In the midst of the reports and counterclaims about genocide, monitoring unconscionable religious crusaders is now pertinent, writes Monday Philips Ekpe

First, a tribute. Chief Dan Agbese, accomplished journalist and writer, who has just passed on is being showered with well-deserved panegyrics from several quarters. The impact of his superlative writing skill on me was such that I wanted to write on his liquid, manicured and profound articles as my Long Essay at the University of Benin, Benin City. My supervisor, however, turned it down as she felt that the subject was narrow. But, somehow, I had to find a way to work on a personality who had become a stubborn force in the process of choosing my own career. Four decades after, I still hope that I’ve not been a poor student of this legend. Yesterday, as I pulled out my bachelor’s degree project, “Tone and Diction in Selected Editions of Newswatch Magazine”, from my bookshelf, it took on a new meaning. The one who inspired it and who had sufficiently demonstrated that the written word could actually have a robust life of its own had gone the way of all flesh. Good night, Sir!

Now, religion. Or, better still, where it has led the country; what it’s up to here and how to make it work optimally for us all. To be clear, God and religion are not one and the same. The former is the supreme being seen by many as the creator and ultimate controller of all things. Even some of those who spend their entire lives denying his very existence are known to have cried for his help at the point of death. The mystery of his relevance and sovereignty is that compelling. And the latter represents the ways human beings attempt to know and serve him.

All through the ages, problems show up as people grapple with the arduous tasks of trying to understand the almighty and his words for themselves and also communicating same to others. Scriptures contained in the Bible and Quran, for instance, have remained unchanged for centuries – a major proof of their immutability and sanctity, at least in the estimation of their believers. But not so for their interpretations. Transcendental meanings are sometimes attributed to what is recorded in black and white. That way, whole denominations have grown out of existing establishments. Virtually all religious schisms are products of irreconcilable differences emanating from how individuals and groups view what they consider to be holy teachings. The conflicts produced by religions are, therefore, both intra and inter and their scopes can indeed be complicated.

The challenge is never with God. And no apologies for that submission. It is, instead, with the human agents who go into the profession of speaking on his behalf with their own prejudices and other shortcomings. It’s difficult to convince me that the men and women who continually spew hate, bloodletting, chaos and doom from their pulpits are true representatives of the God of love and mercy. That such persons keep growing more confident in their dark trade in this country and in this dispensation indicates assured collective destruction if nothing is done to stem the tide.

In Nigeria, Christianity and Islam, two faiths that lay claims to God’s direct commandments, have since pushed the traditional modes of worship to the background. Perhaps, the ways our forefathers sought to reach and please God were inferior to these two religions and could simply not withstand their crusading powers. Whatever the case, the Nigerian population is now largely distributed among both entrants. Nothing to worry about, ordinarily. But these aren’t the best of times.

Nigeria’s current most daunting predicament – insecurity – is traceable to Boko Haram, a group of bloodthirsty people who hid behind their own interpretation of religious dictates to enter and disrupt public consciousness. It wasn’t hard for the discerning to see murderous criminality through their façade from the beginning. It’s on record that Christians and churches were their initial targets. Sadly, it was only a matter of time before everyone became unsafe. The other terrorists and bandits who came after them only helped in further dragging the name of a religion literally translated as peace into the mud.

But, make no mistake! Violence and bloodshed are not synonymous with Islam. The history of Christianity too isn’t spotless. From the 12th Century to the 19th, the Inquisitions – Medieval, Portuguese, Spanish and Roman – saw the torture and extermination of hundreds of thousands of people considered to be heretics and non-believers. Just imagine such horrors perpetrated in the name of Jesus who had declared that he wasn’t here to condemn the world but to save it! So, one responsibility before us is to checkmate the ‘holy’ energisers of wickedness in our midst. We shouldn’t underrate the greater havoc and pain they’re capable of causing.    

Robert Greene and Joost Elffers’ 1999 bestseller, The 48 Laws of Power, provides a window into the psyche of these merchants of morbidity. Law 27 – Play on People’s Need to Believe to Create a Cult-like Following – reads in part: “Having a large following opens up all sorts of possibilities for deception; not only will your followers worship you, they will defend you from your enemies and will voluntarily take on the work of enticing others to join your fledgling cult. This kind of power will lift you to another realm. You will no longer have to struggle or use subterfuge to enforce your will. You are adored and can do no wrong…. As humans, we have a desperate need to believe in something, anything. This makes us eminently gullible. We simply cannot endure long periods of doubt, or of the emptiness that comes from a lack of something to believe in.…

“Always in a rush to believe in something, we will manufacture saints and faiths out of nothing.… The great European charlatans of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries mastered the art of cult-making. They lived, as we do now, in a time of transformation. Organised religion was on the wane, science on the rise. People were desperate to rally round a new cause or faith. The charlatans had begun by peddling health elixirs and alchemic shortcuts to wealth.”

There’s no doubt that the army of misguided and helpless Nigerians is swelling. Vulnerable, willing recruits everywhere. Leaving them as ready preys can only further jeopardise the nation’s safety and prosperity. One urgent duty is to identify our common foes, particularly those who callously utilise God’s name, shame and then disarm them by all means. Religion mustn’t continue to neutralise our capacity for cohesion.

Ekpe, PhD, is a member of THISDAY Editorial Board

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

By Chidi Anselm Odinkalu

“I had discovered since my appointment as a High Court judge that most of the politicians in Nigeria and, indeed, in other developing countries only pay lip-service to the independence of the judiciary…. It pays in the end for a judge, even at the risk of being a snob or of haughtiness, to be somewhat aloof, not only from members of the Executive, but also from political powerbrokers.”

Atanda Fatayi Williams, Faces, Cases and Places, pp. 77-78 (1983)

Atanda Fatayi Williams, the fourth Chief Justice of post-colonial Nigeria (CJN), has not always received the kind of credit that he probably should for a judicial career of impact. Few judicial careers in Nigerian history can compete with that of this grand-son of an Ijebu merchant in terms of both legacy and luminosity.

Sworn in as a judge a mere seven days after independence on 7 October 1960, Justice Fatayi Williams was the first person to be appointed a judge in post-independence Nigeria. 19 years later, he became Nigeria’s first Chief Justice of the presidential era. In this capacity, he was the first CJN to truly feel the pulse of the elected president as both head of state and head of government.

It was his good fortune that the president during his tenure as CJN was the emollient Alhaji Shehu Shagari but he saw enough to leave him a sceptic about judicial dalliance with politicians. “In Nigeria” he warned in his memoirs, “familiarity does not breed contempt. It breeds obligation…. people with whom you are friendly expect you to bend the rules to suit their requirements.”

As CJN, Fatayi Williams pioneered the All Nigeria Judges Conference in Ilorin, the capital of Kwara State, on 8 March 1982. That was one year after the current CJN became a lawyer. Shehu Shagari, then the president, traveled to Ilorin to address the conference. His presence and delivery bore the hallmarks of the polished modesty that defined Shagari’s long public service career.

The conference has grown since then to become a biennial tradition of the bench of Nigeria’s Superior Courts of Record. For many judges, the opportunity to mix, introspect, and learn together with colleagues from across the country, both serving and retired, is the highpoint of every judicial biennium. The conference is also an opportunity for judges as a collective to diagnose common problems that afflict the judicial branch, think together, and communicate with the other branches of government on policy matters adjacent or relevant to the judiciary.

For the past decade and a half, the conference has acquired a permanent home on the premises of the National Judicial Institute (NJI) in Abuja. This year’s conference began on 17 November at the same venue. The Administrator of the NJI, Babatunde Adejumo, himself a former President of the National Industrial Court of Nigeria, ran the floor under the direction of the Chair of the Institute who is also the CJN.

As befits a conference with the president of Nigeria in attendance, the opening of the conference was supposed to be brisk. The Administrator of the NJI had to be persuaded from lingering on the microphone with prolix protocol. Thereafter, it was the turn of the CJN.

Her delivery made a case that appeared both respectable and heartfelt, inviting her colleagues to defend and deepen democracy in Nigeria “by ensuring that justice is not only done but manifestly seen to be done in every courtroom, across every jurisdiction, and in every case.” With deftness, she acknowledged widespread notions that judicial decisions in Nigeria are “sometimes vulnerable to external influences”, a euphemism for perceptions of both corruption and capture of the judiciary; and admitted “with candour that there are some within our ranks who have undermined the integrity of the Bench.” She hoped that “this must change” but stopped short of saying how or when.

The CJN ended her address by inviting President Bola Tinubu to address the judges and declare the conference open. As she unfurled this introduction and transition, the judges gathered in the Andrews Otutu Obaseki Auditorium of the NJI stood in unison both to applaud the delivery of the CJN and, presumably, as a mark of courtesy to their presidential patron.

In unison, the military band from the presidential Guards Brigade broke into an instrumental rendition of “On Your Madate We Shall Stand”, the president’s personal fealty anthem. When the president was done with the delivery of his 1,314 word-long address, the same band again played the same accompaniment as the judges stood to applaud his transition from the presidential podium back to his seat.

So, not once but twice in a period of less than 15 minutes, the presidential band played this partisan political rendition. From any other president, this may have been a mistake but this president is no political eunuch. If the first was an error, the second surely was comfort. Whatever the intention or design was, this guaranteed that no one remembers anything of what President Tinubu said. The only memory of his showing at this All Nigeria Judges Conference is that he sought to wheedle the judges with an instrumental symbolism of personal fealty.

For a conference with the timely theme of “Building a Confident Judiciary”, President Tinubu could hardly have done worse in undermining public confidence in the judges. To their credit, many of the judges inside the conference auditorium were schtum at the rendition(s). Unmistakably, however, there were people within the hall who also sang along.

President Tinubu’s own television station, TVC, later offered the spectacular apologia  that the singing was done by “the people who came with the president…. The president’s staff, they were at the back”, adding: “if those ones were singing, can anyone question them for singing? This is a song they have been singing since they were in Lagos.” The claimed that President Obasanjo had such a song too. That was absurd.

To convince their audience of presumed presidential proselytes, they hyperventilated to the claim that the same tune had been played the previous week when the president opened the conference of the Guild of Editors. In their estimation, a gathering of Nigeria’s most senior judges is worth no more than the currency of a conference of the Guild of Editors.

One judicial participant at the event went further, privately dissimulating that there was no such rendition and that any sound other than the National Anthem associated with their gathering was deep fake from Artificial Intelligence!

The leadership of the judiciary appeared ambivalent. When eventually they responded, over 48 hours later, it was through a statement with mangled syntax signed by a middling officer described as the “Head, Information, Media and Public Relations” at the NJI. The only thing notable about this statement was what was missing on its face: no judicial principal was courageous enough to own the debacle. Its content was entirely forgettable.

In its text, the statement dutifully dismissed the optics as unfounded, exculpated all conferees from suggestions of partisan political animus, and righteously denounced “any attempt to distort the solemnity of the event”, without offering evidence or process. Instead, they trained ostentatious indignation at people to whom they owed both contrition and apology.

The authors of this statement apparently didn’t know that the horse of the distortion of the solemnity of the event had long bolted. The president accomplished that with hubris to spare.

It does considerable injustice to the current generation of judges in Nigeria to suggest, as that statement does, that they are incapable of running with efficiency and without partisan incident a conference in existence for over four decades. Its attempt to outsource responsibility for an incident that should never have occurred is beneath the dignity of judicial office. A confident judiciary should learn from this and promise itself that it shall never happen again.

Alexander Hamilton may have called the judiciary “the least dangerous” branch, having “neither force nor will but merely judgment”, but in taking his personal fealty anthem to the floor of the judges conference, President Tinubu sought to relocate the source of the judicial function from its constitutional foundation to personal loyalty to him. The question he raised is simple: On whose mandate do judges stand? The judges cannot duck the issue posed by the president’s symbolic choice of battleground.

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

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

By Usani Odum

In 1869, Ms. Myra Bradwell passed the Illinois bar exam in the U.S. but was denied admission into the legal profession solely because she was a woman. She challenged that decision by the state of Illinois up to the U.S. Supreme Court, which in Bradwell v. Illinois (1873) upheld the denial. In his concurring opinion, Justice Joseph Bradley infamously wrote that “the paramount destiny and mission of a woman is to fulfil the noble and benign offices of wife and mother,” adding that women’s “timidity and delicacy” rendered them unfit for many civil occupations.

Although some states in the U.S. began admitting women to the bar before the Supreme Court ruled on Bradwell’s case, Illinois waited nearly two decades, finally opening the profession to women in 1890. Bradwell lost, but her fight sparked global gender-equality movements. In Africa, this momentum contributed to the adoption of the Protocol to the African Charter on the Rights of Women in Africa, (the Maputo Protocol) in 2003. The Protocol is celebrated as one of the most progressive treaties advancing women’s reproductive rights, and the type of education that will guarantee them “substantive equality” with men.

In 2023, as the world marked the 20^th anniversary of the Maputo Protocol, female law students of the University of Calabar (Unical) took to the streets to protest what they called “suffocation” from sexual harassment by the Dean Prof. Cyril Ndifon, which is denying them access to education. This was not Ndifon’s first scandal in the faculty: in 2015, Ndifon faced rape allegations involving a 19-year-old law student. The facts of that case, which would normally have led to his immediate dismissal from the school, are summarized as follows:

In August 2015, Ndifon scheduled a Saturday test for fourth-year Jurisprudence students of the faculty. While they wrote, he proceeded to the 19-year-old female student, seized her scripts and tore it up without reason. While on her way home in tears, Ndifon reportedly accosted her in his car and lured her back to his office, where he reportedly offered her the option to rewrite the test. What transpired between the two inside Ndifon’s private office culminated in that rape allegation. In response to the scandal, Ndifon was temporarily removed as Dean, while the substance of the case quickly added to the ever-growing number of unresolved sexual and gender-based violence against students in Nigerian Universities. The case also highlighted Nigeria’s broader failures to address sexual harassment and gender-based violence against women and girls in Nigeria at large.

As a former student during Ndifon’s first term as Dean, I recall him as a predatory, unruly and disruptive little man, who has an unsettling interest in students’ private lives. He maintained informants in every class, often rewarded with academic favors, and who reported on classmates’ gossip or affairs to him. Instead of dwelling on mentoring and helping students succeed into lawyers, Ndifon turned his professorial ears into a cesspit of little talk about student’s private lives. He frequently summoned students over trivial matters, threatening their graduation, and carried out most of those threats repeatedly. I received a few of those calls myself.

Without resolving the rape allegation against Ndifon, UniCal’s then Vice-Chancellor, Prof. Zana Akpagu, recalled him from suspension in 2017. About two years later, under Prof. Florence Obi, the first female and current Vice Chancellor of UniCal, Ndifon was reappointed Dean to the shock of the alumni of the school.  During his second coming, Ndifon’s well-known debauchery continued on a grander scale. It was during this second coming that the female students of the faculty took to the streets to protest the unabating harassment in August 2023. Again, Ndifon was suspended, but this time, an investigative panel was set up to investigate the allegations. To describe the findings of that panel as ‘putrefying’ would be, at best, a gross underrepresentation of the severity of the rot in that faculty.

For context, allegations of sexual harassment against Ndifon have plagued UniCal’s law faculty for about three decades. Stories of female students enduring abuse span generations, with some graduates’ children later recounting similar experiences. While acting in loco parentis, Ndifon reportedly treated female students’ bodies as playthings. But the report of the panel revealed more: levies collected from students for law journals were squandered; unqualified students with incomplete results were mobilized for law school, while qualified candidates were dropped; students with first degree in religious studies and unrelated fields were admitted to the law degree program through direct entry, in clear violations of the admission requirements; female students who rebuffed his advances repeatedly failed law courses in perpetuity. In fact, the investigative panel had to order immediate summer exams for one of the victims as an interim measure, to enable her to proceed to law school while the panel’s report was still being concluded.

Ndifon’s reign of terror extended beyond students. The investigative panel heard that fellow lecturers who opposed him as Dean were sidelined. Course allocations favored loyalty over expertise, and experienced professors lost their courses. A female lecturer who signed an online petition calling for his probe during the first rape scandal, was blocked from defending her PhD indefinitely, while younger, loyal researchers completed theirs in record two years, even amid the COVID-19 lockdown! 

While the UniCal investigative panel exposed the rampant roguery and debauchery in the law faculty, the Independent Corrupt Practices and other related offences Commission (ICPC) filed criminal charges against Ndifon at the Federal High Court. And for the next 23 months, the legal and academic community followed the shocking proceedings detailing how a dean of law traded grades for sexual gratification, solicited nudes from vulnerable students with his phone, and abused his powers in how he administered the faculty. Public outrage peaked when Ndifon argued in open court that his relationship with his diploma student was “consensual,” ignoring the clear power imbalance, duty of care, and trust inherent in his position.

Yesterday, the Federal High Court thankfully convicted Ndifon and sentenced him to five years for sexual harassment and abuse of power against the same diploma student, finally removing him from the reach of innocent students in that school forever. Yet, it is crucial to underscore the fact that for about 30 years, the university knowingly ignored his predations while he plundered lives of young girls. As we make a post-mortem on the eclipse of such a prohibitively disgraceful academic career, we must also underscore that all Ndifon’s perfidious excesses were well known in the university community.  But successive administrations looked the other way, while the man plundered the bodies and destinies of young girls like a rebel soldier in armed conflict.

UniCal failed the girl child for many years, when it failed to provide safe spaces for victims to speak up against their abusers.

UniCal failed the girl child when it recalled Ndifon the first time, despite the controversial weekend tests, the torn scripts, and forcing a student to rewrite the test in his office. All of these were clear, uncontested breaches of extant university rules, requiring no police action to address.

For many years, the University of Calabar failed the girl child!

*Usani Odum is a Transitional Justice expert. He writes from South Sudan.

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