By Max Amuchie | The Sunday Stew

Every serious intellectual undertaking eventually reaches a threshold where it can no longer rely entirely on inherited language. It must create its own vocabulary.
The three-month sprint that produced The Insecurity Triad, the Trinity of State Decay (TSD), and the Decoupling Sovereignty Index (DSI) crossed that threshold repeatedly. New realities demanded new concepts, and new concepts demanded new names.
Some of those names describe the architecture of collapse. Others describe the mechanisms that sustain it. Still others describe what recovery requires. Together, they form a vocabulary of sovereignty — its decay, its distortion, and its possible reconstruction.

The Grammar Beneath the Vocabulary

Before naming the concepts, it is worth naming the architecture that organises them.
The Insecurity Triad identified three vectors through which rival sovereignty is produced: Money, Land, and Mind. Kidnapping finances violence through ransom economies — that is Money. Banditry governs territory and controls the means of production — that is Land. Terrorism reshapes the ideological order, rewriting who commands loyalty and who commands fear — that is Mind.
These three vectors do not operate in isolation. They converge. And their convergence is what makes The Insecurity Triad a system rather than a catalogue of threats.

What the Trinity of State Decay reveals is what happens to a state when that convergence is sustained. Money drains the state’s fiscal and security capacity. Land slips from its territorial grip. Mind withdraws — citizens, communities, and eventually institutions themselves stop believing that the state is the relevant authority. The Trinity maps the structural consequences of what the Triad set in motion.

The Decoupling Sovereignty Index then asks the measurement question: how far has each vector decoupled? M1 tracks the Money dimension — the degree to which ransom economies and rival revenue systems have displaced the state. L tracks the Land dimension — the erosion of territorial authority and enforceability. M2 tracks the Mind dimension — the collapse of psychological allegiance and institutional legitimacy.

Every concept that follows in this column lives inside that architecture. The Institutional Mirage is what the Mind dimension produces at the level of governance. The Shadow Order is what Land and Money produce when they combine to constitute rival authority. The Ransom Economy is Money in its most organised form. Constitutional Erasure is Land rewritten at gunpoint. The Psychology of the Table is Mind in its most exclusionary expression.
Money. Land. Mind. That is the grammar. What follows is the vocabulary it generates.

The Architecture of Collapse

Among the formulations that emerged was the Trinity of State Decay.
Consider what happens when a state begins to lose its grip.
It does not lose one thing. It loses three — simultaneously, and in ways that accelerate each other.
Territory slips first, or perhaps institutions do, or perhaps the people withdraw their faith before either of the others move. The sequence varies. What does not vary is the convergence.

The first dimension is territorial: the state’s control of physical space becomes contested, fragmented, then absent in places it once claimed without effort.
The second is institutional: governance structures remain formally intact — ministries open, officials report, procedures are observed — but effectiveness drains away, and with it, public confidence.

The third is psychological: citizens stop believing. Not all at once. Not loudly. But progressively, they withdraw their emotional allegiance from the state and redirect their trust toward other identities, other authorities, other protections.
And then the loop closes.
Land is lost because institutions have weakened. Institutions weaken because citizens no longer trust them. Citizens withdraw their trust because the state can no longer protect the land.
Each failure licenses the next. Each decay deepens the others. The trinity does not merely describe deterioration — it drives it.
That is what makes it a trinity rather than a list.

But what fills the space that the decaying state vacates? Two concepts answer that question, and they must be understood together.
The first is the Institutional Mirage. When a state loses empirical authority — the actual capacity to protect, compel and deliver — its formal structures do not always disappear. They persist. Ministers are appointed. Budgets are passed. Ceremonies are conducted. The architecture of governance remains visible, sometimes impressively so. But it no longer functions as architecture. It functions as scenery.
The Institutional Mirage is the state performing sovereignty it no longer possesses.

The second concept is the Shadow Order. Into the spaces the Mirage cannot reach, alternative authority structures move. They may be armed groups, criminal networks, ethnic militias, or insurgent organisations. They collect their own revenues, enforce their own rules, and provide their own version of protection — however brutal or extractive. They do not merely fill a vacuum. They constitute a rival sovereignty.

The Institutional Mirage and the Shadow Order are not opposites. They are a system. One performs authority without possessing it. The other possesses authority without performing it in the language of the state. Together, they represent the decoupling at the heart of the Trinity of State Decay: the separation of juridical sovereignty from empirical sovereignty, of the state that exists on paper from the state that exists on the ground.

The Mechanisms of Sustenance

Collapse of this kind does not sustain itself through inertia alone. It requires mechanisms — arrangements, transactions and distortions that keep the system operational even as it deteriorates.
Three concepts describe these mechanisms.
The first is the Ransom Economy. In zones where the Shadow Order operates and the Institutional Mirage cannot reach, kidnapping ceases to be merely criminal. It becomes economic. Ransom payments circulate as a form of revenue — funding armed groups, sustaining supply chains of complicity, and generating employment in the logistics of abduction and negotiation. The Ransom Economy is not a disorder within the economy. In the territories where it operates, it is the economy.
The second mechanism is Pacification Bargaining. Faced with armed groups it cannot defeat militarily, the state — or the communities caught between the state and the Shadow Order — enters into informal negotiations. Cattle corridors are quietly conceded. Seasonal movements are permitted. Attacks pause in exchange for unspoken accommodations. The bargaining is never acknowledged publicly, because acknowledging it would require admitting the limits of state authority. But it happens. And each round of bargaining, however tactically rational, extends the life of the arrangement it was meant to manage.

The third is Constitutional Erasure. This is not a legal phenomenon. It does not occur in courtrooms or parliamentary chambers. It occurs on the ground, at gunpoint. This is, in the most precise sense, a Violent Amendment of the Constitution — not through any legitimate process of revision, but through the barrel of a gun. The armed group does not petition the state to redraw its map. It redraws it unilaterally, inscribing its own authority where the constitution once held.

Constitutional Erasure is the illegal process by which armed non-state actors unmake the official state map and replace it with their own sovereign order. Where the state’s constitution says one thing about who governs a territory, the gun says another — and the gun wins. The armed group does not merely occupy the space. It renames it. It redraws it. It inscribes its own authority onto territory that the constitution still claims but can no longer hold.
This is counter-constitutional inscription: a rival cartography written in violence.
The constitution remains on paper. But on the ground, a different document governs — unwritten, unratified, enforced by the threat of death. What is erased is not the text of the state’s founding law but the physical reality it was meant to describe.

The Psychology of Recognition

Beneath the structural and economic dimensions of decay lies something harder to measure but no less consequential: the question of who belongs.
Political power is frequently imagined through offices, armies and constitutions. Yet societies often possess another, less visible metric of authority.
Who sits at the table?
Who is invited?
Who is absent?

The Architecture of Resurrection

Perhaps the most hopeful formulation to emerge from the sprint was the idea of the Architecture of Resurrection.
Most analyses of state fragility devote considerable attention to decline and collapse. Far less attention is given to recovery. Yet history repeatedly demonstrates that societies possess remarkable capacities for renewal.
The Architecture of Resurrection refers to the institutional, psychological and political design necessary for rebuilding state effectiveness and legitimacy after periods of profound disruption.
Resurrection is not restoration.
A building that has partially collapsed cannot simply be painted and declared repaired. It requires redesign. Its foundations must be reassessed. Structural weaknesses must be corrected. New load-bearing systems must be introduced.
The same principle applies to states.
The Architecture of Resurrection therefore concerns the deliberate reconstruction of authority, trust and institutional capability. It asks difficult questions.
How is territorial control re-established?
How is confidence in institutions rebuilt?
How are psychologically alienated populations reintegrated into a common political project?
How does sovereignty become recoupled — the Institutional Mirage dissolved into functional authority, the Shadow Order displaced, the Ransom Economy dismantled, Pacification Bargaining replaced by genuine security provision, Constitutional Erasure reversed by the renewed enforceability of rights?
How are communities that have been excluded from the table brought back — not as afterthoughts but as constitutive members of the political project?
The metaphor is intentionally architectural because durable recovery requires design, sequencing and structural coherence. Political resurrection cannot be improvised.

These concepts did not emerge in isolation. They emerged in conversation with one another— each one clarifying, qualifying or extending the others.
States do not live merely through constitutions and coercive instruments. They also live through perceptions. They survive because people believe institutions matter, believe they belong at the table, and believe collective political life remains worth investing in.

Conversely, states decay when these sustaining beliefs weaken—when the Institutional Mirage replaces genuine authority; when the Shadow Order occupies the spaces the state has abandoned; when the Ransom Economy becomes normalised; when Pacification Bargaining substitutes for security provision; when Constitutional Erasure progressively empties the law of its force; and when the Psychology of the Table degenerates into a psychology of permanent exclusion.
That is why vocabulary matters. These are not merely descriptive terms; they are diagnostic concepts that identify the mechanisms through which sovereignty decouples from authority and states slide along the continuum of decay.

The Trinity of State Decay reveals the multidimensional nature of collapse. The Institutional Mirage and the Shadow Order name the twin faces of decoupled sovereignty. The Ransom Economy, Pacification Bargaining and Constitutional Erasure describe the mechanisms that sustain it. The Architecture of Resurrection directs attention toward the design principles of renewal.
Together, they demonstrate that scholarship is not simply the accumulation of information. It is also the invention of language capable of capturing realities that old vocabularies struggle to describe.
For sometimes the first step toward understanding a crisis is learning to name it.
And sometimes the first step toward renewal is discovering the words that make recovery imaginable.

Trust is sacred. Stay seasoned.

•Dr. Max Amuchie is an Independent Scholar-Journalist, Media CEO, and Lead Researcher at the Sundiata Post Intelligence Unit (SPIU). He is the architect of The Insecurity Triad framework for African security analysis, the Trinity of State Decay theory, and the Decoupling Sovereignty Index (DSI)—original, indigenous analytical frameworks for understanding, categorising, and measuring conflict, state decay, and sovereignty in the Global South. He writes The Sunday Stew, a weekly syndicated column on faith, character, and the structural forces that shape society, with a focus on Nigeria, Africa, and the Global South in a changing world.

X (formerly Twitter): @MaxAmuchie | Email: [email protected] | Tel: +234(0)8053069436

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

Follow our WhatsApp Channel

By Chidi Anselm Odinkalu

Swami Kesavananda Bharati was a senior Hindu monk who became an unlikely icon of constitutional law and provocateur for judicial independence. Better known by the honorific, “His Holiness”, Kesavananda was by 1970 the senior pontiff of a Hindu Monastery in Edneer, Kasaragod District of Kerala State in south-western India.

The Kerala Land Reforms (Amendment) Act of 1969 which came into force at the beginning of January 1970, empowered the state government to restrict the management of lands belonging to Kesavananda’s monastery.

For His Holiness, this was not a matter for prayer or fasting. In February 1970, he sued. Arguments began 31 October 1972, ending on 23 March 1973 before a full panel of 13 Justices of the Supreme Court of India.

In its judgment, a closely split court decided by a majority of 7-6 in favour of His Holiness, striking down the measures by Kerala State. The majority included three of the most senior Justices of the Supreme Court of India, led by then Chief Justice of India (CJI), Sarv Mittra Sikri.

The government of Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi, was incandescent.

Judgment day, 24 April 1973, was the penultimate day in office of Sarv Sikri as CJI. As Chief Justice Sikri retreated from the Chambers of the CJI the next day, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi arrived the presidential palace bearing a cabinet memorandum for his replacement.

On 26 April 1973, President Varahagiri Giri of India appointed Ajit Nath Ray to the office of CJI. Ajit Ray was the senior judge in the dissent in the judgment in Kesavananda Bharati’s case. At the time of his appointment as CJI, Ajit Ray was junior to three Justices of the Supreme Court of India, who were forced to resign.

The High Court of Delhi noted that at the time, “the established practice” was to appoint “the senior-most judge of the Supreme Court as the Chief Justice of India.” Instead of the National Judicial Appointments Commission as required by the Constitution, the Delhi High Court continued, “the decision to recommend the appointment of Justice A. N. Ray was taken by the Political Affairs Committee of the Cabinet, which has no standing in the eye of law.”

Indira Gandhi’s government did not hide its design in choosing Ajit Ray as CJI. Five days after his appointment, her Minister of Steel and Mines, Mohan Kumaramangalam, disclosed to the India’s Lok Sabha that in choosing him, the government settled for someone who would “help in ending confrontation between the judiciary and Parliament, one who would appreciate the winds of change sweeping the country and one who will help us in Court.”

Former Chief Justice and Acting President of India, Mohammad Hidayatullah, said of the decision that its design was “not creating ‘forward looking judges’ but the ‘judges looking forward’ to the plumes of the office of Chief Justice.” It triggered twin constitutional and institutional crises in India, which was settled after nearly a quarter of a century with the restoration of the convention of seniority.

There are three good reasons for this convention. First, it precludes the process from being hostage to opacity, subjectivity, or extraneous considerations. Second, it equally precludes the process from being hijacked by politicians for partisan ends. Third, it ensures that a serving judge is not denied access to preferment on the basis of smear against which he or she is not afforded a credible defence.

Unlike in India where judicial seniority emerged early as a dispositive factor in the appointment of the Chiefs of court systems, that was not always the case in Nigeria. The consideration of seniority in the appointment of the Chief Justice only emerged in 1979 with the appointment of Atanda Fatayi Williams as the fourth Chief Justice of post-colonial Nigeria.

At the state level, politics has progressively diminished the office of the Chief Judge in both esteem and authority. At independence, Chief Justices (as they were then called) of the various regional courts sat also on the Federal Supreme Court. At the time, they were in fact second only to the Chief Justice in the judicial hierarchy.

Justices of the Supreme Court routinely stepped down to serve as Chiefs at the state level. John Idowu Conrad Taylor, for instance, stepped down from the Supreme Court in 1964 to become Chief Justice of the Federal Territory of Lagos. Mohammadu Buba Ardo did the same in 1976 stepping down from the Supreme Court to become Chief Judge of the newly created Gongola State.

All this was to change under the regime of Muhammadu Buhari. Keen to break judicial opposition to the casualization of judges in military tribunals in 1984, the regime sought to advance loyalists to senior judicial sinecures.

In Anambra State, the regime appointed Alison Madueke, a Navy Captain, as military governor. The Chief Judge at the time was Emmanuel Araka, an old school judge. When the new military governor summoned him, Araka was reluctant. When he declined a second summons, Alison Madueke as military governor fired Araka summarily.

The politicians who took office in 1999 now appear to believe that they have a right to a Chief Judge in their back pockets. When, for instance, former governor, Rotimi Amaechi, could not get his choice as Chief Judge of Rivers State in 2013, he ensured that the office was vacant until his departure from office in 2015.

The latest theatre for the casualization of the State Chief Judge is Imo State. The state has not had a Chief Judge for nearly 20 months since the National Judicial Council (NJC) sacked its last Chief Judge for age falsification in November 2024. In April 2025, the Council torpedoed the design of the Imo State governor to supersede the three most senior judges in the state and appoint the fourth as Acting Chief Judge.

With evident reluctance, the state governor acceded to the directive of the NJC to appoint the most senior judge in the state to act as Chief Judge. Appointed in 1993, Ijeoma Ogugua has served as a judge of the High Court of Imo State for 33 years. At least twice, she has been passed over for the office of Chief Judge. The judge currently next to her in seniority on the bench of the High Court of Imo State is 11 years her junior.

Yet, that is the person whom the State Governor and the State Judicial Service Commission (JSC) would like to see preferred to the office.

In an announcement dated 5 June, the JSC invited public feedback on a short-list of two judges. It omitted the Acting Chief Judge. The JSC claimed to have done this under the 2023 amendment of the applicable Procedural Rules of the NJC. But those rules apply to the appointment of new judges not to that of a Chief Judge.

In reality, the Imo State JSC asserts a power it does not have. The Constitution confines it to the role of rendering “advice” to the NJC on “suitable persons for nomination” to the office of state Chief Judge. In other words, it is a glorified commentator. The power to actually recommend someone for appointment belongs to the NJC, who alone can do a shortlist.

Quite clearly, the short-list so-called of the Imo State JSC is designed to eliminate the most senior judge in the state from consideration. This design has been accompanied by serious allegations that some senior members of the legal profession in the state whose views were registered “were alleged to have been either influenced, appreciated or coerced with the envelopes.”

When he wrote to the NJC early in 2025 for permission to appoint his lackey as Acting Chief Judge, Imo State Governor, Hope Uzodinma, argued that “the three most senior Judges [were] not appointable”, and levied specious smear against especially the most senior judge in the State. But he is unwilling to have any of his allegations investigated on record by the NJC.

The Acting Chief Judge whom Governor Uzodinma wishes to preclude from consideration does not have an adverse disciplinary record with the NJC. In this situation, the current Chief Justice of Nigeria has an opportunity to define the applicable conventions. It is not her job to grant the governor a Chief Judge whom he can own.

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

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

Follow our WhatsApp Channel

By Douglas Ogbankwa Esq.

The office of the Chief Judge is not a political prize. It is a constitutional office that guards the last hope of the common man. The selection of the Chief Judge of Imo State must therefore follow due process as provided by Section 271 of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria 1999 as amended, and the Revised NJC Guidelines and Procedural Rules for the Appointment of Judicial Officers 2014.

Any deviation from this process is not just illegality. It is an assault on democracy.

The NJC must reject any attempt to circumvent established procedure, truncate the seniority principle, or impose a candidate through political pressure. Once judicial independence is compromised, the entire justice system collapses.

Judicial independence is the bedrock of democracy. Once the bench is compromised, justice dies.

The Constitution and NJC guidelines recognize seniority as the primary basis for elevation to Chief Judge. The most senior judge in line must be recommended, except where the NJC is presented with cogent, verifiable reasons against the candidate.The Candidate’s name however must be one of those submitted to the NJC for consideration . Those reasons must be disclosed, tested, and proven. Whisper campaigns and political blackmail cannot substitute for evidence. Seniority protects the judiciary from becoming an appendage of the executive.

Screening, security clearance, background checks, and recommendation must be thorough and transparent. The NJC must insist on full compliance. No shortcuts. No “acting” appointments stretched indefinitely to bypass scrutiny. The process must be seen to be fair by lawyers, litigants, and the public .
Section 6 of the Constitution vests judicial powers in the courts, not in Government House. The executive must not dictate who presides over the judiciary. Separation of powers must be sacrosanct. Any governor or political actor attempting to impose a candidate is asking Imo people to accept a court that takes orders from the executive. That is not a court. That is a department of government house .

The NJC is the last line of defense. It has a constitutional duty to protect the judiciary from capture. Imo people deserve a Chief Judge whose appointment is beyond reproach – a jurist of integrity, competence, and independence. Not one born of political horse-trading in back rooms.

The Bar must also rise to the occasion.Bar Associations in Imo State must rise above primordial instincts, personal interests, and fear. This is the moment to stand to be counted.

Chinedu Agu Esq. has been a lone voice crying in the wilderness. He has recently been a victim of state-sponsored prosecutions for speaking truth to power. Despite intimidation, he has remained unwavering in his stance to ensure justice. His sacrifice reminds us that the Bar cannot outsource its duty to one man.

Even more troubling: In the midst of NBA Branches in Imo State, the Imo State Government promulgated a law that assigned the duty of case assignment to the Chief Registrar of Imo State.

This is a precedent unknown to constitutional practice. Under Section 271(4), the Chief Judge is the head of the High Court and has administrative control, including assignment of cases. To transfer that power by legislation is to amend the Constitution through the back door.

The misconduct escalated when the Chief Registrar actually presented himself to assign cases in the presence of a Chief Judge. That act amounts to professional misconduct, usurpation of judicial function, and contempt of the constitutional order. If the NJC allows this to stand, then tomorrow the executive will assign judges to cases, and justice will be auctioned to the highest bidder.

Due process is not optional. It is constitutional. It is the difference between a court and a kangaroo panel. Between justice and power.

The NJC must act now. Reject any attempt to truncate seniority. Reject political imposition. Sanction the usurpation of case assignment powers.

Imo State, and Nigeria, deserve a judiciary that is independent, courageous, and free.

Ogbankwa Esq. is the convener, Vanguard for the Independence of the Judiciary.

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

Follow our WhatsApp Channel

By Sonnie Ekwowusi

Senate Leader Opeyemi Bamidele recently defended the 10th Senate against accusations of being a mere appendage of the Presidency. The Senate, he insisted, had deliberately chosen constructive engagement over public confrontation. Legislative independence, he argued, should not be measured by theatrical quarrels between institutions but by the quality of governance outcomes. Much of the disagreement between the National Assembly and President Bola Tinubu’s administration, he said, had been resolved quietly and in the national interest.

Senate Leader Bamidele is right, up to a point. Constitutional democracy does not require perpetual warfare between the branches of government. Cooperation between the Executive and Legislature is not only desirable; it is indispensable. A belligerent parliament obsessed with scoring political points can be as damaging to democracy as an overbearing presidency. Effective governance often demands compromise, consultation and discreet negotiations.

But collaboration must not become capitulation. The doctrine of separation of powers—the cornerstone of constitutional democracy—was never intended to create institutional hostility. Rather, it seeks to prevent the concentration of power by distributing governmental authority among the Executive, Legislature and Judiciary, each acting as a restraint upon the others through checks and balances. Harmony among the branches is commendable. Subservience is not.

Measured against this standard, the 10th Senate has struggled to convince Nigerians that it possesses an institutional identity separate from the Executive. Rarely has the chamber openly rejected a presidential request. Ministerial nominees sail through with remarkable ease. Presidential appointments encounter little resistance. Requests for supplementary appropriations are routinely granted.

Emergency declarations receive expeditious approval. Above all, the Senate’s treatment of government borrowing has raised troubling questions about the effectiveness of parliamentary oversight. Since assuming office on 29 May 2023, Bola Ahmed Tinubu has routinely secured parliamentary approvals for several domestic and external loans.

Between 2023–2025 the Tinubu government obtained several facilities from the World Bank amounting to about $4.95 billion. These loans were purportedly for economic reforms, social protection, power sector support and infrastructure. In 2024, the African Development Bank approved a two-year support programme for Nigeria. About $500 million was disbursed in 2024, with another $500 million planned for 2025, making a total commitment of $1 billion.  In the same 2024, Nigeria secured a $747 million syndicated loan, led by Deutsche Bank, to finance the first phase of the Lagos-Calabar Coastal Highway.

In July 2025, the National Assembly approved a massive borrowing package comprising: $21 billion in foreign loans; €4 billion (approximately $4.7 billion); ¥15 billion (about $102 million); $65 million grant and $2 billion domestic dollar-denominated borrowing.  The House of Representatives approved an additional $347 million under the 2025–2026 borrowing plan, partly to accommodate increased costs for the Lagos-Calabar Coastal Highway. In May 2025, President Tinubu requested approval for:$21.5 billion external loans; $2 billion foreign currency bond programme; ₦757.98 billion bond to clear pension liabilities. Observers described this as the largest single borrowing proposal in Nigeria’s history. 

In April 2026, the Federal Government obtained legislative approval for a $516.3 million syndicated loan from Deutsche Bank to finance sections of the Sokoto–Badagry Super Highway. 

President Bola Tinubu’s latest approach to the National Assembly for fresh loans confirms what is fast becoming the defining feature of his economic policy: an extraordinary reliance on debt. Barely three years into office, the administration has turned to borrowing with a frequency and scale unmatched in recent times.

The latest request, amounting to $6 billion, includes a proposed $5 billion structured financing arrangement with the First Abu Dhabi Bank of the United Arab Emirates and another $1 billion facility backed by UK Export Finance for the rehabilitation of the Lagos Port Complex and Tin Can Island Port.

In constitutional democracies, the power to borrow is among the most consequential powers exercised by governments. Debts incurred today become obligations borne by future generations. It is for this reason that constitutions and statutes erect safeguards around borrowing. In Nigeria, the President cannot unilaterally contract external loans. Section 41(1)(a) of the Debt Management Office (Establishment, etc.) Act, 2003, requires that such borrowing conform to conditions approved by the National Assembly. Sections 80 to 83 of the Constitution and provisions of the Fiscal Responsibility Act similarly ensure that borrowed funds and their servicing remain subject to legislative appropriation and scrutiny.

In theory, therefore, the Legislature serves as the people’s guardian against reckless indebtedness. In practice, however, parliamentary oversight has often appeared more ceremonial than rigorous. Loan requests are approved with little visible scrutiny. Ministers and heads of agencies are seldom subjected to searching examinations regarding the terms, utilisation and economic viability of projects financed by debt. The National Assembly rarely demonstrates the inquisitorial zeal that one expects from a body entrusted with safeguarding the public purse.

Nor have the other accountability mechanisms proved particularly robust. Judicial review of borrowing decisions is virtually non-existent. Courts have seldom been invited—or perhaps given the opportunity—to pronounce on whether executive borrowing complies with constitutional and statutory requirements. Oversight institutions, including the Office of the Auditor-General, have not emerged as formidable guardians of fiscal discipline. Consequently, the Executive’s borrowing powers, though legally constrained, have in practice come to enjoy an extraordinary degree of latitude.

It is sad that the National Assembly has, with remarkable regularity, granted virtually every major request brought before it by the Executive—from supplementary budgets and emergency measures to sweeping borrowing plans worth tens of billions of dollars. Legislative approval has often come with little visible resistance and even less public debate. The impression created, fair or otherwise, is of a parliament more inclined to endorse than to interrogate.

Borrowing on such an unprecedented scale has not translated into corresponding improvements in the daily lives of Nigerians. Poverty remains widespread, inflation has reached painful levels, electricity supply is still unreliable and many critical roads and public services show little visible transformation. The natural question therefore arises: where is the money going?

Public borrowing imposes obligations on future generations. Every dollar borrowed today will ultimately be repaid by Nigerian taxpayers.

The role of the National Assembly is particularly crucial. Legislators should not function merely as rubber stamps for presidential loan requests. Effective oversight requires rigorous scrutiny of borrowing proposals, regular monitoring of implementation and public disclosure of project outcomes. A legislature that grants requests without demanding accountability undermines the principle of checks and balances upon which democratic governance rests.

The framers of Nigeria’s Constitution did not establish the National Assembly as a ceremonial appendage of the Presidency. They entrusted it with the power of appropriation, oversight and confirmation precisely because executive power, left unchecked, has a natural tendency to expand. Parliament’s role is not to frustrate the government but to ask difficult questions on behalf of the citizens. It exists not to rubber-stamp, but to scrutinise.

A rubber stamp National Assembly encourages executive overreach, while a weakened judiciary—whether through political pressure, financial dependence or delayed justice—further undermines constitutional equilibrium. When all three arms cease to function as mutual checks, democracy gradually gives way to elective absolutism.

Disagreement between the executive and the legislature is not evidence of dysfunction. It is evidence that democracy is alive. A legislature that occasionally rejects, amends or delays executive proposals is not being obstructive; it is performing the duty assigned to it by the Constitution. The gravest threat to democracy is not always dictatorship. Sometimes it is the quiet erosion of institutional independence, carried out under the guise of unity and efficiency.

A National Assembly that grants President Tinubu everything he asks may make governing easier. But it also makes accountability harder. And in constitutional democracies, convenience is a poor substitute for checks and balances. For when legislatures cease to question, and courts cease to constrain, presidents cease to govern under the law.

This is not merely a procedural defect. It strikes at the heart of democratic accountability. A National Assembly that habitually endorses executive initiatives without rigorous scrutiny ceases to act as the representative of the people and begins to resemble an extension of the government it is supposed to oversee. Such an arrangement mocks neither the opposition nor critics alone; it mocks the very idea of constitutional democracy.

The tragedy is that Nigeria’s constitutional architecture is not fundamentally defective. The country possesses an elaborate framework of checks and balances. What is lacking is the institutional culture necessary to make those safeguards meaningful. Laws exist. Institutions exist. What is frequently absent is the willingness to exercise power independently and courageously.

The issue, therefore, is not whether the National Assembly should cooperate with the Executive. It should. Governments cannot function amid perpetual institutional warfare. But cooperation without scrutiny degenerates into compliance, and compliance without accountability breeds impunity.

Democracy is not sustained by elections alone. It requires institutions capable of saying “yes” when necessary and “no” when principle demands it. A legislature that cannot refuse ceases to be a legislature in the constitutional sense; it becomes a department of the Executive.

Nigeria’s democratic experiment will yield meaningful dividends only when its institutions acquire a distinctly national character rooted in accountability, transparency and service to the public good. Without such character, politics degenerates into what the French political economist Frédéric Bastiat famously described as “legalized plunder”.

And when democratic institutions become instruments of legalized plunder, elections merely determine who gets to preside over the spoils.

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

Follow our WhatsApp Channel

My April 18, 2026 column titled “Tinubu’s Yoruba Agenda Risks Deep Rupture in Kwara” used privileged information I received from a self-described Yoruba irredentist to advance a narrative that President Bola Ahmed Tinubu had planned to impose a Yoruba candidate from Kwara South as Kwara State’s APC governorship candidate at the expense of the Borgu people in the state, who are found in Baruten and Kaiama local governments and of whom he is the Jagaba, that is, champion.

Well, after surviving several fits and starts, manoeuvres, negotiations, disappointments and unpleasant surprises, a Borgu man from Baruten, Yakubu Danladi Salihu, who is the current Speaker of the Kwara State House of Assembly, emerged as APC’s governorship candidate.

Since it is difficult to imagine anyone emerging as APC’s governorship candidate in today’s party structure without at least Tinubu’s acquiescence, several Tinubu supporters privately wrote to challenge me to openly admit that I was wrong in my assumption that he would impose a certain Bashir Omolaja Bolarinwa on the state in furtherance of his “Yoruba agenda”.

They alleged that I wrote my column out of “hate” for Tinubu. I do not “hate” Tinubu. Hate is a mental and emotional burden that I have no capacity to carry for anyone. As much as I have been his critic, I have also defended Tinubu in the past, even when no one else did, when I was convinced that he was unfairly attacked. My impassioned, consistent defense of the validity and legitimacy of his Chicago State University certificate, which drew false accusations that I had been compromised, is a case in point.

And anyone who has followed my public commentary for more than two decades will concede that I am never shy about publicly owning up to my mistakes, apologising when I err and correcting my assumptions when irrefutable, overwhelming evidence contradicts them. I recognise that I am only human and that my imperfections are the biggest proof of my humanity. So, I was going to write this column even if I wasn’t prompted by private, angry messages challenging me to do so.

Of the several messages I received after Malam Yakubu Danladi Salihu was announced as the winner of the Kwara APC primary election, the one by Pastor John Dara, former presidential candidate in the 2011 and 2019 election cycles and chairman of the African Development Investment Limited, was the most conciliatory.

“Please do a follow-up article to thank President Tinubu and Governor Abdulrazaq for supporting the emergence of a Kwara North Governorship Candidate. They both did,” Pastor Dara, who is Yoruba from Kwara South, wrote on May 22. “We also need to call on the people of Kwara State to support this just and positive development.”

I hesitated to write straight away because of the uncertainties that attended the primaries and the resistance, however feeble, that Salihu’s emergence appeared to be generating in a few places. What if I wrote and his victory was reversed?

But Oloriewe Raheem Adedoyin, former Kwara State Information Commissioner and veteran journalist, implied in a June 17 article in the Vanguard that Salihu’s victory is sealed. It is typical in any political contest for people who lose out to discredit the outcomes and for those who win to acclaim them. “The primaries in Kwara are no less credible than those conducted in Lagos or elsewhere,” wrote Adedoyin, who is from Kwara South.

Now that it is fairly certain that both the Kwara State governor and President Bola Ahmed Tinubu are committed to course correction, representational equity and inclusivity, I won’t mince words in saying they deserve plaudits. Kwara North (and Borgu in particular) would never have produced APC’s governorship candidate without them.

It would be too self-important to assume that the president had a change of mind after reading my column, which he probably didn’t even read. But on the off chance that he or the people close to him did and decided to change course partly because of it, it demonstrates admirable sensitivity to public opinion and reasoned arguments.

Read Also: ABSURD! Nigeria imports its own fuel as Dangote petrol loops through Togo despite trillions spent on dead refineries

It didn’t matter to me who between Senator Sadiq Suleiman Umar, Kwara North’s senator who hails from Kaiama, and Yakubu Danladi Salihu, who is from Baruten, won the APC nomination. They are both sons of Borgu in Kwara who are as qualified as anyone who has ever been governor of the state. I am glad that in thanking President Tinubu after his announcement as the winner of the APC governorship primary, Salihu acknowledged that Tinubu has lived up to his title as the Jagaba of Borgu.

Both the governor and the president were obviously under competing pressures from several constituencies, but they resisted them and chose to throw their weight behind a candidate from a part of the state that has never produced a governor since the state’s creation in 1967 and that has remained in its geographic, political and symbolic margins ever since.

It is gratifying that a wide swath of people from the state recognise the imperative of the inclusion of its most peripheral part into the mainstream. After the publication of my April 18 column, countless people from Ilorin Emirate reached out to me to say they saw merit in my arguments and were committed to remediation.

It still honestly and pleasantly shocks me that so many people from Ilorin Emirate concede that the remainder of Borgu in Kwara State should produce the next governor of the state.

My pleasant surprise springs from my knowledge that it takes conscious effort to acknowledge that you are the beneficiary of unfair advantages and to willingly let go of those advantages. Of course, it would be unrealistic to expect everyone to be on the same page on this issue, but my sense is that the vast majority of people in both Ilorin Emirate and Kwara South are sold on this.

Perhaps it’s not altogether out of place that most people in Ilorin Emirate support the shift of power to the North. After all, they have produced the governor for 19 of the 27 years since the restoration of civilian rule in 1999.

Plus, many Ilorin indigenes, my younger sister’s husband being an example, have distant Borgu ancestral roots, even if they are now, for all practical purposes, Yoruba people, and therefore may have some emotional investment in the emergence of a Borgu person as governor.

But the fact that many prominent and not-so-prominent people from Kwara South are on board is the bigger pleasant surprise for me. Kwara South has had only one 8-year shot at the governorship since 1999. That many of them think conceding the governorship to a part of the state that has never produced a governor for even a split second is worthwhile is commendable.

You won’t appreciate what I am driving at until you realise that there are many multi-ethnic states in Nigeria where just one ethnic group dominates the governorship in perpetuity.

An example that stands out like a sore thumb is Benue State. Since the state’s creation in 1976, every elected civilian governor has come from the Tiv-speaking part of the state. The governorship has never gone to Idoma, Igede or any other non-Tiv group in a civilian election. So, every child in Benue who isn’t Tiv has little reason to imagine that they could someday become governor.

In complex, transitional, multi-ethnic and plural countries like Nigeria, conscious efforts should be made to formalise strategies for the symbolic inclusion of all collective identities in governance structures. That is the only way people can relate to governance and feel a vicarious identification with power and authority.

It obviously is not a substitute for good governance, accountability, transparency, performance and improvement in the lot of the people, but it’s an indispensable precondition for getting every citizen invested in the business of government.

Kwara has now shown that even in a country where exclusion often masquerades as democracy and “meritocracy”, power can still be made to travel to the margins when conscience, pressure and enlightened self-interest meet.

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

Follow our WhatsApp Channel