the poet tells of the overfed cricket whose greedy fingers pierced its own bloated belly. How much state care does a leader need before, like that cricket, his own greed bursts his belly?

Restraint is dead. The vehicle of this democracy has lost its axles. A few days ago, Kano State governor, Abba Yusuf, allocated 1,540 plots of land and presented a ₦100 million cash gift to members of his All Progressives Congress (APC) Polling Unit Supporters Association, known in Hausa as Yan’akwati. An exasperated lady on Arise TV read the report aloud, paused and asked: “What does that mean?”

In ‘Politicians, Professionalisation and Anti-Politics’ (2018), scholars Paul Fawcett and Jack Corbett ask: “Why are politicians so unpopular?” They point to the “professionalisation of politics” and the emergence of “a professionalised political class that is increasingly detached from ‘ordinary citizens’.” When the man and woman on the street nurse hunger on the dusty footpath of life, and a governor fetes polling unit henchmen with lands and cash, and an overfed ex-governor demands to be freighted “abroad to enjoy” himself at public expense, neither the politician, his politics nor the democracy that sustains his privileges can expect the goodwill of the people. All three are doomed to be poisoned by the bad looks of the hungry.

How much comfort does a former ‘king’ need?

Russian writer, Leo Tolstoy, in his 1886 short story, ‘How Much Land Does a Man Need?’, tells the story of Pahom, a peasant whose appetite grows with every acquisition. He starts with 40 acres, moves on to 125, rents more land and is preparing to buy 1,300 acres when he hears of a neighbouring clan who possesses vast stretches of fertile land and who sells it almost for nothing. He approaches the clan and their chief makes him an irresistible offer: “Our price is always the same: one thousand rubles a day.” For that sum, the chief says, Pahom may have all the land he can walk around in one day, provided he returns to his starting point before sunset: “We shall go to any spot you like, and stay there. You must start from that spot and make your round, taking a spade with you. Wherever you think necessary, make a mark. At every turning, dig a hole and pile up the turf; then afterwards, we will go round with a plow from hole to hole. You may make as large a circuit as you please, but before the sun sets, you must return to the place you started from. All the land you cover will be yours.”

Really? The greed in Pahom whistles. The man sets out at dawn, taking this, holding that. He becomes like the potter who wants all the soil to be clay. Pahom keeps taking hectares after acres. He takes fields, he takes meadows, and adds entire steppes to them. But every time he thinks he has taken enough, he sees another fertile stretch that he cannot bear to leave out. He walks farther and farther until, suddenly, the sinking sun reminds him that possession has a deadline. He races desperately back towards the starting point, exhausted but unwilling to surrender what he has claimed. He reaches the hillock, the starting point, just as the sun sets, to the cheers of the locals.

But, very exhausted Pahom, that very moment of victory and achievement, drops dead.

The man won his enormous estate but lost everything. The storyteller has one final measurement to make. He says the land-grabber’s servant “picked up the spade and dug a grave long enough for Pahom to lie in, and buried him in it. Six feet from his head to his heels was all he needed.” That is all the land every man ultimately needs — and, in the end, the only land we will all get. Pray that our leaders learn, before their own final measurements are taken, when to tell themselves: ENOUGH.

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

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A Personal Tribute to a Legal Titan: Professor Alfred Bandele Kasunmu SAN (1936-2026) — Prof. Fabian Ajogwu, SAN

A great Iroko of the Inner Bar has fallen. A gentleman of the finest mould and a distinguished Learned Senior Advocate has taken his final bow. It was with sadness that I received the news from his family earlier today, August 9, 2026.

I first encountered Professor Kasunmu as a young lawyer in the early 1990s, at the Lagos High Court. I watched, transfixed, as he addressed the Court with a refinement of language and a brilliance of advocacy that left an indelible impression on my mind. Even then, I knew I was in the presence of greatness.

His name would forever be synonymous with legal excellence, intellectual rigour, and unimpeachable integrity. It was only through the privilege of knowing the man himself, beyond the robes and the citations, that I came to fully grasp the true measure of his towering stature.

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Professor Kasunmu was a colossus in the legal profession and a luminous beacon in legal education. As a Senior Advocate of Nigeria, he wielded the law as a noble instrument of justice and social transformation through persuasion. In the courtroom and classroom, he commanded respect through his wisdom and the quiet, dignity of his carriage.

To many of us in the legal profession, he was the gold standard, the benchmark against which we must measure our own aspirations and carriage. Prof was a mentor whose footsteps we sought to trace, even when we knew the path was steep and the pace formidable. His dedication to the law, his tireless service to humanity, and his high moral compass have left an indelible imprint on our professional and personal journeys.

I join the Kasunmu family in mourning this irreplaceable loss.

May his gentle soul, through the mercy of God, rest in peace.

Prof. Fabian Ajogwu OFR, SAN

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Three transitions, three pioneers — Eyimofe Atake, SAN

The passing of Professor Alfred Bandele Kasunmu, SAN invites a question our profession will be asking in the days ahead: was he the first to transit from academia to legal practice? The answer becomes clean once we separate three distinct crossings, each with its own pioneer.

The first crossing is from the academy to public legal office, and it belongs to Taslim Olawale Elias. From scholarship he went to office and then to the Bench: independent Nigeria’s first Attorney General in 1960, Chief Justice of Nigeria in 1972, and ultimately Judge and later President of the International Court of Justice. But Elias never stood at the private bar; office and the Bench were his destination, not advocacy.

The second crossing, often overlooked, is from the academy to the rank of Silk itself, and it belongs to Professor Ben Nwabueze, made a Senior Advocate of Nigeria in 1978, expressly on the strength of his published works. His, however, was a scholar’s Silk: he remained, in vocation and identity, a man of the academy and of public affairs.

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The third crossing is the one that belongs to Professor Kasunmu, and the record states it precisely: he resigned his chair at the University of Lagos in 1978, founded Prof. A. B. Kasunmu Chambers in the same year, took Silk in January 1979, and built a celebrated full time practice, counsel to the Central Bank of Nigeria, the NDIC and leading banks among others. He was, therefore, the first professor of law to cross fully and permanently into private advocacy of renown, chambers, briefs and courtroom.

One qualification completes the picture. Even Kasunmu’s crossing was bridged, not leapt: he was a consultant in the chambers of the late Chief F. R. A. Williams, SAN from 1972 to 1978, and served as Attorney General of Lagos State from 1975 to 1978. The true contrast with Elias is that office was Elias’s destination and merely Kasunmu’s bridge; the private bar was where Kasunmu was going all along.

On this footing, each of the three keeps his own first: Elias, first to the summit of public legal office; Nwabueze, first academic to wear Silk; Kasunmu, first professor to make renowned private advocacy his life’s vocation. May his gentle soul rest in perfect peace.

Eyimofe Atake, SAN, PhD (Cantab)

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