By Lillian Okenwa

As the Nigerian Bar gathers again for its Annual General Conference, the story of Barnabas and Abigail Igwe returns us to a turbulent period in Anambra when vigilante power was rising, public institutions were under strain and a lawyer’s opposition to the prevailing order carried consequences.

Since Friday, lawyers from across Nigeria began to gather for another Annual General Conference of the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA).

For most of them, it will be a familiar ritual: The opening ceremonies, professional debates, meetings, elections, reunions and the arguments that have always accompanied the Bar’s biggest annual gathering.

For an older generation of lawyers, however, the conference also carries a memory that has never quite disappeared.

Read Also: THE IGWE FILE: They returned from the NBA’s Annual General Conference. They never returned to their lives.

In 2002, Barnabas Igwe, chairman of the Nigerian Bar Association’s Onitsha Branch, attended the Association’s Annual General Conference in Ibadan with his wife, Abigail. They returned to Anambra but, they never returned to their lives.

The murders became one of the most painful episodes in the history of the Nigerian legal profession. But to understand the events surrounding their deaths, it is necessary to go back to the Anambra they returned to—a state experiencing a combination of political tension, insecurity, industrial unrest and a growing crisis of confidence in government institutions.

It was the period in which the Bakassi Boys emerged as one of the most powerful vigilante organisations in the South-East.

The group had acquired popular support by confronting armed robbers at a time when many residents had lost faith in the ability of the police to protect them. Its methods were swift and often violent. To some communities, the Bakassi Boys were a necessary response to a frightening security situation. To human rights organisations and civil liberties advocates, they represented the danger of allowing an armed group to operate beyond the ordinary restraints of the law.

The controversy grew as the organisation became increasingly associated with political authority.

In Anambra, the debate became especially bitter.

Governor Chinwoke Mbadinuju’s administration was facing mounting criticism. Workers went for months without salaries. Industrial action paralysed parts of the state. The courts and other public institutions were struggling with the consequences of the wider crisis.

The political atmosphere had become increasingly charged. The Onitsha Bar’s interventions were no longer routine professional statements. Igwe had become a visible critic in a state where political authority and vigilante power were increasingly difficult to separate.

The murders came against that background.

Anambra was then dealing with a combination of political tension, insecurity and industrial unrest. The Bakassi Boys had grown from a community response to armed robbery into a powerful vigilante organisation, with supporters who regarded them as an answer to the failures of the police and critics who accused them of operating outside the law.

Their growing influence raised questions that went beyond crime and security. Who had authority to use force? Where did the powers of a vigilante group end and those of the state begin? And what happened when political interests became entangled with an organisation whose methods included violence?

Barnabas Igwe had been willing to ask some of those questions publicly.

He was killed with his wife, Abigail, in September 2002.

The years that followed produced investigations, arrests and criminal proceedings, but no final judicial determination that has settled the case for the public. The circumstances of the murders have continued to generate allegations and counter-allegations, while questions about those who ordered, organised or carried out the killings have remained part of the case’s unresolved history.

More recently, the Anambra Truth, Justice and Peace Commission revisited the murders and made findings and recommendations concerning the case. Those findings brought renewed attention to the circumstances surrounding the killings, but they do not substitute for a criminal trial or a conviction. Criminal responsibility must ultimately be established through the courts.

For the Igwe family, the passage of time has offered little consolation.

For the Nigerian Bar, the case has become something larger than the deaths of two people.

Barnabas Igwe was not the first Nigerian lawyer to confront political power, and he was certainly not the last. But the circumstances of his death made his story particularly disturbing to a profession whose work depends on the ability of lawyers to challenge public authority without becoming targets themselves.

The issue became even sharper because of the period in which he was killed.

Anambra was experimenting, willingly or otherwise, with a form of security in which the distinction between the state’s formal institutions and informal armed groups was becoming increasingly difficult to maintain. The Bakassi Boys were celebrated in some quarters as protectors and condemned in others as an instrument of violence. Their rise exposed the weakness of the institutions that had allowed such a vacuum to develop in the first place.

The Igwe case sits within that history.

It raises questions about the relationship between political power and private violence; about what happens when communities lose confidence in the police; and about the vulnerability of lawyers who insist that even the most serious security problems must be dealt with within the law.

Those questions have not disappeared with the passage of time.

Nigeria has since experienced other periods of insecurity in which communities have turned to vigilantes when formal security agencies appeared unable to protect them. Governments have continued to rely, in different circumstances, on community security structures. The arguments over necessity, legality and accountability have therefore remained very much alive.

The Igwe story offers an earlier and particularly painful chapter of that debate.

A criminal justice system earns public confidence not only when it successfully prosecutes ordinary offences, but when it is capable of pursuing difficult cases involving influential people, political interests or allegations against those close to power.

When such cases remain unresolved for years, the consequences extend beyond the families directly involved. The unanswered questions become part of public memory.

That is what happened with the Igwes.

Their names survived the political era in which they were killed. The government of that period passed. The personalities changed. The political arguments moved on. The Bar itself has gone through several generations of leadership.

The case remained.

And so, too, did the question of whether the Nigerian state would ever provide a definitive account of what happened to Barnabas and Abigail Igwe.

As lawyers assemble once again for their annual gathering, that history will be present even if it is not mentioned from the podium.

Every profession has cases that become part of its collective memory. For the Nigerian Bar, the Igwe case is one of them.

It is a reminder of a period when speaking for the law could place a lawyer in danger, when vigilante power had acquired political dimensions, and when the institutions expected to provide answers failed to provide all of them.

The next chapter of the story is therefore not simply about what happened in 2002.

It is about what Nigeria did with the unanswered questions that followed.

Next Sunday: THE IGWE FILE — The Commission That Reopened a Murder. The next instalment examines the Truth, Justice and Peace Commission’s investigation, its findings and recommendations, and the renewed search for answers more than two decades after the murders.

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By Lillian Okenwa

Justice Faruk Hassan Bunza spent nine days in the hands of kidnappers after being taken from his home. Weeks later, Nigeria assembled thousands of security personnel for the Osun governorship election. Between those two events lies a troubling question about the priorities and capacity of the Nigerian state.

There is one detail in Justice Faruk Hassan Bunza’s account of his kidnapping that says more about Nigeria’s security crisis than the number of men who eventually came looking for him.

His captors were afraid.

Read Also: THE IGWE FILE (Part II): The State, the Bakassi boys and the politics of fear

They had taken a sitting High Court judge from his home in the middle of the night and led him into the bush. They had guns, local knowledge and people who could provide information about their intended victim. They knew the terrain and had a hideout where they could keep a hostage for days. Yet they were sufficiently worried about being discovered to warn Bunza against coughing loudly because, he said, they feared the sound might expose their position.

It is an extraordinary detail. The men holding the judge were not confident enough to believe that the state had disappeared; they were simply confident enough to believe that it would not find them.

According to Bunza, fewer than 20 bandits were at the Dutsen Bandan camp in Kebbi State. Five armed men had taken him from his residence shortly after midnight on July 26. They made him walk roughly 25 kilometres barefoot before moving him another 24 kilometres by motorcycle to the camp, where he remained for about nine days.

The kidnapping was therefore not the work of some enormous armed formation overwhelming a heavily defended position. A handful of men were able to enter the home of a sitting judge, remove him without interception and transport him deep into territory they understood better than the authorities pursuing them.

Bunza’s account suggests that information was central to the operation. His captors appeared to know about him, his work and his circumstances, and he said they had informants around the area. They monitored news reports and social media and understood enough about their surroundings to remain at the camp while keeping watch for signs that security forces might be closing in.

That is where the story moves beyond the kidnapping of one judge.

The issue becomes the reach of the Nigerian state: its intelligence, its deployment of personnel, its ability to maintain a presence in vulnerable communities and, ultimately, its choice of where to concentrate the resources available to it.

The contrast with what happened in Osun is difficult to miss.

For the August 15 governorship election, the Nigeria Police Force deployed more than 15,000 personnel across the state. Thirty Commissioners of Police were assigned to the state’s 30 local government areas, alongside deputy commissioners, assistant commissioners, Mobile Police units and other formations. A Deputy Inspector-General coordinated the operation, while helicopters and drones were deployed for surveillance. The Army was also assigned roles around the state’s borders.

There is a perfectly legitimate reason for such a deployment. Elections are vulnerable moments in a democracy. Political violence, intimidation and disruption can alter the result before a single ballot is counted, and voters should be able to go to polling stations without having to negotiate with armed groups or political thugs.

But the contrast raises a disturbing question.

Nigeria was able to assemble an extraordinary concentration of security personnel around a single governorship election, yet a sitting High Court judge whose work included cases involving kidnapping and banditry was vulnerable enough to be taken from his home.

The significance lies not in suggesting that the two deployments were interchangeable. They were not. An election is a planned national event with a fixed date, identifiable locations, known participants and a defined security operation. A kidnapping is sudden, dispersed and unpredictable.

The significance lies in what the comparison reveals about the state’s ability to mobilise when it considers something an immediate national priority.

The judge who became a target

Bunza had spent years inside the criminal justice system before he became its victim.

He had served as a magistrate and chief magistrate before his elevation to the High Court. His courtroom work included cases involving banditry and kidnapping, putting him in direct contact with the criminal networks responsible for some of the most serious threats in northern Nigeria.

He told reporters that his security arrangements changed as his judicial career progressed. As a magistrate and chief magistrate, he said, he had permanent security at his residence. As a High Court judge, security was provided on a shift basis.

His experience now gives that distinction a disturbing significance.

Bunza said his captors appeared to know that he handled serious criminal cases and had information about his personal circumstances. He believes his professional responsibilities may have contributed to his selection as a target.

That should prompt a broader examination of the protection available to judges whose work puts them in the path of organised criminals.

A judge who presides over a kidnapping case is not simply another government employee. He or she may sign warrants, remand suspects, convict offenders and impose sentences that can have consequences for people with the resources and networks to retaliate.

The courtroom may be insulated from the violence outside it, but the judge who leaves the courtroom is not.

Bunza’s experience exposes that gap in the most direct way possible.

The difference between numbers and intelligence

The scale of the Osun deployment inevitably invites a discussion about numbers.

Nigeria needs more police officers. It needs better equipment. It needs more specialised units and stronger communications. Those are longstanding deficiencies.

But Bunza’s experience suggests that the problem cannot be reduced to manpower.

The kidnappers did not defeat the state by assembling a force larger than the police. They avoided a direct confrontation altogether. Their advantage was information: where to find their target, how to move him, where to take him and how to remain hidden afterwards.

That is a different kind of contest.

An armed criminal group does not have to control a town to create insecurity. It needs only enough knowledge of the roads, communities, forests and people around it to move with confidence while the security agencies are working with incomplete information.

Bunza’s captors apparently had that advantage.

They were few enough to remain mobile, familiar enough with the terrain to disappear and connected enough to obtain information about the man they intended to abduct.

The state had more personnel.

The kidnappers had better knowledge of the immediate environment.

That imbalance is at the heart of much of Nigeria’s insecurity.

When security becomes an event

The Osun operation also illustrates the way security is often organised around political events.

An election provides a timetable. There is a known polling date, a defined geographical area, a list of polling units, political parties and candidates, collation centres and likely flashpoints. Commanders can plan weeks ahead and move personnel into place before voting begins.

The result can be seen on the streets: senior police officers arrive, tactical units are deployed, surveillance is expanded and borders can be controlled.

Ordinary insecurity does not offer that convenience.

A judge goes home after court.

A farmer travels to his field.

A family sleeps in its house.

A witness prepares to testify.

A child returns from school.

These are not national events, yet they are the moments in which citizens depend on the state most directly.

Security that appears in large numbers for a political event but is difficult to sustain in vulnerable communities leaves a gap that criminals learn to exploit.

The problem is not that Nigeria secures elections too heavily. The problem is that the exceptional capacity displayed during elections can make the everyday absence of security elsewhere even harder to explain.

The price of concentrating power

The Osun deployment also raises the issue of what happens outside the state when security resources are concentrated there.

Festus Adedayo, writing in Premium Times, questioned the scale of the deployment and reported that large numbers of senior police officers—including Commissioners of Police, Deputy Commissioners and Assistant Commissioners—had been moved into Osun, raising concerns about the effect on police commands elsewhere.

The argument deserves consideration beyond the politics surrounding the election.

Police resources are finite. Senior officers are finite. Specialised units are finite. Surveillance equipment and operational capacity are finite.

Whenever large numbers are moved from one part of the country to another, there is a consequence, even if it is not immediately visible.

That consequence matters in a country where kidnapping and banditry do not pause because an election is taking place somewhere else.

The police can justify concentrating resources around Osun. The voters of Osun have a right to security. But the communities from which those resources are drawn have the same claim.

This is where questions about national security become questions about national priorities.

Protecting the people who protect the law

The vulnerability of judges deserves particular attention because the judiciary is one of the institutions on which the security response itself ultimately depends.

Police arrest suspects.

Prosecutors bring charges.

Judges determine whether evidence is sufficient and whether the law has been breached.

When a judge convicts a kidnapper or imposes a sentence on a member of a criminal gang, the decision is an exercise of state authority. If the people exercising that authority become targets without adequate protection, the authority of the state becomes easier to challenge.

Bunza’s kidnapping therefore has implications beyond his personal ordeal.

It raises questions about whether judges handling high-risk criminal cases should automatically receive enhanced protection; whether judicial residences should be subjected to formal security assessments; whether intelligence agencies routinely evaluate threats against judicial officers; and whether the protection given to judges is designed around their actual risk or simply inherited from a general system of police deployment.

These are administrative questions, but they have constitutional consequences.

Judicial independence means little if a judge can be intimidated physically, threatened through his family or made to fear the consequences of performing his judicial duties.

Bunza has said that his experience has not weakened his commitment to the bench. That is a testament to his personal resolve.

It should not, however, become an excuse for the state to rely on the courage of judges to compensate for institutional shortcomings.

A state of surges

The Osun election showed how quickly the Nigerian state can produce a large, coordinated security presence when the circumstances demand it.

The kidnapping of Bunza showed how different the experience can be when insecurity is dispersed across ordinary communities.

That contrast is more revealing than either number on its own.

Fifteen thousand officers in Osun do not mean that Nigeria has 15,000 spare officers who could simply have been sent to Kebbi. The demands of election security are different from those of counter-kidnapping operations, and numbers alone cannot substitute for intelligence, investigation and sustained presence.

But neither should the availability of thousands of personnel for an election obscure the weaknesses exposed by Bunza’s captivity.

The Nigerian state has repeatedly demonstrated an ability to surge.

What remains less convincing is its ability to sustain.

A surge can secure a polling station for a day. It cannot dismantle a kidnapping network that has operated in the same area for months or years. It can protect a political rally for several hours. It cannot provide permanent security to judges, witnesses and communities living under threat.

That requires something less visible and more difficult: intelligence built over time, cooperation between agencies, reliable local networks, rapid response, proper investigation and a security presence that does not disappear when the immediate event is over.

The real test of the state

Bunza’s ordeal began at home, not at a political rally or a battlefield.

His captors came in the middle of the night, took him away and moved him through terrain where they believed the state could not reach them. They held him for nine days before he eventually found his way out of captivity and back to his community.

Weeks later, another part of the Nigerian security machinery was operating at a very different scale in Osun, where thousands of officers had been assembled to ensure that an election could proceed peacefully.

Neither event, by itself, tells the whole story.

Together, however, they expose a fault line in the way Nigeria protects its citizens.

The country can mobilise large numbers of security personnel when an event is politically important, nationally visible and fixed on the calendar. The more difficult task is providing the intelligence, protection and persistent presence required when there is no election to secure, no dignitary to protect and no television camera waiting to record the operation.

That is where the capacity of a state is ultimately tested.

Not only in how many men it can put on the streets when the country is watching, but in whether an ordinary citizen can go home at night and reasonably expect the state to be there if someone comes for him.

Justice Bunza was a judge when he was taken.

His kidnappers knew it.

The state should have known what that meant, too.

And that leaves Nigeria with a question that goes well beyond Osun, Kebbi or one judge’s ordeal: When the Nigerian state has to choose where its power will be seen, where does it choose to put it—and what happens to everyone else?

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A high-stakes administrative crisis at the University of Calabar (UNICAL) has erupted into a explosive multi-billion-naira legal battle at the Federal High Court in Abuja, exposing systemic rot, regulatory overreach, and the grim reality of Nigeria’s higher education system.

In Suit No. FHC/ABJ/CS/1825/2026, 214 undergraduate students—summarily purged from the institution’s Faculty of Law—have dragged the University of Calabar, its Vice-Chancellor, Prof. Offiong Offiong, and President Bola Ahmed Tinubu (in his capacity as Visitor to the varsity) before the law, demanding N5 Billion in damages and immediate reinstatement.

At the heart of the suit—Ogana Lukpata & 213 Ors. v. University of Calabar & 3 Ors.—is a devastating dilemma: Can a federal university lure students into a coveted professional program, collect millions in tuition, issue official transfer credentials, and then dump them back into their old departments when regulatory quotas backfire?

Here is an in-depth legal analysis of the scandal tearing UNICAL apart, the constitutional breaches at play, and what this precedent-setting trial means for Nigerian universities.

The Genesis: A Quota Disaster and Administrative Betrayal

The trouble began when the previous university leadership approved intra-university transfers and Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) regularisations, expanding the law faculty’s intake to 435 students. However, faced with looming accreditation sanctions from the Council of Legal Education (CLE)—which strictly caps law admissions—the incoming Vice-Chancellor cracked down.

In a swift administrative purge, 214 students were locked out of their portals, stripped of their LL.B status, and unilaterally ordered back to their entry-level departments.

Rather than bow to the directive, the affected students tapped into the very legal principles they were being taught, mounting a massive suit accusing the university of gross breach of contract and administrative tyranny.

The Legal Battleground: 4 Core Issues Facing the Court

1. The Doctrine of Legitimate Expectation & Estoppel by Conduct

Under administrative law, an institution is a continuous legal entity (persona ficta). A change in Vice-Chancellors cannot erase previous official acts.

By issuing transfer approvals, upgrading student portals, accepting specialized tuition fees, and administering law examinations over multiple semesters, UNICAL created a legally binding expectation. Under Section 169 of the Evidence Act 2011 (Estoppel by Conduct), UNICAL is barred from denying the validity of an admission process it conducted, supervised, and monetized for over two years.

2. Breach of Contract and Arbitrary Contract Termination

Admission to a university constitutes a formal contract: an offer is made, accepted, and consideration (tuition) is exchanged. By abruptly revoking student status without fair hearing or due process, UNICAL violated fundamental rights guaranteed under Section 36 of the 1999 Constitution of Nigeria (as amended). Courts have repeatedly ruled that universities cannot unilaterally void academic contracts when the fault lies entirely within institutional governance.

3. Students as Scapegoats for Institutional Maladministration

UNICAL’s core defense rests on regulatory compliance—specifically, staying within Council of Legal Education (CLE) carrying capacities. However, appellate court precedents in Nigeria consistently affirm that students must not be made scapegoats for internal university corruption or administrative incompetence. If university officials unlawfully inflated admission lists, the legal burden falls on the administration to penalize the officers responsible—not to destroy the academic careers of paying students.

4. The Presidential Factor: Why Tinubu is Joined

President Bola Ahmed Tinubu was joined as the 4th Defendant pursuant to his statutory duties as Visitor under the University of Calabar Act (Cap U5, LFN 2004). While a Visitor’s powers are primarily supervisory, invoking the Visitor forces executive oversight, bringing the Federal Ministry of Education and the Attorney-General of the Federation directly into the courtroom.

What’s at Stake?

• For the Students: The immediate threat is academic death. Without court intervention, two to three years of legal studies, financial expenditure, and career momentum will be wiped out. Even worse, graduating without recognized CLE quotas risks total rejection by the Nigerian Law School.
• For UNICAL: The university faces catastrophic exposure—a N5 Billion damage claim, potential loss of faculty accreditation, and severe reputational damage.
• For Nigerian Tertiary Education: A ruling in favor of the students will send shockwaves through federal and state universities, effectively ending the chaotic practice of off-the-record admissions and unregulated intra-university transfers.

The Verdict Ahead

As the Federal High Court prepares to hear arguments, the immediate focus turns to whether the court will grant an injunction restoring portal access to prevent the students from losing an entire academic year.

Whatever the outcome, Lukpata v. UNICAL is no longer just a localized campus conflict—it is a landmark showdown that could permanently redefine university accountability, student rights, and regulatory compliance across Nigeria.

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