In celebration of World Menstrual Hygiene Day—observed globally on May 28th—with this year’s theme –“Together for a Period Friendly World” – Embracing the Girl Child Initiative held a powerful outreach program at Witty Kid’s Secondary School, Mararaba, Nasarawa State, with the aim of empowering young girls through education, mentorship, and menstrual hygiene awareness.

Embracing the Girl Child Initiative is a non-governmental organisation in partnership with LinkedLegal Attorneys aimed at providing legal representation, counselling and rehabilitation of victims of sexual abuse and domestic violence; sensitizing the girl child with critical knowledge on various laws protecting them, menstrual hygiene, puberty, career choices/development, etc. and also the free distribution of sanitary towels.

Since 2019, the initiative has reached over 10,000 girls in school and young women on the streets across Nigeria through its school and street outreach, providing mentorship and distributing free sanitary towels.

This school outreach brought together professionals, community leaders, mentors, and eager students for an impactful day focused on breaking menstrual stigma, how to make reusable sanitary pads, promoting good hygiene practices, and inspiring young girls to dream boldly.

Proceedings began with a warm welcome and an address by the school principal, who commended the initiative for its timely and relevant mission.

Founder and Country Director, Barrister Nneamaka Onyema emphasized the need to prioritize health, education, and empowerment of girls in Nigeria, and called for safe spaces where they can ask questions and thrive.

Mrs. Ngozi A. Ukachukwu, a seasoned nurse, led the first session on the topic, “Puberty and Menstrual Hygiene”, demystifying puberty and menstrual health, addressing harmful taboos, and offering practical tips to help girls manage their periods confidently and with dignity.

Barrister Onyema later delivered an inspiring session on “Recognising the Path to Your Career”, urging students to follow their strength, interest and passion, believe in themselves, and rise above challenges. Her personal stories and motivational advice struck a chord with many students.

The day also featured an interactive panel session with professionals from diverse fields, where students asked insightful questions about career choices, personal growth, and overcoming gender-prejudiced societal expectations.

The highlight of the event was the free distribution of sanitary towels/pads, underscoring the commitment to alleviating period poverty and ensuring every girl can manage her period safely and with dignity.

The event closed with a group photo, capturing the joy, connection, and sense of new possibilities shared throughout the day.

This outreach is yet another testament to Barrister Nneamaka Onyema’s unwavering dedication to grassroots advocacy. It stands as a call to action for individuals, communities, and institutions to invest meaningfully in the lives of girls in Nigeria—nurturing a healthier, stronger, and better empowered future generation.

We appreciate LinkedLegal Attorneys, I Dey Com Tours and Travels Limited, Dr Innocent Ezuma – CEO, Eta-Zuma Group W/Africa Limited, Joseph Aro – C.O.O, Observatory Earth Analytics LTD, Emeka Terry Ibe – Legal Adviser, Nigerian Society of Engineers, Cyoda Kids Empire, Law & Society Magazine, and Charity Ibezim for their support for this outreach.

Email Address: [email protected]

Instagram:  @embracingthegirlchild

Facebook: Embracing the Girl Child Initiative

BOOK SERIAL

By Chidi Anselm Odinkalu

YESTERDAY

The author examined the concept of rule of law, the judiciary and their relationships to elective government, beginning with Albert Venn Dicey.

Today, he looks at how the courts in Africa have overreached themselves and the consequences, citing Malawi, Zimbabwe and Mali as examples before dwelling on Nigeria where the problem appears to be worst.

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The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) guarantees that “the will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government,” and that “this will shall be expressed in periodic and genuine elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage.” This right to political participation is the anchor of electoral legitimacy, which is the basis of the right to govern. However, this norm is increasingly under threat from diverse forces leading to what has been described as  crisis of so-called democratic recession.” Such forces include a global rise in populist authoritarianism and, on the African continent, increasing incidents of unconstitutional changes in government.

Regardless, a focus on these forces can downplay more subtle trends that have enabled the corrosion of democratic participation, especially in emerging or transitional democracies. Following an era of constitutional instability in the aftermath of independence, Nic Cheeseman suggests that by the turn of the millennium, “elections and term limits replaced death and coup d’etat as the most common ways in which African presidents and prime ministers left office.”’

The fact that presidents leave office through elections, however, does not mean that their successors necessarily get installed through the popular will. Across Africa, judges are increasingly involved in determining the winners and losers of elections. Depending on the extent of this involvement, the consequence could be, first, a transfer of the ultimate decision on the mandate to rule from the people to the judges; and second, the creation of an incentive for the erosion of the independence and impartiality of the judiciary as a longstanding foundation of the rule of law. This trend bears close attention.

Courts can overreach in determining not merely the rules governing the validity of elections but also in making calls as to the winners and losers of specific electoral contests. This degree of judicialisation of elections enables democratic recession in three ways. First, it vitiates the right to democratic participation and retrenches the popular will as the basis for democratic legitimacy. Second, it enables the courts to expropriate electoral legitimacy from the people and transfer it to the judges. Third, it provides perverse incentives for political interference with judicial independence, increasingly making the judiciary a site of contest over the pre-determination of election outcomes in many countries.

In Malawi in 2020, for instance, the people had to take to the streets to resist the effort by the president to remove the Chief Justice in order for the president to secure a Supreme Court panel more solicitous of his will in the run-up to a presidential re-run following a rigged contest that had been struck down by the courts. The following year, in neighbouring Zimbabwe, the ruling party pressured the Constitutional Court to overrule an earlier decision of the High Court blocking an extension of the tenure of the Chief Justice after he had attained the mandatory retirement age, placing him on a contract, which made him manifestly subject to presidential whim. Ahead of contentious national elections two years later, the same president decided to advance $400,000 to all serving judges in Zimbabwe as “housing loan” with no repayment obligations. The beneficiaries included the chair of the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC), herself a serving judge.

Unsurprisingly, such developments can endanger a government founded on the will of the people. In April 2020, Mali’s Constitutional Court overturned the results in thirty-one parliamentary seats won by the opposition. Its decision to hand these seats over to the ruling party sparked an uprising that led to the dissolution of the Constitutional Court;’” and was followed by the overthrow of the government in a military coup.

Electoralism and Judicial Independence in Nigeria

Among political scientists, there is a point of view that when EMBs are incapable or compromised, institutions of “oblique accountability,” such as courts, can step in to cure their deficiencies. This argument appears to overlook three issues. First, looking to courts to cure habitual deficits of will or capacity in EMBs casts a shadow over elections and their legitimacy because in deploying courts to cure substantial failures in election administration, the risk is that the site of electoral legitimacy is relocated from the people to judges. Second, the question could arise as to whether the same forces capable of compromising the independence and integrity of an EMB would be reluctant to extend the same treatment to the judiciary. Third, this does not reckon with any sense of what the consequences could be for both the effectiveness of courts and for public perceptions of the judiciary.

Few countries have been overtaken by this trend like Nigeria. When Nigerian judges began overturning the results of elections and declaring their own, many took a sanguine view of the development, describing it as “an instrument of democratic advancement and stability.” Since then, however, opinions have evolved and judges at the highest levels now complain that “the entire Nigerian judicial system is inundated with electoral litigation and adjudication almost all year round,” which are “taking a monumental toll” on the courts. This toll resounds both in metrics of judicial service provision as well as in the credibility of the courts and judges.

In Nigeria, for instance, over 80% of the contested offices in elections in any cycle can be decided by the judges. Nigerian courts can set aside official electoral returns and substitute their own or routinely re-compute returns by the EMB. This has created a situation described by the Economist as a “democracy by court order.” In 2011, for instance, the courts for the third time returned to the upper chamber of the national parliament a man who had never won an election.

Two cycles of elections later, they conferred the mandate in a state governorship election on a man who had been well beaten into fourth position. When it decided to replace a duly elected candidate for the position of state governor in a state in North-West Nigeria in 2019 with a candidate who was well beaten into a distant second, Nigeria’s Supreme Court incredibly crystallized a doctrine that the votes of the winning candidate whom it had chosen to oust on a preelection technicality were “wasted.” Surely, a democracy cannot be founded on jurisprudence that renders votes so casually expendable. Under the cover of “judicialism”, the use of courts in this manner subverts the will of the people in a manner not dissimilar to the effect of a military coup.

Among transitional democracies in Africa, few are as significant as Nigeria. It is not just the most populous African country, it is also the African country with the most extensive record of judicial immersion in election dispute adjudication, with a history that pre-dates the onset of presidentialism in 1979, and a jurisprudence of election dispute adjudication influential beyond its shores. In over half a century, election dispute resolution in Nigeria has metastasized to a level that now suggests that it is the primary preoccupation of the courts.

On its own, the dysfunction of courts derailed from their primary mission by a preoccupation with election dispute resolution is very much deserving of attention. A bigger concern, however, lies in the reality that the primary reason for this dysfunction is the fact that in Nigeria, courts have emerged as the predominant venue for acquiring the mandate to rule and judges have become the only people whose votes count for that purpose. Put differently, the Constitution may designate the people as the electorate, but they have been toppled by the judges who have installed themselves as a Selectorate. This book examines and illustrates the origins of this trajectory and its consequences for both right to participation and for judicial integrity and independence. Before proceeding to this inquiry, a brief institutional context of the place of courts in the political economy of Nigeria is essential.

TOMORROW…

We skip many juicy pages to Chapter 6, where the author tells exactly how judges became the selectorate. 

BOOK SERIAL

By Chidi Anselm Odinkalu

YESTERDAY
The author laid the groundwork for his thesis that judges, whom he calls “the selectorate”, have toppled the people in deciding who rules them. Today, he examines the concept of rule of law, the judiciary and their relationships to elective government, beginning with Albert Venn Dicey.

The Constitution’s Design

The usual fare is to begin every examination of the judiciary and rule of law in the Common Law world with an obligatory genuflection before the altar of Albert Venn Dicey and his Victorian notions of the rule of law.

These were founded on benevolent notions of predictability and equality policed under an unwritten constitution by “the jurisdiction of the ordinary tribunals.” Inherent in Dicey’s concept of the rule of law is the idea of a judiciary whose effectiveness is essentially guaranteed by their notional independence, impartiality and predictability.

Dicey’s ideas were originally published in 1893 at the onset of the European occupation of Africa. The world that Dicey described and analysed, however, did not treat people of colour as humans, and the benevolence that he took for granted as a Caucasian was unknown to the interaction between his people and colonial subjects. This certainly was the case in Africa. For present purposes, therefore, an examination of the rule of law, the judiciary and their relationship to elective government is more usefully situated in the seminal distinction drawn by Ernst Fraenkel between the “Normative State” of credible institutions and rule constraint on the one hand and the “Prerogative State” of caprice on the other.”

Democratic process, as a rule-constrained system for the transfer and exercise of power in political society, assumes the existence of what Ernst Fraenkel called the normative state of the rule of law, which he distinguished from the authoritarian prerogative state.

The African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights has similarly distinguished between a state with rule of law and judicial independence on the one hand, and the “rule of power, which is typically arbitrary, self-interested and Subject to influences which may have nothing to do with the applicable law…,” on the other.

The state with the rule of law as described can only exist where there is a reasonably independent judiciary to arbitrate and interpret the norms applicable to the democratic process. It is possible, however, for courts to be instrumentalised in a manner that uses the appearance of a norm-constrained process to engineer into existence authoritarian conditions. In many African countries, this appears to be happening.

To understand how this occurs, it is essential to stress that the role of the judiciary in the democratic process of electing government is a narrow one. As pointed out by the Supreme Court of India, the role of the courts is to oversee the validity of the electoral process in order to ensure that while the rules are certain, the outcomes of elections are uncertain or not predetermined until the votes of the people are cast and counted. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights guarantees the rights of democratic participation and to vote as the basis of legitimate government. To implement these, countries establish election management bodies (EMBs), which supervise and organise their elections and declare their outcomes.

When elections occur in this manner, they ensure that democratic legitimacy resides with the people. The Supreme Court of the United States has rightly cautioned about “the vital limits on judicial authority” concerning “the Constitution’s design to leave the selection of the President to the people, through their legislatures, and to the political sphere.” In Nigeria, the Electoral Reform Panel chaired by former Chief Justice, Lawal Uwais, similarly warned in 2008 that “care should be taken not to drag the judiciary into the political arena too often as this can affect its credibility.”

Elections are, therefore, globally accepted normatively as how the people choose who governs them but the quality of what counts for elections varies widely across the globe. This most consequential of decisions in most countries around the continent increasingly involves judges in varying degrees of intimacy, if not capture.” Following the wave of democratisation around the continent in the 1990s, this role of the judiciary was largely seen in a positive light as a source of “hope.” This verdict proved to be premature at best.

Judges are supposed to be independent of politics. Yet, the assumption exists that they can continue to make the most consequential decisions in a democracy while retaining independence from external influence. Hakeem Yusuf strongly suggests that the immersion of the judiciary in political change “seriously tasks the institutional integrity of the judiciary.”

This book argues that the immersion of judges in election dispute resolution around Africa endangers the judiciary, imperils the project of building independent institutions, and retrenches the will of the people as the foundation of legitimate government. It illustrates these triple crises with a narrative of how the immersion of Nigeria’s judiciary in election dispute resolution has over time intensely altered the traditional assumptions that underpin the judicial function as we know it but first, it is important to explain why such an inquiry is essential.

Judges, Democracy and Elections

The judicial function is now globally accepted as foundational to the role of the state and essential to Iegitimate government but its delimitation is underpinned by both fluidity and contradiction.” Notionally, the judiciary embodies the very essence of what has been described in constitutional design as “politically neutral zones.” At the African continental level, State parties to the African Charter on Democracy, Elections, and Governance (ACDEG) undertake to “establish and strengthen national mechanisms that redress election-related disputes promptly.” They also agree to “strive to institutionalise good political governance through an independent judiciary.” In the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights, they equally subscribe to a “duty to guarantee the independence of the courts.”

But what does an independent judiciary entail? Ordinarily, it imports structural and institutional assumptions that recognise the judiciary as an arm of government in a scheme of separation of powers coexisting in juxtaposition with the legislative and executive branches but free from interference or manipulation from the latter two.” To assure this, formal standards of judicial independence are recognised internationally,” and instituted in the constitutions of different countries, addressing such issues as processes of appointment; security of tenure, discipline and removal; remuneration; and preclusion of reprisals or liability for exercise of judicial function. By and large, judicial independence embodies at least three complementary elements. These include adjudication by “a neutral third”, institutional insulation from political interference or pressure, and guarantees of effective coexistence as a separate branch of government.” However, around the world, the judiciary is also widely seen as a political institution, which functions in the role of political accountability.”

Howsoever the judicial function is conceived, independence is widely seen as constitutive of its being. The United Nations Special Rapporteur on Independence of Judges and Lawyers has argued that judicial independence belongs to the domain of a peremptory norm of international law (jus cogens), although he stops short of explicating the elements of such a norm.

The scope and meaning of judicial independence exist in a zone of contradiction and dynamic ambiguity that encompasses institutional as well as procedural; inherent and instrumental; normative and situational; structural and behavioural; prophylactic and propositional: as well as formal and informal dimensions.

Yet, political rulers can often suborn the judiciary to legitimise themselves and the effectiveness of the judicial institution is reputedly shaped by political context. Courts and judges are at once institutions and employees of the state and yet, agents of the government. Notwithstanding its description by Baron de Montesquieu as “in some measure next to nothing,” the judiciary is nevertheless eulogised in comparative jurisprudence as the ultimate custodian of constitutional government, the “lifeblood of constitutionalism,” and as the avatar of the people against autocracy.”

The adjudication of election-related disputes tests the limits of these assumptions about the judiciary and has been delicately described as a “compromise between law and political expediency.” In many African countries, the people may vote but the question of who wins or loses the presidency is increasingly resolved as a judicial dispute in compelling spectacles of judicial pusillanimity. Uganda’s former Chief Justice, Benjamin Josses Odoki, “smiled when commenting that to nullify a presidential election would be suicidal,” suggesting that the independence of judicial decision making in any country is reflected in both the scope of judicial imagination and in its institutional psychology.

A mere seven years after this claim by Uganda’s Chief Justice, David Maraga, as Chief Justice in neighbouring Kenya, led the Supreme Court in that country to accomplish precisely that,” and less than three years later, the Constitutional Court did the same in Malawi, with a bench of judges dressed in bullet-proof vests.” It must be said that these could not have occurred under the constitutional systems bequeathed by colonialism at Independence. By the time these developments occurred, these countries had re-engineered their constitutional foundations forged in bitter experience.

But, if judges can be so powerful as to strike down election returns, it is natural to expect that assertions of their independence will not go without political pushback. Naturally, therefore, the involvement of judges in electoral adjudication makes their independence a zone of political contest.

TOMORROW…
The author discusses how the courts in Africa have overreached themselves and the consequences, citing as examples Malawi, Zimbabwe and Mali before zeroing in on Nigeria, saying “few countries have been overtaken by this trend like Nigeria.”