It was Christmas week, 2025. I knew Yuletide had its unique fragrance, but I didn’t realise surprise was part of the scent. Then, it happened.

I looked round the hall. There could not have been fewer than two hundred guests seated in easy poise: manifest and latent powers; senators; key figures who belong in President Bola Tinubu’s kitchen; people of prominence from the other side; former governors, business magnates, artistes, men and women drawn from every corridor of influence in Nigeria.

It was a gathering where power wore perfume and soft laughter carried weight. Among that sea of guests, I was aware of three journalists; there could be others I didn’t notice. I was one of the three; beside Bob Dee, I sat. At the host’s table was the biggest of us, Chief Olusegun Osoba.

A few days before the event, my phone had blinked with a message that startled in simplicity: “My brother, on the 20th we have a Xmas Carol at the BELLISIMA ON THE WATERFRONT, in Banana. An evening of absolute razzmatazz. Music, comedy, connoisseur drinks and fine dining. Plse join us…A card will be sent later today sir.”

The message came from one of Africa’s richest men.

The carol turned out exactly as promised by the host—razzmatazz in its finest form. Music flowed, laughter rose with nice jokes, glasses clinked while the breeze of Lagos’ immense waters carried the fragrance of festivity.

Yet, even amid that glitter, the host himself remained what he had always been: quietly present, almost hidden behind his own parapet, but seated strategically enough to view every one of his guests and ensure their comfort.

At about 1 a.m., the host rose, and the show came to an end. One by one, the guests drifted away.

The host was Dr. Mike Adenuga Jr., the man widely known as The Bull. He clocks 73 this week.

Bellissima on the Waterfront is the name he gave his residence. That Italian word of beauty is a synonym for breathtaking, and exactly that is what the residence is. The event that held in the massive acreage could not be less stunning.

He will be 73 on Wednesday. Seventy-three is a big number. But it seldom carries the noise and excitement of the big round numbers. It, nonetheless, is a milestone that demands the aplomb of the impact the celebrator has made on the world. Even when he recoils from celebration, he is celebrated.

Some give out hens and keep a tally of the eggs they lay. The billionaire of Bellisima freely gives out horses—complete with bridle, saddle, and reins. The world may measure him in billions, but it is his humanity that gives meaning to those billions. His health is the health of an immeasurable community of beneficiaries; his success, their success. They call him the mystery man who gives and retreats before gratitude can catch him. He gives and withdraws from thanks.

Such men are rare in every civilisation, culture and age: Mansa Musa of Mali (c. 1280–1337); Ashoka of India (c. 304–232 BCE); Antoninus Pius of Rome (86–161 CE); Louis IX of France (1214–1270); and Dom Pedro II of Brazil (1825–1891)—wealthy men who wore crowns lightly and gave heavily.

Extraordinary generosity headlines tributes from Adenuga’s beneficiaries. Glo Life, the in-house publication of his telecom company, periodically chronicles his quiet acts of munificence. A 2025 edition carries a striking line: “He often reconnects with old associates and quietly showers them with millions, transforming their lives in the process.”

In a previous piece, I hinted at his famed preference of the shadows of work to the noise of applause. In the early days of Globacom, he told a group of editors from Ibadan that working hard was a habit for him.

Now the man takes his seventy-third step on the ladder of years. For someone whose days are filled with oil wells, telecommunications towers, and global boardrooms, from Lagos to Paris, to everywhere, age appears not to have slowed him; if anything, it has polished his resolve.

You saw him at a business meeting with French president, Emmanuel Macron, last year. At over 70, he still expands stakes and scales heights. He moves quietly to sign deals, in telecoms, in oil and gas; home and abroad. There was a deal signed last year in Paris between his Conoil Producing and TotalEnergies. A new medium sweet crude grade called the Obodo blend was launched and shipped exactly a year ago, diversifying Nigeria’s export portfolio. It is from his onshore OML 150 block.

The Yoruba know how to salute greatness. In the hunter’s chant, they say the elephant is not an animal that invites casual pointing. They say the elephant is the creature that one points at with all the fingers. They assert that standing before the elephant, the hunter’s boast dies in his throat. Adenuga is that elephant in the forest of enterprise and philanthropy: viewed or heard from a distance, spoken of in reverence, seldom met in person.

At seventy-three, the Bull still stands firm in the pasture of industry. May the coming years grant him continued strength, deeper quiet, and wider horizons. And, God willing, when, next year, the next birthday arrives, we shall write again of another step taken by the man whose habit is success.

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

“Where you have a warrior culture, you have heroes.” That is how the unusual character of Ibadan is explained on page 856 of Professor Toyin Falola’s 1,012-page history of the city. My eyes caught the line as I watched Saturday’s opposition political summit in the city.

Opposition politics in Nigeria is post-apocalyptic, its script reads like ‘The Last Man on Earth’. The virus of power has thinned the ranks. In a hall full of heavyweights, only one serving governor showed up. He was also the host—Seyi Makinde. Someone called him “the last governor standing.”

Twenty-three years ago, there was a Yoruba president in Abuja—Olusegun Obasanjo. The last governor standing in defiance of that presidency was another Yoruba man, Bola Ahmed Tinubu. Today, Tinubu occupies that same seat, and, in a neat irony of history, he faces his own version of Tinubu, his own upstander.

So, I wonder what thoughts crossed Tinubu’s mind as news of the Ibadan meeting and its declaration – and of the man who convened it – reached him. Could he see in it the quiet symmetry of history? Karma, perhaps; nature paying back, in familiar coins, what was once spent generously by him between 2003 and 2007.

The choice of Ibadan for the meeting was strategic. It was akin to Julius Caesar carrying the war to Pompey—taking the contest to a ground heavy with meaning. It is significant that Makinde, in his speech, described the city as Nigeria’s political capital. Stretch the meaning of “political” beyond office and title, take it into influence, memory, and the theatre of power, and test that claim against the country’s history, and you may find the governor was not merely being rhetorical. He was, arguably, right. Ibadan has weight when power is contested.

Then I found it curious that speaker after speaker at the event, suggested that the host had taken a risk by convening the meeting. Each time the remark dropped, I paused. What risk?

In Yorubaland, elders do not die with their skulls missing. And in all the history I have read and heard, Ibadan does not birth or raise a man who steps into the waters of battle only to shiver.

Those who gathered in that city from across Nigeria on Saturday said they were there for democracy. But what, exactly, is their definition of democracy? This one that replaces the bad with the worse, and the worse with the worst?

We read in the Bible (Genesis 6:6) that God created man, looked at what He had made, and “was grieved in His heart.” One hears echoes of that grief in today’s democratic experience. Calm, thoughtful people now ask, almost in resignation: ibo l’a já sí yìí? (where exactly have we found ourselves now)?

About two decades ago, American political theorist, Michael Hardt, observed that the word “democracy” had been so corrupted and abused that many thinkers preferred to avoid it altogether.

Hardt’s disappointment ran deep. Writing in 2007, he said democracy had become “difficult to pronounce… It tastes like ashes,” its once-beautiful promise burnt out by cynicism and reaction. What now marches under its banner, he argued, often resembles its opposite: war, authoritarianism, and deepening inequality. In many places, he warned, when you hear “democracy,” it may be wise to step aside.

Reading Hardt, one feels he was writing about Nigeria of today where democracy feeds the greedy and leaves behind the needy.

I listened attentively to the Oyo governor’s speech. He insisted the meeting was “not a gang-up against one man,” nor a sneaky platform for the ambitions of angling presidential hopefuls. Rather, he framed it as an expression of the collective will of Nigerians to reclaim a proper democracy.

But before that reassurance, there came from him a warning: “A significant majority of state governments are aligned under one party. There are open efforts to consolidate legislative control under one party.” In those words, he gave voice to a fear many whisper, that democracy here may have acquired a meaning that subverts its own popular definition.

John Adams, one of America’s founding fathers, left behind reflections on democracy that were not always flattering. He warned romantics of the system: “Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.” In simpler terms, democracy begins to commit self-murder the moment it kills competition. I heard that warning in virtually all speeches delivered on Saturday.

Makinde’s speech was as bold as his decision to host that gathering of Abuja’s ‘enemies’. In Yorubaland, when a load refuses the rafters and rejects the floor, there is always a third place to set it. The Ibadan meeting suggests that the ancient city on Saturday served as that third place—a refuge from the sword and sharp edges of the ‘omnipotence’ of power.

So, if there were “terrified” voices at the Ibadan gathering, wondering where the relatively young occupant of the Oyo State Government House draws his courage, they need only look to history—to what the past of his people has long deposited in their character, the tonic that gave Ibadan its peculiar gravitas.

Professor Bolanle Awe, writing in December 1965, offers more clue: Ibadan began “as a melting pot of warriors” from across Yorubaland. From that origin, the city drew men of daring, freelance soldiers and adventurers, bound not by kinship, as in other towns, but by a shared appetite for risk, for war, and for a life less restrained by threats from any authority.

Professor Falola, Africa’s preeminent historian, author of over 200 books, Bobapitan of Ibadanland, knows the land, waters and dwellers of his city inside out. Very few could give the clinical character analysis he has here: “Ibadan heroes fit perfectly into a dramatic plot. Generally, the hero faces a challenge and requires adventures that lead him to difficult places and peoples. He must persevere and endure great hardship. The hero never dies a useless death. Those of the nineteenth century had sufficient charms and courage to endure, and, when both failed, they had the opportunity to call upon their ancestors, spirits and gods to intervene. The Ibadan warriors travelled in the world of spirits, animals, people, and odious characters. Thus, Ogunmola, a dominant figure, was smart, bold and wise, and used all these qualities to win his wars.”

So, was I surprised when Seyi Makinde momentarily looked away from his prepared speech, praised his Ibadan, invoked its history of resistance (weti e), smiled, and took a swipe at “those acting as if there is no tomorrow”? No.

That is Ibadan—its drama, its theatre, and the character of its leaders. The city carries a daring heritage, forged in war. Where such heritage is absent, wounds appear on the back; in Ibadan, men meet their battles face to face.

A melting pot carries the DNA of all its parts. In Ibadan, that DNA is daring: the resolve to fight, to win, and to stand at the top.

Here again, I turn to Falola’s ‘Ibadan’ (page 856): “The ambition of many Yoruba elite, especially the politician, is to become a hero of the nation. Many have tried in vain” because they refused to learn from history. Ibadan’s story teaches that such stature is earned, forged in war, in political struggle and in culture.

Many still wonder where Bola Tinubu found the courage to confront Olusegun Obasanjo at the height of his imperial presidency. The answer may lie in his formative years in Ibadan of the 1970s, where he was steeped in the city’s lores, mores, and methods. Seyi Makinde, the man now standing up to him on the other side of that political tradition, was born and bred in Ibadan. The stage, therefore, is set for a drama like no other.

And let no one cry “betrayal” or invoke Yoruba Ronú as this drama unfolds. If it was not betrayal when a previous Yoruba president was fiercely challenged by a fellow Yoruba son, it cannot suddenly become one now.

In all this, where are we, and where are we going? We know how precarious the Nigerian state and its politics remain. Colonial civil servant and English academic, Martin Dent (11 July 1925 – 2 May 2014), in his review of the major events that fractured Nigeria’s First Republic (beginning from Ibadan), described politics as “a confused business much dependent upon money and involving the use of thugs.” He wrote in July 1970.

Nearly six decades later, those words still ring true. But it would appear that money (especially more money) has trumped thuggery as the more enduring currency of power. With party primaries upon us and the real contest already casting a long, menacing shadow, politicians will deploy more than those two ingredients to cook the 2027 broth.

In ‘Ogboju Ode Ninu Igbo Irunmale’, Fagunwa’s hunters walk into the forest of fear fully aware that not every hunter who enters returns with his story intact. The politics of the next polls is a frightening theatre of the heartless, yet men and women are already casting their lots and buying tickets “in defence of democracy.” I respect their courage and salute their resolve. I wish I could stand among them, but I am an orphan. Only the Ogboju Ode choose the forest of a thousand demons as their hunting ground.

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

By Max Amuchie

A nation does not declare its own decline. It performs normalcy — until the performance can no longer hold.
What follows is not an announcement, but a pattern — visible to those willing to look beyond the performance.

Last week, this column offered the definitive articulation of The Insecurity Triad — the convergent system through which kidnapping finances violence, banditry governs territory, and terrorism reshapes the ideological order. It also made a promise: that the Trinity of State Decay would follow as the macro-diagnostic lens—the theory that explains not merely what the Triad does, but why it is structurally possible—why the state does not stop it. Why, in important senses, the state cannot.
This is that column.

One clarification before we proceed. Last week I referred to the first element of this Trinity as the Administrative Mirage. The more precise term — and the one this framework now canonises — is the Institutional Mirage. The distinction is deliberate and consequential. “Administrative” suggests a failure of management: the wrong people, the wrong processes, the wrong execution. That is a recoverable condition. “Institutional” names something far graver — the failure of the very structures through which legitimate authority is constituted and expressed. That is not a management problem. It is a structural mutation. The precision matters because the diagnosis must be exact. A misnamed illness invites the wrong cure.

The Trinity of State Decay holds that Nigeria’s crisis is not simply one of state weakness or failure in the traditional sense. It is a decoupling — a splitting of reality into two rival orders: the Institutional Mirage, which performs sovereignty without possessing it, and the Shadow Order, which possesses sovereignty without performing it.
Between them operates The Insecurity Triad — the operational framework through which organised violence is produced, financed, and sustained.
These three elements are not sequential. They are simultaneous. They are mutually constitutive. And together, they describe not a country in crisis, but a country in transformation — toward something that no existing framework has yet fully named.
This is the core claim.
Now let’s look at elements of the Trinity.

The first is the Institutional Mirage.
The Nigerian state exists. This is not in dispute. It issues passports, signs treaties, seats delegates at the African Union and the United Nations, dispatches ambassadors, and convenes legislative sessions. It possesses, in the language of international relations, juridical sovereignty — the legal right to rule, recognised by the community of nations.
What it increasingly does not possess is empirical sovereignty — the actual capacity to rule: to protect its citizens, enforce its laws, secure its borders, and deliver the basic functions through which a state justifies its claim to authority over people and territory.
This gap — between the legal right and the practical capacity — is the Institutional Mirage. It is not a gap born of poverty alone, nor of incompetence alone, though either or both may be present. It is structural.

The Mirage is maintained by two interlocking performances.
The first is the performance of governance. Summits are convened. Committees are inaugurated. Security councils meet. Declarations are issued. Each of these acts reassures the urban elite — and the international community — that a system exists, that the state is functional, that the problem is being managed. Fifty kilometres outside a state capital, farmers are fleeing their fields. Villages are being renamed by gunmen. Communities are learning that no one is coming.
The performance is not cynical in a simple sense. In many cases, the actors within it believe in what they are doing. But belief in process is not the same as process producing outcomes. Governance is replaced by the ritual of governance — the meeting held in place of the action, the declaration issued in place of the protection, the committee inaugurated in place of the problem solved. The ritual is maintained because it is the last remaining evidence that the state is real.

The second is the façade of presence. The motorcades, the grand secretariats, the uniformed officials at checkpoints — these constitute a thin crust of visible authority. They are not nothing. But they are concentrated in spaces where the state was never truly absent: the capital, the commercial city, the airport corridor. In the spaces where the state is most needed — the rural northwest, the insurgency-ridden northeast, the contested middle belt — the façade does not reach. There, the absence is not symbolic. It is territorial.
The Institutional Mirage, then, is the structural condition in which a state maintains the international performance of sovereignty while progressively losing the domestic substance of it. It is not collapse. It is something more insidious — the appearance of function in the presence of dysfunction. A state that has collapsed is visible in its collapse. A Mirage state is invisible in its decay precisely because the performance continues.
And it is the Mirage — not mere weakness — that creates the condition for what comes next.
This logic produces a structural split in sovereignty. If the Mirage is the performance of authority, the Shadow is its possession.
Nature, it is said, abhors a vacuum. So does political geography.
In the spaces the Institutional Mirage vacates — or never truly occupied — a Shadow Order has emerged. It is essential to be precise about what this means, because “shadow” can imply something furtive, marginal, illegal-but-minor. What has emerged in Nigeria is none of these things. It is a rival sovereignty: a structured, territorial, self-financing order that governs populations, extracts resources, adjudicates disputes, and in some regions commands greater practical authority than the formal state.
The Shadow Order is not a consequence of criminals filling a gap. It is the relocation of authority from the centre — the loss of its monopoly on the power to protect, to tax, to name, and to decide. It expresses itself in two particularly revealing ways.

The Promotional Negotiation. When the formal state sits across a table from bandits — or terrorists, or both — to negotiate ceasefires, ransom arrangements, or “peace deals,” something precise and devastating is occurring. It is not diplomacy. It is an act of transactional sovereignty. The state, by negotiating, elevates the criminal from a subject of the law — someone to be prosecuted, dismantled, defeated — to a stakeholder of the land: someone whose compliance must be purchased or secured, whose demands have standing, whose survival the state has implicitly agreed to manage rather than end.
This is what might be called the Psychology of the Table. The population watching these negotiations does not see a state managing a crisis. It sees a state that has conceded the terms of its own authority. The lesson absorbed is not that the state is not working but that the Shadow holds leverage the state does not. Every negotiation of this kind is a quiet transfer of legitimacy — conducted in public or in the forest, often celebrated as pragmatism, and devastating in its long-term structural and political consequences.
The Constitutional Erasure. This is the most precise and the most devastating expression of Shadow sovereignty — and it is almost entirely unreported as what it actually is.
The 1999 Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, as amended, is not merely a legal document. It is a sovereign map. It names — by schedule — 36 states of the Federation and their capitals, the Federal Capital Territory, and 774 local governments and their headquarters. Each entry is a sovereign seal: evidence that the state has claimed, recognised, and accepted responsibility for that space and the people within it.
When armed groups — or rival sovereign invaders — drive ancestral owners from their land and rename the villages, they are not merely committing displacement and violence. They are conducting a violent amendment of the Constitution. They are erasing the state’s map and drawing their own. They are performing, through force, the counter-constitutional act of renaming the republic.
This is where the work of Frantz Fanon becomes indispensable — not as a borrowed abstraction, but as a precise analytical tool. Fanon, in The Wretched of the Earth and Black Skin, White Masks, argues that naming is sovereignty: that the coloniser’s first act of domination is not the gun but the renaming — the erasure of indigenous identity through the imposition of a new lexicon of place, person, and possibility.

But renaming is not the only instrument of this counter-constitutional act. Rival sovereign invaders — terrorists and armed groups operating under ideological banners — go further. They hoist their own flags, their own insignia over the communities they seize. This is not mere symbolism. It is a territorial declaration — the physical assertion that the Nigerian state’s sovereign seal over that space has been revoked and replaced. Where the Constitution places a community under the authority of the Federal Republic, the hoisted flag of a rival order places it under a different authority entirely. The flag is the constitutional amendment made visible.

What is occurring in Nigeria’s conflict zones is precisely inverted and internalised colonisation, in which armed non-state actors perform the naming rituals and hoisting of flags of sovereignty over populations that the formal state can no longer protect.
The Shadow Order, in this sense, does not merely fill the space the state vacates. It governs it, on its own terms, by its own logic, with its own map — and it marks that governance in the oldest sovereign language there is: the name of the land.

But how exactly does the Mirage create the conditions for the Shadow to thrive? And what is the engine that locks them together in a loop the state seems unable to break? A country still named on paper, but being renamed in practice.
Part II follows next week — where the Trinity of State Decay receives its definitive formulation.

Don’t miss it.

Trust is Sacred. Stay Seasoned.

•Dr. Max Amuchie is the CEO of Sundiata Post, the developer of The Insecurity Triad Analytical Framework, and the theorist of the Trinity of State Decay. 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

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

By Chidi Anselm Odinkalu

My ill-fated country, those you have affronted

with them you must be equalized by sharing the same affront.

            Those you have denied

human rights,

Allowed to stand before you but never invited in –

with all of them you must be equalized by sharing the same affront

Rabindranath Tagore, Gitanjali (Song Offerings) 108 (1910)

Nigeria is a country of pious people and sacred cows. On Fridays, its mosques are filled with prayer and Tafsir. On Sundays, the churches take over with song offerings and evocative homilies. The illegitimate child of the ménage à trois between George Taubman Goldie; his employee, Frederick Lugard; and their shared mistress, Flora Shaw, it was a matter of fate that the country would live in interminably fruitless search of prayer and miracle.

Written in 1959 by Lillian Jane Williams and scored by Frances Benda, Nigeria’s first national anthem was ultimately a failed effort at inventing a civic prayer to expiate for the original sin that afflicted the country’s birth. Its third stanza ended in an invocation to the “God of all creation” to “grant this our one request” and “help us to build a nation where no man is oppressed.” It was as if this prayer forgot that the country had women too, not to mention children.

Under this prayerful invocation, Nigeria raced through a pogrom, a civil war, and four coups (including one unsuccessful one) in its first 20 years of Independence, accounting for the killing of three of its first four Heads of State and three of its first four heads of government. As a prayer, it did not seem to hold God’s attention.

Rather than investigate or address why the prayer appeared to have suffered derailment on its way upstairs, the country sought replacement therapy. In 1978, it retired that anthem in favour of another one.

Invented by committee, the fate of this second anthem was sealed at birth when it was arranged by the Police Band. Like its predecessor, it prays to the “God of creation” to help us “to build a nation where peace and justice shall reign.” Launched into a transition and bridled under austerity, this second anthem became a totem to treason; and song offering for a succession of military usurpers whose primary vocation was to sow constitutional instability and sunder the nation.

Two decades into its life, it was evident that the second anthem did not cut much ice with the Heavens either as the country’s problems seemed to multiply in direct proportion to the frequency of its rendition. The response was a multiplicity of prayer projects to save Nigeria. Indeed, Nigeria’s second military ruler and its first four-star army General, Yakubu Gowon, retired to a ministry known as “Nigeria Prays”.

It was, however, Nigeria’s largest Christian denomination, the Catholic Church, which gave full vent to the enterprise of praying for Nigeria. Five days after the military annulled the outcome of the June 12 1993 elections and as the country laboured under existential uncertainty, On 27 June 1993, the Catholic Bishops Conference of Nigeria launched the “Prayer for Nigeria in Distress” as their unique contribution to Nigeria’s search for sovereign safe harbour.

This “prayer” confesses on behalf of Nigerians that “[W]e are sorry for all the sins We have committed and for the good deeds We failed to do”, but pleads with the Almighty to “keep us safe from the punishments we deserve”, without giving any compelling reasons why He should. It admits that “we are weighed down not only by uncertainties, but also by moral, economic and political problems”, begs Him to “be merciful to us your people”, and, with shameless lack of self-awareness, asks Him to “spare this Nation Nigeria from chaos, anarchy and doom.”

This prayer is at once a summary of the Nigerian condition and a brutal piece of self-indictment. Its authors clearly understood that the natural logic of the Nigeria’s trajectory is “chaos, anarchy and doom”. What is not clear is why they believed that the way to spare the country these consequences was through a ritual of gratuitous weekly prayer incantations.

33 years of this ritual have not made much dent on the natural logic of Nigeria’s sovereign misadventure. During that period, lots of Catholic priests and bishops have – with full knowledge – blessed politicians who rigged elections and collected car gifts and cathedrals procured with stolen public funds. Nigeria’s sacred cows continue to receive their benedictions from pious men who offer prayers to save the country from the doom to which their acts logically condemn it.

As if goaded by a clan of shamans, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu disinterred the first anthem in 2024 – 45 years after it was first retired. He has since then turned the country into a gaggle of “prayer warriors”.

Most recently, Kebbi State Governor, Nasir Idris, has called for “divine intervention” to save the country from insecurity. As the last Ramadan season entered its final furlong, Borno State Governor, Babagana Zulum, “called on Muslims and Christians in the state to intensify prayers against rising  insecurity issues.” Not to be outdone, Benue State Governor – a Catholic Priest – preaches “sustained prayers” as the answer to insecurity in his state.

When he was Governor of Zamfara State in 2022, Bello Matawalle funded 97 clerics to Saudi Arabia “to go and pray for a stoppage of banditry” in order to “diversify strategies to restore peace and security in the state.” Today, as Nigeria’s Minister of State for Defence, his tried and tested playbook bears remarkable fruit for a country affronted!

But the real prayer for Nigeria was arguably written four years before the Amalgamation that begat it in 1914 and over ten thousands kilometres away, in a collection of chants by Bengali mystic, Rabindranath Tagore, published under the title “Gitanjali.”

The tale of Tagore, India and Nigeria makes for a most unlikely coincidence. Tagore was born in 1861, the same year in which the British possessed Lagos. He died in 1941, just six years before the British project in India ended in that most bloody Partition, the same year in which the Nigerian Regiment helped to restore the Emperor in Ethiopia. From Tagore’s India, the British exported many things to Nigeria, including the Criminal Code, the Verandah, and Frederick Lugard.

It is, therefore, not at all un-natural that Tagore’s prayer for Nigeria was also made in India. Among his collection in Gitanjali, Tagore pens a trilogy of patriotic songs: Gitanjali 106 calls attention to the perils of social exclusion; 107 acknowledges India’s vast under-class of social exclusion in the caste system; and 108 predicts a terrible reckoning:

Day after day, you have avoided human touch

Showing your contempt for the deity that dwells in man.

            One day, the Creator’s ruthless fury

            will make you sit by famine’s doorway

and share with others what there is to eat and drink.

With all of them you’ll have to be equalized by sharing the same affront.

These excluded were the people whom another of India’s celebrated founders, Mohandas Gandhi, called the “Harijans” or “God’s people.” It is no accident that Nigeria’s encounter with its reckoning appears to be happening “in God’s name”.

In the north-east, a Jihadist onslaught proclaims a Caliphate in God’s name.

In the north-west, the killers of Deborah claimed they did it in God’s name.

In the south-east, adherents of the Indigenous People of Biafra, IPoB, claim to be the children of “Chukwu Okike Abiama”, which translates into “God of all Creation” in Nigeria’s relay of national anthems.

All this grasping for the Almighty reflects the reality that the Nigerian State has never cared nor existed for its underclass. It has only ever treated them as both sub-human and expendable.

As the country prepares for another milestone in its romance with sovereign organized crime in 2027, the authors of this script must pray that Nigeria’s excluded and expended do not decide to ask for what is duly theirs. For if they could, they will present the country for the first time with a proposition for which there are not enough prayers or bullets.

For Nigeria, they are Tagore’s prayer in the fourth stanza of Gitanjali 108 answered:

Whoever you fling to a lower level will bind you to that level.

Whoever you keep behind your back is only dragging you backwards.

Whoever you keep occluded,

            Hidden in ignorance-darkness,

            is shaping a chasm between you and your welfare.

You must be equalized with all of them by sharing the same affront.

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.

I came of age in Nigeria during absolutist, totalitarian military regimes and was shaped by the anti-military rhetoric and activism that surrounded me.

Although democracy hasn’t lived up to its promises, which has fueled what I consider misguided and amnesiac nostalgia for military rule, I would rather we fix our badly deformed civilian system through trial and protest than return to the dark days of brutal military monocracy.

That is why news of an alleged abortive coup plot last year unsettled me, particularly because many of those implicated are northern Muslims. In a country riven by deep primordial fissures, I doubt we can recover from the northern-led overthrow of a civilian government headed by a southerner.

Read Also: Otti’s Stark Warning: 2027 vote will decide poverty or prosperity

The Defence Headquarters initially denied it. It described reports of a coup attempt as not just “false and misleading”, “entirely false”, and “malicious” but as deliberately fabricated to “cause unnecessary tension and distrust among the populace”.

The Director of Defence Information, Brigadier General Tukur Gusau, said what Sahara Reporters described as a coup was merely “indiscipline and breach of service regulations” by 16 officers who felt stymied by “perceived career stagnation caused by repeated failure in promotion examinations, among other issues”.

But news platforms such as Sahara Reporters, Premium Times, and Daily Trust quoted unnamed sources in the upper echelons of the military and the Tinubu administration who insisted the Defence Headquarters was being economical with the truth and that there had indeed been a real attempt to overthrow the government.

The confidence with which these reports were presented, despite the anonymity of the sources, led me to write my November 1, 2025, column titled “The Coup That Dare Not Speak Its Name”, in which I argued that the government owed the public transparency about what had happened.

I wrote: “Secrecy accelerates suspicion. Nigeria’s citizens have matured politically; they can process national challenges without descending into chaos. Shielding the public from reality infantilises the electorate and breeds cynicism.”

On January 26 this year, the Defence Headquarters, which had earlier dismissed the reports as “false and misleading”, made a dramatic reversal and acknowledged that there had indeed been a plan to violently overturn the Tinubu government. It also said the implicated officers would face military tribunals.

After multiple peaceful protests by the wives and relatives of the accused, formal charges were eventually filed. Six suspects, including a retired major general and a serving police inspector, were charged with terrorism and treason. In a 13-count charge sheet, the federal government alleged that they “conspired with one another to levy war against the state to overawe the president of the Federal Republic”.

Although respected analysts such as Chidi Odinkalu have questioned the plausibility of the evidence cited in media reports to substantiate the alleged coup, I do not have sufficient information to independently assess the credibility of the claim.

What is not in dispute, however, is that what we are witnessing is uncharted territory. Since Nigeria’s independence, there is no clear record of military officers being tried for an alleged coup attempt under a civilian administration.

The closest parallel is the 2004 episode during the Obasanjo presidency, when the government announced that it had uncovered and foiled a coup plot. The Guardian quoted presidential spokeswoman Remi Oyo as saying that Hamza al-Mustapha, then in prison in Lagos, was suspected of involvement.

From what I recall, that episode produced neither a formal court-martial proceeding nor a full civilian trial. Instead, scores of senior and mid-level officers were detained, questioned and then retired or dismissed. What is unfolding now is therefore without precedent.

This is why the intervention of respected human rights lawyer Femi Falana deserves careful attention. In an April 23 statement, he called for the immediate suspension of the government’s secret court-martial of 36 soldiers accused of plotting a coup. He described the proceedings as unconstitutional, illegal and a violation of due process.

Falana argued that trying the soldiers behind closed doors undermines transparency and the right to a fair hearing, especially in light of the gravity of the charges against them. His central legal contention is that offences such as treason and terrorism fall within the jurisdiction of civilian courts, not military tribunals, even when the accused are soldiers.

He warned that subjecting some suspects to court martial while others implicated in the same alleged plot face civilian prosecution creates a two-track system of justice that affronts the principle of equality before the law.

He urged the Attorney-General to halt the military proceedings, transfer the case to the Federal High Court, and ensure that all suspects are tried openly and uniformly under civilian law.

Falana’s argument raises a deeper question that goes beyond this case. What does it mean to be governed by law in a democracy that still carries the institutional reflexes of military rule? A state that derive its legitimacy from and is bound by the constitution cannot choose opacity when transparency is inconvenient, nor can it apply different standards of justice to people accused of the same crime.

If the government is confident in the strength of its case, in the unimpeachability of its evidence against the accused, it should have no fear of public scrutiny. I know there is legitimate argument to be made about the risk of inspiring copycats if the trial is open, but coups are not crimes of imitation like bank robberies. They require coordination, access to arms, insider networks, and timing. Those conditions are not created by watching a public trial. If they exist, secrecy will not eliminate them.

Second, secrecy is more likely to breed suspicion than prevent instability. When the state hides proceedings, it invites rumours, conspiracy theories, and loss of trust, which can be more destabilising than any supposed copycat risk.

Third, transparency is a deterrent. A public, evidence-based trial exposes the consequences of plotting against the state and demonstrates that institutions can respond lawfully. That is more likely to discourage would-be conspirators than embolden them.

Fourth, courts already have tools to protect genuinely sensitive information. Specific details can be redacted or heard in camera without turning the entire process into a secret proceeding.

But there is also a broader political risk. In a country with a long and traumatic history of coups, secrecy around allegations of military insurrection heightens suspicion. When the government first denied the existence of a coup and later admitted it, it created a credibility gap that only openness can close. Conducting trials behind closed doors only deepens that gap and invites speculation about what is being concealed.

If the accused are guilty, a transparent trial will expose their culpability and reinforce the legitimacy of the state. If they are not, secrecy will have compounded injustice. Either way, opacity serves no one except those who benefit from weakening public trust in institutions.

If the suspects are found guilty through a fair, transparent and evidence-based process, they should face the full consequences of their actions. I would never defend any attempt to seize power through violence. But guilt must be established beyond all shadows of doubt. It is not enough to allege; the government must prove its case in the open.

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