A commenter on X, obviously a South African national, with the name Paul, reacted to a CableNews April 27 report that two Nigerians were killed in recent spike in South Africa’s xenophobic attacks on fellow Africans. He said: “They were burnt alive…our country isn’t a playing zone. They (sic) will be more Nigerian criminals to be buried this Saturday.” Paul was writing with the handle, @blewcash.easymoney.referral, with the South African national flag hoisted on his comment. A BBC report had earlier quoted a 43-year-old Democratic Republic of Congo national living in Hillbrow, S.A. as saying he felt lucky to be alive: “My best friend was attacked one morning… He was stoned to death like a dog. Imagine someone runs away from his own land and comes here to find peace but ends up getting killed.”

 A 2017 report cited by Nigeria’s House of Representatives said that 116 Nigerians were killed in South Africa over a preceding two-year period, out of which, roughly 20 were killed in 2016. Though not a recent phenomenon, xenophobic attacks in South Africa have assumed epidemic proportion. As far back as 1994, in the rush for scarce resources,  immigrants face stiff push, leading to violent discrimination. Record has it that in 2008, South Africa harvested 62 deaths from xenophobic uprising and attacks. A 2018 Pew research poll reported that 62% of South Africans believed immigrants constituted social and economic burdens and were responsible for crimes. At the moment, South Africa’s rate of unemployment, ranked as one of the highest in the world, oscillates around 33%. Xenophobia attacks increased after Nelson Mandela and a black majority government deposed white rule, inflicted by assailants who allege that job losses result from foreigners’ infiltration.

Read Also: The travails of Nestoil and the travesties of courts

 Julius Malema, South African opposition politician and leader of the Economic Freedom Fighters, had a stinging remark against such claims. Last Thursday, at the 14th anniversary of Collen Mashawana Foundation, he took a swipe at xenophobia by saying, “I want to challenge you who say ‘Zimbabweans take your jobs, Nigerians take your jobs’ and you march, close shops, and beat up people. Tell us after doing that, how many jobs have you created?… Unskilled men, with no skill whatsoever, say somebody took their jobs. The skill they know is to drink and want to pretend like revolutionaries.”

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 South African politicians, like ones in uMkhonto weSizwe (MK) led by ex-President Jacob Zuma, latch on this to make xenophobic comments to gain political advantage. Early this year, Zulu king, Misuzulu kaZwelithini, used highly derogatory term for immigrants while calling for their eviction. He spoke by the rocky Isandlwana hill, in a place where history recorded that, 147 years ago, his forefathers, commanding 20,000 Zulu warriors in the Anglo-Zulu war, defeated 1,800 British soldiers in the battle of Isandlwana. 

 The 51-year king said: “The kwerekwere must leave,” kwerekwere being a derogatory word for African migrants. His late father, Goodwill Zwelithini, made similar offensive call in 2015, asking immigrants to “pack their belongings”. This led to a rise in vigilante anti-migrant groups, chief of which is the Operation Dudula (Dudula in Zulu language meaning “to be removed by force”) as well as March on March, with their notoriety flourishing daily.

 There is no way we can locate South Africans’ violence against fellow blacks unless we go into history. In 2019, South Africans unleashed an unprecedented assault on Nigerians which resulted in loss of property worth billions of Naira. To understand this hate, we have to trace its genealogy. It will explain the infliction of horrendous pains on fellow blacks by South Africans.

READ ALSO: Before South Africa’s demons start murdering Nigerians again

Historically, since 1948, Black South Africans have harboured bile, violence and rancid hatred for other races. 1948 was the year Apartheid was institutionalized as a system of white minority rule. It led to acute racial segregation. The Apartheid system also forced non-white into segregated areas, restricted their rights to mingle with whites and took away their voting rights. These further inflicted incalculable damage on their psyche. The  National Party, led by such leaders like Pieter Willem Botha, enforced this oppressive policy of «apartness».

Today, though Apartheid was defeated by the collective voices of the world in 1994, it has not died. While you may see imposing infrastructural relics of white rule in South Africa, its innards are made of up of irreconcilable dysfunction, hate and quest for vengeance of 1948 to 1994.

If you read the works of authors like Mazisi Kunene, Ezekiel Mphalele, Peter Abrahams, Alf Wannenburg and many others, you will understand why South Africans haven’t purged themselves of their bond with violence. 

 I have searched frantically for the lure of the gruesome murders of Nigerians and other African nationals at the drop of a hat by South Africans. My findings revealed a retained savagery of Apartheid. Placing stories of blood spillage under Apartheid with the recent ease with which South Africans hack fellow Blacks to death, a knowledge of the country’s historical development will bail you out of wonderment. If you now read Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and William Golding’s classic, Lord of the Flies, place the bestiality in the books beside the black-on-black hate in South Africa today and you will agree with white theorists’ submission that the Blackman has within him innate bestiality. Today, South African blacks only need very little provocation to unleash an ancestry of savagery, like Golding’s little boys marooned on an island, whose animalism took the better part of them.

Like Fela Anikulapo-Kuti sang, quoting Botha, Apartheid indeed brought out the beast in South Africans. Today, fellow blacks have replaced whites in their subconscious. The moment the system castrated the Blackman’s manhood, he became a lot less than an animal, with no difference between his behaviour and those of his ape ancestors. If you read the history of the South African liberation struggle, it is replete with macabre and a number of horrendous murders that would make a civilized world shudder. In the name of the struggle, many of those atrocities were excused and overlooked; indeed, they came to the world’s knowledge seldom. The world focused, on the reverse, on the evil regime of Frederick de Clark and the atrocities of segregating white from Indians, the black and coloured. The dastardly act of murdering fellow blacks they labeled Askaris, who were alleged to have betrayed the liberation struggle, were never heard. Thus, we never knew how ignoble and bloodless the hearts of our South African brothers were.

You will recall the trial of Winnie Mandela and the allegation of her involvement in the murder of some youths, who went by the façade of a football club. The murdered boys were alleged to be squealing on the liberation struggle. They were summarily tried by the “Winnie Boys”, sentenced to death and executed, similar to how a Nigerian police officer, ASP Nuhu Usman, was captured on video executing a 28-year-old suspect, Mene Ogidi, last week in Effurun, Delta State. Winnie was eventually tried for these murders which constituted one of the thousands of gruesome killings by blacks under Apartheid.

If you read some of the works of Alex la Guma, like A Walk In the Night, you will encounter District Six, the inner city of Cape Town, home to all sorts of sub-human activities and why horrendous murder became part and parcel of the people’s existence. Mutual knifing, unprovoked arson, murders and all sorts were carried out with a clinical finish that would make a decent man shudder. In Quartet and In the Fog of the Seasons’ End, you will encounter the bestiality that Apartheid wrought on the psyche of our so-called brothers. Many black South Africans lost their humanity in the process.

Umkhonto we Sizwe, the armed wing of the African National Congress (ANC), founded by Mandela in 1961, perpetrated a lot of criminal activities and mindless murders that were swept under the rug while Mandela was in jail. Several South Africans who were accused of betraying the struggle were tagged Askari or “cockroaches” got summarily executed and nobody ever heard of their deaths thereafter.

If Gen Z South Africans who hate Nigerians this much, apparently not born in 1994 or are too young to appreciate the roles Nigeria played to get them the freedom that made them fiefs in their own land, methinks elderly South Africans should retell the story to them. After all, my people say if a child was not alive to witness history (Ìtàn) in manifestation, they will at least hear historical narratives (àróbá). In total, it is said that, from 1960 when Tafawa Balewa made Africa the centerpiece of Nigeria’s foreign policy, to 1994 during Sani Abacha regime, Nigeria wasted an estimated $60 billion on funding the anti-Apartheid struggle.

That Nigerian intervention actually began with the Sharpeville Massacre of March 21, 1960. Police had opened fire on a crowd of protesters outside a police station in the township of Sharpeville. They were protesting Apartheid system’s Pass laws which required Blacks to obtain passes to move around. 72 blacks were killed and about 184 wounded in one fell swoop. In protest, Nigerian university students voluntarily skipped their lunch for a month, and the proceeds remitted to South Africa. It was called the Mandela Tax. Not only did they make fetish of the evil of Apartheid, Nigerian students mobilized public opinion in support of people they felt were their brothers, with many young Nigerians contributing from their little pocket monies in aid of the struggle.

In the same vein, many tertiary institutions formed clubs like Youth Solidarity on South Africa. Nigeria then boycotted the 1976 Olympics and 1979 Commonwealth games, leading to national losses. To get South Africa liberated quickly, Nigeria declined selling oil to the apartheid regime. Aside these, Nigeria played a vital role in the anti-apartheid struggle through music, using powerful songs to mobilize awareness and solidarity across Africa and beyond. Artists like Fela Kuti and Sonny Okosun used their voices to condemn oppression, inspire resistance, and amplify the call for freedom in South Africa.

Apart from frontline states like Zimbabwe, Zambia, Angola, Mozambique and Namibia, no nation could rival Nigeria in contributions to the struggle against apartheid. If you read the book, Diplomatic Soldiering (1987) written by Gen. Joe Garba, Nigeria’s foreign affairs minister under Gens. Murtala Muhammed/Olusegun Obasanjo, you will have an idea of the quantum of fortune Nigeria sank into the liberation of South Africa and South African states. On many occasions, Nigeria single-handedly picked the bills of programmes associated with the struggle. Thousands of South African youths received scholarship to study in Nigerian universities, nursing schools, polytechnics and colleges of education. Frustrated at some point, Obasanjo, as Head of State, once threatened to deploy all means possible to fight Apartheid to a standstill, including invoking what he called the Blackman’s magical power.

 At some point, Nigeria was home to South African freedom fighters like Thabo Mbeki’s father, Govan Mbeki; Albert Luthuli and other ANC leaders who were here on asylum. Nigeria also richly funded ANC’s military wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe. Thabo, Mbeki’s son, was also on exile in Nigeria from 1976 to 1979.

 On May 13, 1990, upon his release from a combination of terms in Robben Island, Pollsmoor, and Victor Verster Prisons which cumulatively stood at 27 years, President Nelson Mandela was on a courtesy visit to Nigeria. At the Murtala Square, Kaduna, he affirmed that Nigeria made the highest donation to South Africa’s liberation. To further underscore this, on April 27, on the Freedom Day which marks South Africa’s first democratic elections in 1994, President Cyril Ramaphosa reminded his country of the debt it owes other nations on the continent who supported their struggle against the racist system of apartheid. 

 The children and grandchildren of Nigerians who made those huge sacrifices are now the ones being killed in South Africa today. As Nigerians, we have our own drawbacks, but violence of the South African kind is alien to us. 

My take is that, if Nigerian governments, from independence to 1994, had spent the estimated $60b frittered on South Africa on the future of Nigerians, their offspring would not be hibernating in South Africa today. South Africans may also jolly well still be in captivity. We owe it a duty to both ourselves and country to make Nigeria too a pleasant country, a country which, travelling out of it would be for mere sightseeing, rather than for economic liberation. The hopelessness at home and the serial plunder of our country by our own kin, the notoriety of which is a tale told in all the four corners of the globe, are reasons we weigh little in the estimation of the world. Again, the criminal lifestyles, drug-pushing and excessive self-underscore that our nationals live abroad cannot but make us objects of xenophobia.

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

By Max Amuchie | The Sunday Stew

Nigeria’s decoupling is not random — it is engineered. The state wears the mask of authority while its rivals wield the substance of power. In the vacuum, a rival order rises: taxing, renaming, and ruling with a clarity the state can no longer muster.

Part 1 named the condition. This second movement explains its mechanics.
If the Institutional Mirage performs authority and the Shadow Order exercises it, then the question is no longer whether the state is weakening, but how that weakening is organised, sustained, and reproduced.
The answer lies in the Insecurity Triad — not as a collection of crimes, but as an operational system of governance that emerges in the interstices of state withdrawal.
What appears as disorder is structure. What appears as fragmentation is system. What appears as crisis is reproduction.
At the centre of this reproduction is a loop the state does not merely fail to break — but increasingly inhabits as its own mode of survival.

The Structural Interaction: Mirage, Shadow, and the Production of Void

The Institutional Mirage and the Shadow Order are not parallel formations. They are locked in a causal circuit — a self-reinforcing loop sustained by the Insecurity Triad.
The sequence is precise, not accidental.
The Mirage creates the vacuum.
By performing governance without delivering it — convening committees instead of enforcing authority, issuing declarations instead of securing territory, maintaining symbolic centrality while withdrawing from operational peripheries — the Institutional Mirage produces spaces where sovereignty exists in form but not in force.
These are not empty spaces. They are functional voids: zones where authority is declared but not operational, where legality exists but enforceability does not, where the state is present as narrative but absent as structure.
In these voids, legitimacy becomes unanchored from enforcement.
The Shadow does not enter these spaces as disruption.
It enters as replacement infrastructure.
It fills the vacuum through the Insecurity Triad:
Money — ransom economies that convert insecurity into revenue;
Land — territorial governance through coercive taxation and control;
Mind — ideological capture that replaces civic legitimacy with alternative authority systems.

The Triad is not incidental. It is not criminal residue. It is administrative architecture without formal recognition.
Together, these three logics form a rival system of governance that requires no elections, no constitutional validation, no external recognition. It requires only the sustained absence of enforceable state presence.

Constitutional Erasure: The Shadow’s Sovereign Inscription

The functional void produced by the Mirage is not passive; it is actively inscribed by rival authority. What Part 1 established empirically — the renaming of villages, the hoisting of rival flags, and the symbolic reordering of territory — now becomes analytically central as constitutional erasure within the Insecurity Triad loop.
Fanon’s insight is decisive here. To rename is to unmake — to dissolve one sovereign order and inscribe another in its place. The gun secures territory; the name governs it. Constitutional erasure is therefore not adjacent to governance. It is governance in its rival form — counter-constitutional inscription of authority.

Its significance lies in how it restructures perception and compliance. Once a community is renamed, the former constitutional designation becomes politically fragile. To invoke the state’s authority is to invoke an order that cannot enforce itself; to invoke the Shadow’s authority is to invoke one that can. The choice is no longer between legality and illegality, but between enforceable and unenforceable reality.
Constitutional erasure thus converts the Mirage’s vacancy into the Shadow’s jurisdiction. It transforms spatial absence into administrative capture, making subsequent compliance transfer structurally inevitable. The population is not simply governed differently; it is repositioned outside the state’s effective map of enforceability.
The Shadow does not request allegiance. It inscribes it through territorial naming itself.

Compliance Transfer: The Silent Relocation of Authority

As the Shadow consolidates control within functional voids, a second-order transformation occurs: compliance begins to migrate.
This is not ideological conversion. It is practical adaptation.
Populations shift allegiance along lines of enforceability rather than legality:
•taxes are paid to those who can enforce extraction;
•disputes are resolved by those who can enforce outcomes;
•rules are obeyed where consequences are immediate.
What emerges is not rebellion against the state, but rational substitution of authority under conditions of asymmetry.
Each act of compliance transferred is also an act of state erosion — not because the state disappears, but because its authority becomes non-competitive in lived reality.
At this stage, sovereignty is no longer monopolised. It is distributed according to functional capacity.

Dependency Turn: When the State Requires the Shadow

The loop reaches structural maturity when the state begins to adapt to its own displacement.
This is the most critical transition in the entire system.
The state does not confront the Shadow Order as an external adversary alone. It increasingly engages it as an informal stabiliser of governability.
This produces what can be described as Promotional Negotiation — the practice of purchasing temporary stability from a rival authority structure through ransom logic, informal settlements, or negotiated withdrawals.
This is not strategy. It is systemic dependency.
Every negotiation produces three systemic effects:
•It monetises insecurity by validating abduction economies;
•It territorialises Shadow authority by recognising de facto control;
•It legitimises the Shadow as a negotiating sovereign rather than a residual actor.
The paradox is complete: the state stabilises instability by financing its reproduction.
At this point, the Institutional Mirage is no longer merely performing sovereignty.
It is renting functional access to sovereignty from its own rival system.

Theoretical Architecture

The Trinity of State Decay is grounded in a layered theoretical architecture that explains the formation, operation, and persistence of the Institutional Mirage, the Shadow Order, and the Insecurity Triad. At the level of structural formation, Claude Ake and Franz Fanon clarify the inherited constitution of the Institutional Mirage: a postcolonial state that operates primarily as a performative and extractive apparatus, whose authority is unevenly inscribed across territorial space and sustained through symbolic rather than fully enforceable sovereignty.

At the level of mechanism, William Reno and Achille Mbembe explain the operational logic through which the Shadow Order emerges within the functional voids produced by the Mirage. Reno accounts for the relocation of authority to actors capable of enforcing compliance through control of resources and coercive capacity, while Mbembe extends this analysis by showing how coercion becomes a distributed regime of governance over life, survival, and exposure to insecurity.

At the level of persistence, Ali Mazrui and Jean-François Bayart explain why the interaction between Mirage and Shadow stabilises rather than resolves: Mazrui foregrounds the historical continuity of overlapping and non-synthesised authority systems, while Bayart highlights adaptive strategies through which elites and institutions reproduce governance through external linkage and internal accommodation. Together, these perspectives converge within the Trinity as a single analytic stack in which the Institutional Mirage, the Shadow Order, and the Insecurity Triad form a self-reproducing system of fragmented but structured sovereignty.

The Loop as System: Self-Reproduction Logic

The Insecurity Triad stabilises the system through continuous feedback:
Mirage withdraws functional void emerges;
Shadow occupies—authority substitutes
Triad institutionalises—governance stabilises;
Compliance shifts —state capacity erodes further;
Negotiation increases —dependency deepens
Loop intensifies —system reproduces.
There is no external reset mechanism within this system.
It is self-referentially stabilising under fragmentation conditions.

The Trinity of State Decay does not describe collapse. It describes a stable configuration of fragmented sovereignty sustained by asymmetry in enforcement capacity. Its resolution does not lie within the system it describes, but in the restoration of empirical sovereignty capable of reuniting legitimacy and force.

This is not the end of the argument, but the consolidation of its structure. The next and final movement will define the conditions under which the Trinity can be reversed, and the architecture of sovereignty reassembled into a single coherent system.

Trust is sacred. Stay seasoned

•Dr. Max Amuchie, CEO of Sundiata Post, is the architect of The Insecurity Triad analytical framework and the Trinity of State Decay theory. He writes The Sunday Stew, a weekly syndicated column on faith, character, and the forces that shape society, with a focus on Nigeria and Africa in a global context.

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

By Chidi Anselm Odinkalu

In a week in which the Nigerian judiciary at all levels has been the focus of considerable civic and party-political energy, it may seem odd to expend bandwidth on the travails of an investor or businessman, but Ernest Azudialu-Obiejesi is no ordinary businessman. The story of the ongoing ordeal in the Nigerian court system involving him, his wife, Nnenna – an entrepreneur in her own right – and various companies in which they are cross-invested, will for long be studied as an example of how disreputable dispute resolution constrains development and can blight even the ablest.

These cases involve the control of assets running into billions of dollars and claims concerning the structure and enforcement of secured credit transactions whose value is equally mouthwatering. The issues and sums involved are consequential for the fate of Nigeria’s economy. The performance of the courts has been just as consequential but for mostly the wrong reasons.

These cases have worked their way with dutiful relentlessness through every nook and cranny of the Nigerian court system. In the past six months alone, they have traveled through multiple judges of the Federal High Court; up to the Court of Appeal; and then to the Supreme Court from where they have returned to the Federal High Court. These cases have also generated tens of thousands of pages of court filings and records and thousands of billable hours for the most expensive lawyers in Nigeria.

As with many such cases involving commercial transactions at the sharp end, these cases can seem interminable, and their narrative can appear complex. Amidst the fog of legal attrition, however, the plot is discernible. What they reveal about how courts can dissipate a country and its wellbeing bears close attention.

Better known as “Obijackson”, the name of the trading company under which he first made his foray into the Piranha-infested waters of Nigerian enterprise in 1983, Ernest Azudialu-Obiejesi is one of Nigeria’s richest. In 1991, during the heady days of military rule, he ventured beyond trading and founded Nestoil, an engineering, procurement, construction, and commissioning company active in the provision of services to the hydrocarbons and adjacent sectors in the country.

Neconde Energy, another company founded by Obijackson, is a leading indigenous operator in hydrocarbons exploration and production in Nigeria. Among other holdings, Neconde Energy owns 45% of Oil Mining Lease (OML) 42. The remaining 55% is owned by the Nigeria National Petroleum Company (NNPC) Exploration and Production Limited (NEPL).

These companies are part of the Obijackson Group, which employs over 3,000 Nigerians directly. Up to 15,000 indirect jobs depend on their operations too.

As with many operators in the hydrocarbons and adjacent sectors, it is not unusual for such companies to require lines of credit from financial institutions. Indeed, this can itself be proof of the value and profitability.

In December 2022, the First Bank Group led a syndicate of financial institutions, including 16 Nigerian banks, in restructuring and consolidating the long-term indebtedness of Nestoil into a pool designated as “Global Facilities” and under a document known as Common Terms of Agreement (CTA). The consortium also included some lenders who were non-Nigerian, such as the Africa Export-Import (Afrexim) Bank, headquartered in Cairo.

The CTA contained provisions governing applicable law as well as dispute resolution forum. It appears that the parties agreed that the applicable law will be English law and the forum for resolution of disputes will be England. How or why they made this choice is not in issue at this moment.

Neconde Energy – together with Obijackson and Nnenna Obiejesi – guaranteed this transaction.

Around 22 October 2025, the second anniversary of the onset of his judicial career, Deinde Isaac Dipeolu, a judge of the Federal High Court in Lagos, issued an order at the instance of the FBNQuest Limited, a Merchant Bank, and First Trustees Limited, both members of the First Bank Group, authorizing a receiver/manager appointed by them to take control of the assets of Nestoil and Neconde Energy. The basis was a claim that there had been a default in the debt which crystallized enforcement against the assets on which the debt was secured. Importantly, the order declined to extend judicial protection to the receiver/manager.

The understanding of the creditors appeared to be that those assets included a mini-skyscraper known as Nestoil Tower, located in a choice part of Victoria Island in Nigeria’s commercial capital in Lagos. The occupants of this building include staff of Nestoil and of Neconde Energy. However, the building is owned by another company called Drawcock Estates Limited, which was not party to the Global Facilities or the CTA.

One year earlier, on 8 October 2024, another judge of the Federal High Court, Ambrose Lewis-Allagoa, had apparently issued an order restraining “any persons whatsoever”, from taking such adverse enforcement action against the building. This order was not challenged.

Similarly, prior to the CTA, in 2019, another judge of the same court, Muslim Sule Hassan, had made another order requiring the parties – in a formulation that has now become familiar to Nigerians – to preserve the status quo ante bellum.

It appeared that Deinde Dipeolu had set out to anchor a young judicial career on a distinguished track-record of controversial ex parte orders involving both hydrocarbons interests and bankers. On the last working day of 2024, 30 December, again at the instance of the First Bank Group, he dutifully issued an order freezing the accounts of General Hydrocarbons Ltd in a dispute concerning credit facilities to the operators of OML 120. However, three weeks earlier, his colleague, Ambrose Lewis-Allagoa appeared to have issued an order restraining such action.

Deinde Dipeolu’s order of October 2025 threatened to ransack the life of Nestoil and the Obijackson Group as a going concern. To enforce the order, the Nigeria Police Force deployed to seal Nestoil Tower. Following a petition by Obijackson alleging judicial malpractice, the Chief Judge of the Federal High Court transferred the case to another judge of the court, Daniel Osiagor who, on 20 November, vacated Deinde Dipeolu’s ex parte orders. This enabled the company to – temporarily at least – return to its headquarters building.

The First Bank Group filed a notice of appeal on 21 November 2025 against Daniel Osiagor’s decision. On 26 November, unknown to anyone, they followed this up with an application ex parte asking the Court of Appeal to issue a “restorative injunction” returning them to the building and affording judicial protection to the manager/receiver.

At this time and on this day, however, no records of appeal had been prepared or transmitted records to the Court of Appeal. So, there was no appeal before the Court. Mind you, the lower court had declined judicial protection to the receiver/manager. So, there was nothing about that to “restore” either.

Yet, the following day, 27 November, a three-judge panel of the Court of Appeal sat promptly and, in the absence of an underlying appeal, granted the application for “restorative injunction” without hearing the other side. If anything qualifies as judicial miracle, this was it.

But this Court of Appeal had only just begun its career in judicial miracles.

In the third week of January 2026, they disqualified lawyers instructed by Obijackson and Nnenna Obiejesi, his wife, as well as Neconde Energy, from participating in the proceedings. According to the Court of Appeal, only the receiver/manager (the validity of whose appointment was disputed) could exercise that right. The audacity of this reasoning did not pass the smell test.

On 10 April 2026, the Supreme Court agreed, accusing the Court of Appeal in this case of having “abdicated its judicial responsibility and enabled blatant abuse of process of court when it granted the application.” Stronger judicial condemnation is difficult to imagine.

Now that the Supreme Court has settled the matter of legal representation, the parties must return to the High Court for the underlying dispute. How long this will take or how many more twists of judicial malefaction could accompany the journey to a resolution of the mouthwatering sums involved is anyone’s guess. Investors elsewhere desiring to make Nigeria a destination and looking at this will be forgiven if they were to decide to sit it out or find a more sensible destination.

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

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

By Farooq Kperogi

There is really no opposition in Nigeria in the true sense of the word. There are only politicians who have been temporarily kicked out of the inner sanctum of power and influence but who share no fundamental difference with the current temporary occupants of the power structure. Nonetheless, if all the people vegetating on the margins of the power structure came together, they could easily displace those within it in 2027.

Although the coalition of so-called opposition politicians angling to get back to power in 2027 has not articulated a coherent blueprint to show that it will be different from President Bola Tinubu (I strongly believe they are indistinguishable from him), it can effectively instrumentalise the crying incompetence, in-your-face corruption, ethnic bigotry, insufferable arrogance, unabating misery and insouciance that have become the hallmarks of Tinubu’s administration to convince a traumatised nation that it can offer an alternative.

It doesn’t matter if they will replicate or even exacerbate Tinubu’s unrelieved disaster when they get to power. Even the prospect of temporary relief from Tinubu’s unending torment is enough to get most people to give them a chance. But they have shown that they lack the discipline, cohesion and foresight required to wrest power from Tinubu.

Even before they have had a chance to come together, they are splintered. This became clear in the aftermath of the Supreme Court ruling that restored David Mark’s leadership of the ADC. Neither Peter Obi nor Rabiu Kwankwaso said a word about it.

There are credible rumours that Obi and Kwankwaso didn’t react to the Supreme Court judgement because they had already moved on. They are said to be heading to the NDC and no longer care about what happens to the ADC.

In other words, we are back to the 2023 factionalisation of the “opposition”. Both Obi and Kwankwaso appear to be allergic to the internal democratic processes of political parties. They want to be canonised as candidates without contest. Since they can’t find that, they are moving away.

Atiku Abubakar may emerge as the candidate of the ADC if the ADC survives, that is. He might choose Rotimi Amaechi as his running mate. Should this happen, the opposition will be fatally fractured, as it was in 2023.

Even now, the verbal darts between Atiku’s supporters and Obi’s and Kwankwaso’s supporters are more caustic and more venomous than the exchanges between either camp and Tinubu’s supporters.

In fact, Tinubu is the net beneficiary of their maximalist posturing and internal warfare. Obi and Kwankwaso supporters say they would rather let Tinubu continue for another four years than support Atiku’s aspiration to replace him. Atiku’s supporters, for their part, say they would rather put up with another Tinubu term than support an Obi/Kwankwaso presidency.

Beyond their crude, petulant name-calling, Obi and Atiku supporters advance arguments in support of their positions, both of which benefit Tinubu. Obi’s supporters say since it isn’t the turn of the North to produce a president, Buhari, having ruled for eight continuous years before Tinubu took over, if another southerner can’t be presented as the opposition’s candidate, they would rather support Tinubu to complete the South’s turn.

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Atiku’s supporters, on the other hand, turn that logic around and say that if Obi is supported to displace Tinubu in 2027, he would “eat into” the North’s turn, which they believe should start in 2031. They don’t believe Obi’s promise to rule for only one term since there is no legally binding or constitutional constraint that would forbid him from reneging on his promise.

There is a precedent for this in Goodluck Jonathan, who was “allowed” to complete Umaru Musa Yar’adua’s term on the understanding that he wouldn’t seek another term in 2011. He not only ran and won in 2011, he ran again in 2015 and almost won.

So, the argument of Atiku’s supporters is that supporting Tinubu to complete his term benefits the North more than supporting Obi because there is certainty, in their reckoning, that power will move to the region without contest after Tinubu’s term. It’s irrelevant if Tinubu’s policies incinerate them before power rotates back to the North.

It isn’t the logic or admissibility of the arguments of both camps that is the issue here. The point at issue is that in fighting each other, the opposition is fighting for Tinubu. His economic strangulation of the masses of our people takes the back seat. The insecurity that is ravaging the country, which he seems either unable or unwilling to confront and stamp out, is rendered irrelevant.

In other words, Tinubu’s most potent weapon isn’t INEC with its partisan chairman or a compromised judiciary. It is the opposition. Interestingly, the two main groups in the opposition like to accuse each other of “working for Tinubu” to ensure that their candidate doesn’t win. The truth is that they are both assets to Tinubu and are working for him for free. They are both weapons fashioned against each other for the benefit of Tinubu.

And that’s why I consider Tinubu’s excessive, underhanded zealousness in suffocating the ADC and other opposition parties from becoming viable platforms to challenge him a self-sabotaging strategic blunder. He could have a clear win, because of the selfishness and disunity of the opposition, and still be dogged by a crisis of legitimacy because he didn’t allow a fair contest.

On April 23, I wrote a Facebook post about two contradictory impulses of Nigerian politicians. I said Nigerian politicians are some of the most incurably optimistic specimens of humans you can find on earth. That’s why you have opposition politicians who can’t even agree on who their candidate will be in 2027, say with cocksure certitude that they can wrest power from a man who defied all odds to get to power while out of it and has since consolidated power by ensuring that INEC and the judiciary are in his pocket.

But I also pointed out that Nigerian politicians can be some of the most cowardly people while outwardly projecting faux bravery. That is why a politician who has 32 governors, INEC, the judiciary, an unrivalled war chest and a gravely divided opposition is still so fearful of his chances of winning that he doesn’t want the opposition to even have a platform to challenge him.

Tinubu joked on April 14, 2026, that he could send Godswill Akpabio to the opposition to “scatter them”. Days later, on April 20, his chief of staff, Femi Gbajabiamila, publicly urged ADC lawmaker Leke Abejide to remain in the party so that he could “fight them” and “scatter them”. Abejide said yesterday that Gbajabiamila was only joking, just like his boss, Tinubu.

An English proverb says, “Many a true word is spoken in jest.” That is, people often reveal serious truths while pretending to joke.

ADC’s fate is currently hanging in the balance, and if the past is any guide, the David Mark leadership of the party might lose in the federal high court. That would be an avoidably self-inflicted political injury for Tinubu. He doesn’t need to use the instruments of the state to “scatter” the ADC, the NDC, the PRP or any other potential platform opposition politicians might need. The opposition is doing a better job “scattering” itself than he can ever do, even with the instruments of the state.

Tinubu may not need to defeat the opposition because the opposition appears determined to defeat itself. An opposition that lacks the self-denial, strategic patience and moral urgency necessary to galvanize popular resentment and win power doesn’t deserve power.

Until Atiku Abubakar, Peter Obi, Rabiu Kwankwaso and others understand that power is rarely handed to the disunited, the vain and the impatient, they will remain Tinubu’s most reliable unpaid campaigners.

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