By Lasisi Olagunju

In the early 1940s, Sir Ahmadu Bello, the hugely popular Sardauna of Sokoto, found himself at a crossroads of politics and rivalry. After losing the contest for the Sultanate of Sokoto to his long-standing rival, Sir Abubakar III, he was appointed emirate councillor and superordinate district head of Gusau in Sokoto Province. The posting, however, came with what he would later describe in his autobiography as “not lacking dark undertones and hidden motives.”

The shadow over his new position darkened in 1943. One day in the afternoon, a friend arrived with a troubling warning: Bello’s enemies were plotting his fall.

The man said: “Look, a plot is being arranged against you, so that you will fall into an inescapable trap.”

“What sort of a plot?” Ahmadu Bello said he asked the friend. He went on to say that “people were being organised to lay complaints against me so that I would be involved in a court case. I replied, ‘Tawakkaltu Alal Haiyil Lazi Layamutu (I depend on the Soul that never dies).’ A week later, I heard some Fulani (herdsmen) were being told to say that they paid cattle tax to me which never went into the treasury.” He was also accused of accepting gifts. The allegations quickly became a weapon in the hands of his rival, the Sultan. “After necessary investigations by an instigated administrative officer who was specially sent for the purpose, I was summoned to appear before the Sultan’s Court. I was tried and sentenced to one year’s imprisonment.” Bello recalled in his autobiography years later: “Knowing my own reputation and standards and the way the case was tried, I appealed to the Appeal Court. The learned Judge (Mr. Ames), with two Muslim jurists, allowed my appeal and I was therefore acquitted.”

He got back his freedom, but that experience signposted an example of what politics could throw at any of its practitioners, no matter the height of their standing. Bello’s experience was an early taste of the trials and political intrigues that would mark his rise to prominence in the years ahead. Read ‘My Life’, Sardauna’s autobiography. Read ‘Ahmadu Bello: Sardauna of Sokoto’ by John N. Paden, page 119. Read Chapter 2 of Steven Pierce’s ‘Moral Economies of Corruption.’

You saw what happened in France last week. Seventy-year-old Nicolas Sarkozy was sentenced to five years in prison by a Paris court. There is a lot of fun in watching tragedies. Some courts are crazy. The man they jailed was the Commander-in-Chief of a superpower. He wielded veto powers at the United Nations and rubbed shoulders with the president of the Almighty United States. He did not kill, he did not rape. Even if he killed and raped, didn’t he have everlasting immunity from being treated like a common commoner? His crime was not even looting of his country’s treasury. His sin was criminal conspiracy in a scheme to secure campaign funds from the late Libyan dictator, Muammar Gaddafi. What kind of crime was that?

Reuters reported that “the presiding judge said there was no proof Sarkozy made such a deal with Gaddafi, nor that money that was sent from Libya reached Sarkozy’s campaign coffers, even if the timing was “compatible” and the paths the money went through were “very opaque”. But she (the judge) said Sarkozy was guilty of criminal conspiracy for having let close aides get in touch with people in Libya to try and obtain campaign financing.”

Why would the president of a first-world country be so broke as to go to North Africa for a bailout? The central bank of France is called the Banque de France (Bank of France). Don’t they print money there? Wasn’t Sarkozy the one who reappointed Christian Noyer as the governor of that bank? So, what happened that Noyer allowed his benefactor to be that exposed and hard pressed that he had to go beg Ghadafi, the ultimate sinner, for campaign funds? What is even bad in collecting money, even from Satan? What kind of law and judicial system did that to a benefactor of their country?

Sarkozy should have been a Nigerian. If he were a Nigerian, our courts would have scolded the prosecutor for being rude to the father of the nation. We would have told him sorry and compensated him with a comeback from retirement and a third term.

Nigeria can never be France. A country where people love life and fear death more than they fear hell is a doomed state. Nigeria is caught in that loop. We have long abandoned the fear of sin and hellfire. We mock morality, twist God’s words, and purchase prayers to sanctify our iniquities. Yet, while trampling on conscience, we go to great lengths to stay alive. We act with impunity, but move about with convoys of armed men so we may live to enjoy the spoils of our recklessness. We wreck healthcare at home and pile money into hospitals abroad against the day when sickness comes calling. We sin, we revel, and we rock the world. We move freely with sinful steeze without consequence, without judgment. Sarkozy should have been a Nigerian; he would have been saved the insult of that Paris trial and conviction.

I am not the originator of the contrast between fearing death and fearing hell. A man called Thomas Hobbes saw it centuries ago and wrote it down. Hobbes lived from 5 April 1588 to 4 December 1679. At his death, he was described as “greater in his foes than in his followers.” He is the same man who, in his social contract book ‘Leviathan’, famously declared that without law and order, life collapses into fear and violence; and, in his words, it becomes “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

Times change, people change. Hobbes observed that in his own age the fear of hell outweighed the fear of violent death. Religion then carried such weight that eternal damnation was a stronger restraint on conduct than the threat of sword or sentence. Men trembled more at the thought of sinning against God’s commandment than at the prospect of breaking the law. Religion and politics worked hand in hand to uphold order.

But that was Hobbes’s time. Today, the opposite holds sway. And that inversion explains the brazenness of misbehaviour around us. When men cease to fear God, and hell (the consequence of sin), they also cease to fear what the Yoruba call Àtubòtán; they disdain legacy, and numb conscience. Their only terror is not afterlife; it is just death, and, maybe, poverty and loss of privilege. And so, to prolong their lives and cling to power, they kill, they silence critics, they loot without restraint. The loss of a soul is, to them, an abstraction; but the loss of office and privileges is real, immediate, unbearable.

I go back to Hobbes; he was right: fear shapes society. But when the wrong fear governs, politics mutates into predation, and the polity collapses into a jungle. Nigeria suffers that fate. We are ruled by men who worship power and fear coffins more than they fear God. Until that fear is reordered, until conscience returns as a brake on ambition, no constitution or law will be strong enough to restrain leaders who no longer believe that God is watching.

Back to Sarkozy, Western media described his fate as “a historic moment for modern France”, a nation where politicians, until last week, sinned while sneering at the idea of punishment. The media said Sarkozy, who served as president between 2007 and 2012, was known for his hard line on immigration and national identity, and for championing harsher punishments for offenders. He must now prepare to face the same fate. Judges ruled that within months he will report to prison, making him the first former French president in modern history ordered to serve time behind bars.

It was, as The Guardian of UK put it, “a spectacular downfall and a turning point” in France’s struggle to deal with graft and political impunity. Sarkozy sat in court flanked by his wife, Carla Bruni Sarkozy, and his three sons as judges delivered a sentence laced with a message: Thomas Fuller’s words of almost four hundred years ago, “Be ye never so high, the law is above you.”

France has shown that even the mighty can crumble under the weight of justice. Nigeria, by contrast, keeps teaching its politicians that what sin has is not consequence but reward. Until our courts can frighten the powerful as much as our cemeteries do, Hobbes’s warning will remain our reality: life in this jungle will stay poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

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

In February 2025, Daily Trust quoted him as saying: “I’ve been fighting battles all my life and I have not lost one yet.

In May 2025, Business Day quoted him as saying: “I have been fighting all my life. And I will win at the end of the day.”

Aliko Dangote, President of Dangote Group, speaks those words each time there is a war to fight. In the last two, three weeks, I have heard him repeat that statement about fighting all life and winning all the time.

There is a bird in the Yoruba forest called Òrófó. Its mouth is its executioner. If I fought and won all the time, I would not display the trophy all the time.

Each time I hear people boast about their strength and blessings, I reach for my favourite quote:

“Travel and tell no one,

Live a true love story and tell no one,

Live happily and tell no one,

People ruin beautiful things.”

It is one of my priceless quotes; it is from Khalil Gibran, Lebanese-American poet who lived from January 6, 1883 to April 10, 1931. There is a reason why the light travels light; it is because the world is heavy.

Dangote may be correct in his self-assessment as the unbeaten. He is the lion in Nigeria’s industrial jungle. He fought and won in cement, in sugar, in flour. But did he win the noodles war? When he started his refinery project, I heard people who said we should expect another war in that sector. And that is what we see. But if I were him, I would reflect that even the lion has limits. A lion that fights hyenas, leopards, wild dogs, and hunters all at once will soon learn that its roar and paws are not enough. If I were him, I would know that there is a difference between the unbeaten and the unbeatable. I would know that strength spread too thin becomes weakness. A lion who fights every creature in the forest risks exhaustion. It risks even worse: isolation.

The wealthy man who fights and wins all wars now has his hands full. At the beginning of his refinery journey, Aliko fought the regulators over approvals and compliance issues; he crossed that river and turned his cannon on depot owners and marketers; this week, he is fighting the unions. And now the unions are responding by shutting the valves. PENGASSAN at the weekend ordered a blitzkrieg on Nigeria’s fuel lifeline: it instructed its members to stop all gas supply to Dangote refinery with immediate effect; it ordered crude oil supply valves to the facility shut; it directed loading operations for vessels headed to the refinery suspended. It’s grouse was the mass sack of workers there.

It has been one war after another, a rolling theatre of conflicts that raises the question: can one man, no matter how wealthy, fight every battle and still win the war?

But the unions are not saints either. Nigerian unions roar justice but feed like hyenas. They thrive in disruption. They fight for rents. A union that turns every quarrel into a weapon or business may one day find that it has destroyed its own leverage.

Sword that destroyed its sheath is homeless. I do not know what democracy calls pulling the plug on a promising patient. But I know that under the military, those who did what PENGASSAN ordered at the weekend were deemed to have committed grievous crimes. Luckily, we are in a democracy.

Shortly before the PENGASSAN bombardment, there was the war with DAPPMAN, the depot owners and marketers. Dangote said they demanded ₦1.5 trillion in hidden subsidies each year. He said he would not pay. He said they wanted him to cover coastal charges and logistics. He insisted that his gantry price was fair. He dared them to sue. The marketers replied that Dangote sold cheaper petrol abroad than at home. They called him disruptive. They accused him of undermining competition. So, the drama grows. The lion roars at unions, at traders, at depot owners, and at those he called the mafia in the oil industry. The elephant struggles with its own bulk. But wisdom says no hunter fights every battle.

I had this hearty discussion with some friends yesterday. They think the unions were unreasonable and exploitative. I agreed with them but asked them to also check what a monopoly in fuel refining and supply does to national security. All monopolies are dangerous.

I told my friends what a voice told me: If one refinery is the nation’s fuel heart, don’t we know that one strike or sabotage can paralyse the country?

What if the refinery owner even decides to ‘go on strike’ or produce and refuse to sell?

When a country’s situation is as it is, will that be said to be sovereignty? That will be fragility disguised as progress. I hope you agree with this.

No village entrusts its present and future sustenance to one farm, no matter how large. Nigeria does not need monopolies, whether in refineries or in unions. What it needs is balance, competition, and choice.

Nigeria needs competition, not concentration. It needs many refineries, not one. But where are the investors? Where is the government? Why do we need more than the behemoth in Ibeju-Lekki? Folklorists tell of an elephant. It was the envy of the savannah. Grass bent under its feet. Trees shook at its steps. But when drought came, its size became its curse. Its massive body needed more water than the land could give. Smaller animals survived on little streams. The elephant collapsed under its own weight.

That is the risk with this lone refinery. It is an elephant, mighty and heavy. The body and its demands are a burden to it. Its operational environment is choky. I pity the promoter. He must have found out too late that this terrain is not solid and firm as concrete; not as soft as dough. The refinery ground is crude, oily, slippery, and treacherous.

Those who know told me that in this business of refinery and refining, tension will remain forever high because margins are thin. In there, refineries buy crude in dollars; they sell fuel in naira. Debts keep breathing in banks while workers hum discontent with the life they live. As investors juggled the figures to stay afloat, at the UNGA, we heard rhetorics that tell the world to accelerate its movement towards clean energy. Clearly, the elephant carries more weight than the land may sustain.

But what kind of country fears convulsion, or even convulses, because a private company has issues with its stakeholders? Ask around how many refineries Egypt has. Google says Egypt currently has eight operating oil refineries, with a total nameplate capacity of approximately 763,000 barrels per day. And Algeria? Six: five operational, the sixth about to be commissioned. How about small Ghana? I asked Google and this is its final answer: “Ghana currently has two main operational refineries, the state-owned Tema Oil Refinery (TOR) and the Sentuo Oil Refinery… In addition to these two, the nation is also developing the Petroleum Hub Project, a large-scale initiative that includes the construction of three new refineries as part of a three-phase project aiming to significantly reduce Ghana’s reliance on imported refined fuels.” What is Nigeria as a country building? Do not bother to check. If you check, what you will find is 2027.

Back to the feuding Dangote refinery and its union of workers. Negotiation and bargaining and agreeing (rather than stone-throwing) are key in human transactions. In his ‘Bargaining and War’, R. Harrison Wagner notes that “nearly all wars end not because the (feuding parties) are incapable of further fighting but because they agree to stop.”

It is sweet to fight and win. But that is where it ends. The one who killed an elephant with his hat enjoyed the fame for just 24 hours. The next day, everyone avoided him. Enough of unhelpful tough talking and disruptions. As I watch the drama of this oily war, I see the two entitled camps unravelling. I see both sides losing ultimately. But their loss will be our loss, a disaster. The country will grind to a halt.

So, I ask the oily fighters in Lagos to read Khalil Gibran’s ‘The Two Cages’: “In my father’s garden, there are two cages. In one is a lion, which my father’s slaves brought from the desert of Ninavah; in the other is a songless sparrow. Every day at dawn, the sparrow calls to the lion, ‘Good morrow to thee, brother prisoner’.”

There is no winner in this war.

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

By Chinedu Agu

It is no longer news that on Wednesday, 17 September 2025, I honoured the invitation by the X-Squad Unit of the Nigeria Police Force, Imo State Command, over allegations of “Criminal Defamation of the Governor of Imo State” and “conduct likely to cause a breach of the peace.”

This account is not intended to sensationalize the matter, but rather to lay bare certain uncomfortable truths which I am prepared to stand by, as they are rooted in incontrovertible facts which demonstrate three clear points:

1. The persecution against me was directly initiated by the Imo State Commissioner of Information.

2. The so-called “civil society organisation” presented as the originator of the petition against me – Imo Democratic Alliance, allegedly coordinated by one Umukoro Marvis Udechukwu – does not exist in Nigeria. It is not registered and has no traceable office address anywhere in the country.

3. But for the courage and professionalism of Magistrates in Imo State, and the overwhelming solidarity of lawyers, civil society organisations, and friends, I would have been languishing in detention much earlier.

What follows should shed light on the rot, the decay, and the complicity that continue to fester in our Imo State.

At 12:47 p.m. on 12 September 2025, my phone rang. The caller introduced himself as a police officer and asked if I was Chinedu Agu. Without hesitation, he informed me that there was a petition against me for “criminal defamation of His Excellency, the Governor of Imo State.” He further requested me to honor an invitation to appear before the X-Squad Unit of the State Police Command on Wednesday, 17 September 2025.

Curious, I asked about the source of the petition. He replied that it came directly from the Imo State Ministry of Information and even went on to mention the name of the official who signed it.

When I requested for a copy of the petition, he responded I would have to “call Oga” for a copy. When I reached out, “Oga” categorically told me I could not be given a copy of the petition except I applied formally to the Commissioner of Police for a Certified True Copy (CTC).

After we eventually settled on a date for my encounter with the X-Squad, the officer reluctantly sent an “Invitation Letter” to me via WhatsApp. That letter, bare as it was, stood as a symbol of something deeper—the rot and decay in our system, where power is wielded not to protect truth and justice, but to intimidate voices that dare to speak both.

This refusal by the police to furnish a citizen with a copy of the petition forming the basis of his invitation raises grave constitutional and statutory issues. Under Section 36(6)(a) & (b) of the 1999 Constitution, every person facing criminal allegations has the right to be informed “promptly and in detail” of the nature of the offence, and to have adequate facilities for the preparation of his defence. Denying access to the petition until one applies for a CTC clearly violates this right.

The Administration of Criminal Justice Law of Imo State, 2020 (ACJL) reinforces this. Section 8 of the ACJL guarantees fair hearing, while Section 17 mandates humane treatment and respect for the dignity of suspects. Transparency at the investigative stage is, therefore, not a matter of grace, but a constitutional and legal obligation.

This practice, whereby the police serve an invitation letter yet withhold the petition that underpins it, fosters intimidation, secrecy, and abuse of power. It effectively disarms the citizen and turns what should be a fact-finding process into a trap.

I digress.

On the agreed date, I arrived at the station accompanied by a team of lawyers numbering about 72. I was ushered in together with Chief Chris Ihentuge, Chairman of the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA), Owerri Branch, and Chief H.N. Duroha, Chairman of the Sports Committee of the branch. A police officer, who introduced himself as the “2/IC”, laboured rather gratuitously to persuade us that the petition did not emanate from the Ministry of Information but rather from “Imo Democratic Alliance”. To convince us, he brought out a two-page petition and read the first page aloud. He then handed me over to the Investigating Police Officer (IPO) to whom the matter had been assigned.

At the IPO’s office, he made to read the petition to me. I politely requested to personally peruse it. What I saw was a farce: a hastily contrived letterhead, garishly designed, with “IMO DEMOCRATIC ALLIANCE” written in capital letters. Its motto, inscribed in red, declared “FOR GOOD GOVERNANCE.” On the top right corner of the page was a needless sketch of the map of Imo State. It bore no office or return address. The “petition” was dated 2 September 2025 and captioned, “Criminal Defamation of the Governor of Imo State and Incitement of the public against Imo State Government and the Police by Barr. Chinedu Agu.”

The “petition” referred to two articles authored by me: the latter article, “Imo State – Where Justice in On Vacation During Court Vacation”, was published 31 August 2025. The earlier one, “Tears From Enugu: A Lawyer’s Heartbreaking Diary From a State That Works To a State In Ruins”, was published one day earlier on 30 August. The author alleged that I published both with the “intention to incite an insurrection against state institutions through the vicious provocation of the citizens”. It concluded by warning that “if Barr. Agu is not called to order now, he may be on his way to inciting the citizenry into violent action.” Critically, the author did not say how either article had incited anyone nor suggest how I was to be called to order. 

The petition was signed by one “Umukoro Marvis Udechukwu”, who claimed to be the “Co-ordinator” of the Imo Democratic Alliance.

In my response, I pointed out that this petition did not disclose any offence known to law. On the accusation of “criminal defamation”, everything I wrote in my two pieces is factual and truth is a complete defence to defamation. I requested the IPO to retrieve and review the full texts and identify a single line that was untrue.

I also added that the law does not permit a third party to lay such a complaint. Defamation is personal, and no busybody can initiate action in that regard. The fictitious organisation did not allege defamation of itself, nor did Umukoro Marvis Udechukwu allege defamation of his own person.

Importantly, the so-called petition did not annex the articles complained of. Instead, it imported mutilated texts, using only those parts that suited its persecutorial purpose. As for the allegation of “inciting the public,” I also invited the police to point to a single line in my articles that did any such thing.

Upon leaving the police, I immediately conducted a search on the portal of the Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC). Imo Democratic Alliance is legally non-existent. It is not a registered organisation. To use such a phantom entity as source for a law enforcement procedure is itself criminal.

On the evening prior to my scheduled encounter with the police on 17 September, I received credible information that my detention was already pre-determined. Indeed, the police made strenuous efforts to procure a magistrates’ signature for an order to detain me but none could be persuaded at the time to lend legitimacy to such illegality.

Frustrated by that setback, and confronted with the overwhelming solidarity of more than seventy-two lawyers who accompanied me to the station, the police chose to release me on bail, on self-recognizance. It was a temporary respite.

Thereafter, they fixed a fresh encounter for early afternoon on Tuesday, 23 September.  I shall honour that invitation once again to see what new tricks they will conjure.

One undeniable truth from this entire episode is that the initiator of the police persecution against me is the Imo State Commissioner of Information. I welcome genuine legal process. I am not afraid of lawful process, but I already suspect that is not what this is about.

A former secretary of the NBA, Owerri Branch, Chinedu Agu wrote this piece on 20 September 2025. Since 23 Sept 2025 he had been detained at the direct instigation of the Imo State Government. He can be reached at [email protected]

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