The English Premier League ended yesterday with Arsenal crowned champions. But that triumph almost slipped away because, two weeks earlier, a stolen goal arrived disguised as a legitimate one.

I watched the West Ham–Arsenal match of Sunday, May 10, 2026. It got me thinking about Nigeria’s past and coming elections. Deep into stoppage time, there was a crowded goalmouth scramble. The ball ended up in the Arsenal net, the referee okayed it and the stadium erupted.

But the celebration was cut short when the referee was called to the VAR monitor.

Replays showed that as the Arsenal goalkeeper leapt to claim the ball, his left arm had been held and impeded by an opposing attacker. The goal, a crucial equaliser, was ruled out for a foul.

Note that the referee initially stood by the decision. Then came protests. He paused the game, consulted technology, reviewed the incident and reversed himself. He was not stubbornly chained to an earlier error. He chose, instead, to stand by the rules of the game.

We should learn a lesson in that episode and weigh in on the relationship between sport, technology, rules and democratic accountability. A last-minute goal was first allowed, then overturned because it had been obtained unfairly.

As I watched the referee, I thought of our INEC; the VAR reminded me of IREV and the courts, and our 2023 controversies. The match officials did not manipulate the rules or sabotage the technology. There was no self-help, no front or backend glitch, and no desperate effort to protect a heist simply because a verdict had already been announced.

Read Also: The Case for the office of Judge Dan Maliki

That is the lesson for Nigeria, its politicians and their politics, and for INEC. Democracy, like football, survives on the integrity of process. When doubts arise, institutions must have the courage to review themselves honestly and correct wrongdoing openly. A bad decision does not become sacred merely because it was confidently declared. What destroys public trust is not human error; it is the refusal to admit and correct errors.

Elections are not different from football. In Nigeria, political heists are rarely committed in the open. They happen in the confusion of numbers, in the invasion, the pushing and pulling around collation centres, in the unseen grip on institutions, and in the calculated obstruction of the people’s will. As we move towards the next elections, INEC should learn from that match. What may appear to be victory amid the noise of celebration may, upon honest review, turn out to be a foul on democracy itself.

The Nigerian voter too must approach future elections with the vigilance of a VAR room. Every suspected inflated figure, every compromised official, every act of voter suppression, every attempt to intimidate observers or mutilate result sheets is a foul hand on the goalkeeper’s wrist. It must be contested until it is redressed.

If football can pause an entire stadium and viewing centres around the world to review an unfair advantage, then a republic must be prepared to pause and review the electoral process at any point whenever the people suspect that the game has been rigged.

This is necessary if what we say we have is a democracy. Democracies do not die only through bullets and coups; they also get murdered through clever, vile manipulations hidden inside crowded political moments.

While I sat impressed by that referee obeying the laws of the game, the Federal High Court in Abuja last Wednesday nullified parts of INEC’s 2027 election timetable, ruling that portions of it violated the law. The court acted the VAR of this game. It held, among other things, that INEC cannot unilaterally fix the timetable for party primaries; cannot abridge the period within which parties submit candidates’ particulars; cannot shorten the lawful window for withdrawal or replacement of candidates; cannot publish the final list of candidates earlier than 60 days before the election; and cannot compel campaigns to end two days before voting.

In effect, the court set aside the timeframes imposed by INEC for party primaries, submission of candidates’ particulars, withdrawal and replacement of candidates, publication of final candidate lists and campaign periods.

The question is: if the Constitution and the Electoral Act are already clear on these timelines, why did INEC choose a route so far removed from the law? Whose interest was that timetable designed to serve? I read somewhere that INEC said it was reviewing that judgment. We wait to see what its reviewers have to say.

Will they say the figures in the Electoral Act are not there or, perhaps the version of the Electoral Act available to them differs from the one available to the rest of Nigeria? We wait.

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

The military high command has come out to say that the gunmen who abducted schoolchildren and murdered their teachers in Ogbomoso were JAS men. JAS (Jama’tu Ahlis Sunna Lidda’awati wal-Jihad) is a splinter of Boko Haram. One of the kidnapped teachers was beheaded on camera by the terrorists who flung the video into cyberspace to our collective horror. So, finally, in Yorubaland, they have come.

I can count two, three, four people around me who watched that video and fell ill. Yet those who did it felt normal and may do it again because they always do. “Any savage likes to collect heads,” Iris Murdoch writes in ‘A Severed Head’, a story of victims who think they are survivors. And why the head, of all parts of the human body? Murdoch says heads are “the apex of our incarnation.”

Nigeria’s contemporary terror has historical roots. Almost exactly 200 years ago (1826 /1827), in that same Ogbomoso axis, Edun of Gbogun, an Aare Ona Kakanfo, suffered what the murdered teacher suffered at the hands of the Fulani.

Recorded as one of the notable figures of the nineteenth-century Yoruba wars, and the last major shield defending the northern Oyo frontiers against Ilorin, this Aare was defeated in battle by the Fulani, and the unthinkable was done to him. Samuel Johnson, in ‘The History of the Yorubas’, writes that “his head was taken off, put on a pole” and carried “in triumph to Ilorin.”

Because reuniting Kakanfo Edun’s head with his body was necessary if his spirit would rest, Johnson wrote that “Edun’s son afterwards went to Ilorin, and did obeisance to the Emir, who then allowed him to take his father’s head away; it was brought back and buried with the body at Gbogun.” Obeisance was the ransom exacted before the family could complete the Aare’s burial rites.

Now, almost exactly 200 years after that publicly displayed human head and humiliating ransom, the marauders are back. Has the body of the murdered teacher now been released for burial? No. The terrorists are waiting for ransom. Ransom and a severed head? Read Edun’s story and remember history’s record of something similar.

Read Also: As terrorists expand their reach, Nigeria’s politicians plot for 2027

I also read somewhere that the abductors holding the Oyo schoolchildren demanded that the governor speak directly with them. Interesting and intriguing. What really was the motive behind all these? The abduction and the conditions attached to it jointly signal the possible arrival of Boko Haram in Yorubaland. So, unless this household wakes up and drives away the invading army, more heads may yet be hoisted on poles and carried as trophies by triumphant killers.

The president and Commander-in-Chief reacted to the Ogbomoso abduction and murder last Monday. A friend was angry that it took the president four days after the tragedy to react. I told my friend to relax. He should not blame the president. What if he was warned or advised not to say anything until he was cleared to speak?

“Who would clear the president?”

“His advisers.”

“Who?”

Only the naïve ask questions whose answers everyone already knows.

Yesterday, I bought a copy of General Yakubu Gowon’s autobiography. The first “secret” I saw divulged there is the role marabouts played in the running of our country. In the very first chapter, and within the first eight pages, the old man writes about how his office as Head of State was “bombarded with messages by several clerics and marabouts from Dakar, Senegal, and an astrologer from Mali” asking him to be wary of the very people who gave his government meaning.

In the 1990s, we heard stories of how spiritualists from these “religious” countries wielded enormous influence over our leaders, particularly key figures in the government of Sani Abacha. Go out today, don’t go out tomorrow. Hire this man, fire that man. We heard stories that they completely caged Abacha inside the Villa so that he would not die. But because he who wants to save his life shall lose it, Abacha died right inside the Villa.

We have always read that clerics wielded enormous powers, but what many probably never knew is that they also did security work. Gowon said the marabouts were “agents of the French Intelligence Service” whose motive was to infiltrate his government and rule or ruin it from within. He said he ignored them and handed over his life and affairs to God.

Not all leaders avoid marabouts; many court and worship them, often to their ruin. It happened to Afonja, another Kakanfo whose attachment to spiritualists brought Sheikh Alimi into the very centre of his power, and to his sorrow.

How much of that cleric content do we have in our own power bottle today? Gowon said the marabouts who sized him up were French agents; so, whose agents are today’s mystics?

Some ten years ago, Nigerians were told that the country spent N2.2 billion hiring clerics for national prayers. Today, what happens behind the curtains of power? We still have marabouts as drivers of our politics and governments. Many African presidents, we are told, do not sleep, travel or even make appointments without consulting unseen “controllers.”

How much influence do these invisible advisers wield today in Abuja? That is a question worth asking whenever power behaves strangely in Nigeria, especially now that government is afraid to call terror and terrorists by their name.

“I can’t stop thinking of the abducted pupils and their teachers. Many will be traumatised for life. If they were forced to watch the beheading of their mathematics teacher, many will suffer mental health issues. All of them will never be the same again.” An old schoolmate and health practitioner in the United States sent me those words. You should have no difficulty agreeing with her.

I set out to write that Nigeria is the factual setting of the classic horror film or detective novel: bloody, harsh, cold, intriguing and insane. But there is one difference. No matter how long the night of blood and darkness, detective fiction traditionally ends with order restored. The guilty are exposed, justice is served, and society breathes again. Nigeria’s bad story does not end; it remains trapped in the middle chapters where chaos walks forever freely and innocence bleeds till eternity.

Nigeria suffers urban chaos and rural terror. Stand on the terrace of your home and look at the street. What stretches before you is a horizon of insecurity, untamed terror and collapsed social order. The cloud and its storm are not fleeting, yet we individually comfort ourselves with the hope that our own roofs will escape the rain.

The president last Monday expressed similar optimism. He promised bandits and their collaborators hell in the hands of hunters. He said they would face the law. What law? What justice? He spoke as if we do not know that in Nigeria, terrorism moves swiftly while justice limps behind it.

I cite an example. The trial of a kidnapping suspect commenced in an Oyo State High Court only a few days ago. The abduction happened in March 2019. A farm guard from the North masterminded the abduction of his own employers. A ransom of N25 million was paid, one worker was killed, confessional statements were obtained and arrests made almost immediately. Yet, seven years later, the case has only just started crawling through the courts, with witnesses now recounting their ordeal before a judge.

Because terrorism rejects the certainty of punishment, terror in the South-West has now moved from farms to schools. In Yorubaland, schools are inviolable symbols of innocence and civilisation. Strange men with strange ideas have now turned them into theatres of horror.

The first school in Nigeria, ‘The Nursery of the Infant Church’, was founded in Badagry in 1843 by Mr. and Mrs. De Graft. For the first time since that epoch, Yoruba parents are now genuinely afraid of sending their children to school. You blame them? “The wise sees danger and hides himself, but the fool proceeds and suffers for it.”

If the Yoruba child can no longer go safely to school, then the enemy has scored a terrifying victory over the land. The classroom was once where Yoruba society hid its future from danger. We took it for granted that it was the safest place in any modern civilisation. Nigeria’s special breed of terror has now turned the school assembly ground into a hunting ground. It used to be said only of the North-East that gunmen invaded schools with the confidence of landlords returning to their property. Now it has happened in the South-West. Pupils are marched into forests; teachers are abducted and beheaded like plantain trees. The blackboard and gravestone have become frightening companions.

When the sacred is violated, what should the guardian priest do? Befriend the violators? Celebrate them as cousins and pardon them as prodigal sons? The body language of today’s politics increasingly suggests that the wages of sin should not be death — all because of the calculations of election and re-election. Nigeria’s deepest tragedy may therefore not even be terrorism itself, but our growing accommodation of it. The country has become a vast jungle of predators and prey. In that jungle, the hierarchy is fixed: the hunted remain hunted; the spared merely await their appointed hour. No matter the severity of a tragedy, society moves on as if nothing happened. We consume reports of massacres and abductions with weary resignation. We debate horror like football scores. We place lush artificial grass of normalcy over the ugly surface of our nationhood.

In that same Ogbomoso corridor of abduction and beheading, politicians spent last week harvesting primary votes. The ruling APC held governorship and presidential primaries undisturbed. Even in the traumatised Oriire Local Government Area, locals queued while votes were counted. Across the nation, winners sang and danced. That is how Nigeria rolls. It wears the mask of peace while its people live the reality of war. Nigeria will eat its corn meal even while the house burns and robbers roam freely: Bí ilé njó, bí olè njà, won á jè’ko. A dark pall now hangs over the country. Hitherto safe territories are slipping beyond state control; schools no longer feel sacred; roads have become ambush corridors and farms are theatres of war. Bandits even invade homes now to harvest preys.

Nigeria was conceived as a covenant against barbarism. Yet barbarism now walks openly across the land. Unless those who breed these hounds restrain them, the country may soon convulse. Across the South-West, communities increasingly speak the dangerous language of self-help because the Nigerian State appears weak, hesitant and indecisive. Laws, courts and governments exist to prevent society from collapsing into primal violence. The terrorists who abduct children and behead teachers are not ordinary criminals; they are enemies of civilisation itself. Their attack on individuals is symbolic; their true target is the very idea of sanity.

Now, what next? Will this flood stop its southward sweep? That question can only be answered positively if this other one is answered first: Does the present system possess enough competence and moral will to rescue its classrooms, defend its children and reclaim civilisation from the merchants of fear? A state that cannot defend its classrooms has failed at the first duty of civilisation.

America recently shut its embassy services in Abuja. Like competent weather forecasters, they sensed a coming hurricane and took cover. Our own “seers” see nothing; our “hearers” hear nothing. A friend wonders what our intelligence community does beyond searching for threats to power and its temporary occupants. Why are these roaming terrorists never detected before they strike? Should intelligence work prevent disaster or merely arrive afterwards to count corpses? People answer “detective” without interrogating the meaning of the word itself. ‘Word Stories’ in the Oxford English Dictionary takes a deep and scintillating dive into that history. It should interest those whose profession is the detection of evil before evil acts. From Arthur Conan Doyle to Agatha Christie, the classic detective novel presents the investigator who restores moral order to chaos and pursues truth even when society fears confronting it.

Nigeria today desperately needs such intelligence, competence and moral courage. People are paid every month to see danger before it erupts. Why do they arrive only after disaster? My teacher taught me that the old detective stories of English literature were built on a simple assumption: civilisation is fragile; beneath every appearance of order lurks chaos waiting to break loose. That is where the detective comes in. He exists to uncover hidden plots, stop carnage and restore moral balance. But what happens when society itself loses the will, the competence or the courage to confront and punish evil? In such a place and situation, even the watcher becomes helpless. He may see danger clearly, announce it promptly and warn repeatedly, yet because of politics, audacious catastrophe still marches forward unchecked. I pray Nigeria has not reached that tragic point of no return.

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

By Max Amuchie

Last Sunday, I indicated that this week’s edition of The Sunday Stew would pay tribute to the late political economist and public intellectual, Claude Ake. That tribute remains, but its timing has shifted. Later this year will mark the 30th anniversary of his passing — a more fitting moment to revisit the life and legacy of one of Africa’s most consequential intellectual minds. Until then, this column turns to a related but less discussed tradition in Nigerian thought: the rare lineage of framework builders who operated outside the academy yet reshaped how society understood itself.

Nigeria’s intellectual landscape faces a persistent challenge: not the total absence of indigenous frameworks, but their relative scarcity and limited institutional consolidation. Much of our analytical vocabulary still arrives pre-assembled from elsewhere — adapted to Nigerian conditions rather than born from them. We reach habitually for tools forged in other fires, calibrated for other crises, and carrying the residue of other civilisational assumptions. The consequence is not merely intellectual dependency. It is explanatory incompleteness. Borrowed frameworks, however sophisticated, can illuminate local realities, but they do not always capture the structures beneath them.

Yet Nigeria has never been entirely without its own framework builders. What it has lacked is not indigenous conceptual production itself, but its sustained institutionalisation. Alongside the academy, it has historically produced another tradition — rarer, more independent, and deeply sovereign in character.

It is a tradition built largely beyond university faculties and disciplinary boundaries. Its practitioners did not merely interpret events; they created new conceptual vocabularies. They refused inherited explanatory tools when those tools proved insufficient, choosing instead to engineer indigenous frameworks for immediate national and civilisational questions. Their objective was not institutional approval but conceptual sovereignty.

This is the elite class of Nigeria’s framework builders. And it is within this largely extra-academic lineage — one operating beyond the formal boundaries of university production and disciplinary gatekeeping — that figures such as Azikiwe, Awolowo, and Chinweizu emerge — not merely as statesmen or writers, but as framework builders. Each refused the role of interpreter. Each chose, instead, the more demanding vocation of architect.

Nnamdi Azikiwe: The Newsroom as Primary Laboratory

To understand what Azikiwe accomplished, one must resist the temptation to reduce him to his political biography — to the president, the governor-general, the nationalist icon. These are accurate descriptions, but they obscure the more foundational achievement. Before Azikiwe was any of those things, he was a theorist of communications power.
His intellectual contribution extended beyond communications infrastructure into explicit framework construction. Through Zikism in Africa and works such as Renascent Africa and Liberia in World Politics, he advanced a political philosophy centred on spiritual balance, social regeneration, mental emancipation, economic reconstruction, and political resurgence. Zikism was not merely nationalist rhetoric. It was an indigenous ideological framework — an attempt to articulate a distinctly African vocabulary for liberation, modernity, and civilisational renewal.

Azikiwe understood, with unusual clarity for his era, that newspapers were not passive instruments of reportage. They were engines of consciousness formation. Through The West African Pilot, launched in 1937, he built a mass communications infrastructure designed not merely to inform but to manufacture national awareness where none yet existed in consolidated form. The newsroom became a laboratory of political imagination.
The West African Pilot therefore functioned not only as a newspaper but as the transmission mechanism for Zikism itself — a vehicle through which ideas moved from theory into public consciousness.

This was framework building in the most consequential sense: the creation of a conceptual technology — the politically purposive newsroom — that could transform the relationship between a population and its own self-understanding.

Azikiwe drew from global traditions of activist journalism but adapted them into a distinctly West African instrument of nationalist mobilisation.
The lesson for the contemporary era is unmistakable, and uncomfortable. The modern digital newsroom has, in large measure, abandoned this mandate. Optimised for traffic, calibrated for virality, and disciplined by the imperatives of advertising revenue, it has become a largely reactive institution — faster than its predecessors, but shallower in purpose. Azikiwe’s example issues a rebuke and a challenge in equal measure: the newsroom cannot survive, in any meaningful civilisational sense, as a purely commercial machine. It must recover its older mandate as a theory laboratory — a place where original socio-political frameworks are serialised, tested, refined, and introduced into the public square. The medium has changed. The obligation has not.

Obafemi Awolowo: The Geometry of State Architecture

Where Azikiwe worked through the newsroom, Awolowo worked through the monograph. And where Azikiwe’s primary instrument was consciousness, Awolowo’s was structure.
Awolowo approached the Nigerian state with something that can only be described as geometric discipline. He did not merely criticise colonial administration or lament political dysfunction. He subjected the Nigerian project to systematic, structural examination. Through works such as Path to Nigerian Freedom (1947) and Thoughts on Nigerian Constitution (1966), he mapped constitutional arrangements, regional balances, socio-economic organisation, and the friction points embedded within the federation with a precision that distinguished him from his contemporaries. He treated governance as architecture — as a designed system with load-bearing elements, stress points, and the capacity to collapse if its internal logic was violated.
This temperament is what separates framework builders from analysts. The analyst produces interpretation. The framework builder produces a map of the system generating the events that require interpretation. Awolowo was interested not in the headline but in the structure producing the headline — and he was willing to do the painstaking intellectual labour of rendering that structure visible and legible.
The diagnosis of state fragility demands this same architectural temperament today. Nigeria’s security crisis is narrated, almost universally, at the level of events: the attack, the abduction, the reprisal, the press release, the lament.

But events are symptoms. Framework builders map systems. They move beneath the surface of occurrence to identify the structural arrangements generating those occurrences — the incentive structures, the sovereignty vacuums, the institutional failures that are not aberrations but outputs of a deeper logic.

His engagement with federal design, regional autonomy, and constitutional engineering reflected an understanding of governance not as administration alone, but as institutional geometry.
Awolowo’s method remains not only valid but urgently necessary.

Chinweizu Ibekwe: The Mandate of the Intellectual Border Guard

If Azikiwe built the communications laboratory and Awolowo built the architectural method, Chinweizu performed a different but equally indispensable function. He stood watch.

Chinweizu’s role was expressed not only through critique but through conceptual production. Among his notable interventions was Culturecide — his framework describing the systematic erosion, displacement, and destruction of indigenous cultural systems through external domination and internalised dependency. It was an attempt to name a process that conventional political language often failed to capture: the destruction of a people’s civilisational software while the institutional hardware of the state remained formally intact.

Through works such as The West and the Rest of Us (1975) and Decolonising the African Mind (1987), Chinweizu issued one of the sharpest warnings in Nigerian — and indeed African — intellectual history: the danger of mental capture. He challenged imported analytical vocabularies with a directness that was, by design, confrontational. He questioned the dependence on external civilisational lenses for interpreting African realities. He argued, with sustained rigour and deliberate provocation, that a society which cannot explain itself to itself in its own conceptual terms is a society that remains, whatever its formal independence, intellectually colonised.
His role was that of an intellectual border guard. Not merely a critic — a guardian of the threshold between conceptual sovereignty and conceptual dependency.

The challenge Chinweizu issued has not expired. It has, if anything, intensified. For every contemporary Nigerian thinker, his questions remain active and uncomfortable: Where are your own tools? What indigenous vocabulary explains your society? What framework have you built rather than borrowed? What analytical structure emerges from your own reading of your own conditions — rather than from the application of a foreign theoretical template to a local dataset?

These are not rhetorical questions. They are the standard by which any serious tradition of framework building must measure itself.

The Lineage and Its Continuation

Azikiwe built both the communications laboratory and the ideological architecture of Zikism. Awolowo built the architectural method of state design. Chinweizu defended conceptual sovereignty while naming the dangers of civilisational erosion through frameworks such as Culturecide.

Together, they constitute a tradition — dispersed across time, never formalised as a school, but coherent in its underlying conviction: that the most consequential intellectual work is the construction of original frameworks capable of explaining a society to itself.

The Insecurity Triad is offered in continuity with that tradition. It is an attempt, specific to this moment and these conditions, to construct an indigenous diagnostic framework for Nigeria’s security crisis and its relationship to state decay — one that does not merely apply existing theory but builds the conceptual architecture from the ground up, from the evidence of Nigerian and Sahelian experience, on its own terms.
The tradition is older than any single framework. What matters is that it continues — that each generation of Nigerian thinkers refuses the false comfort of borrowed explanation and accepts, instead, the more demanding obligation of original construction.
Nations are sustained not only by institutions, but by the concepts through which they understand themselves.
That obligation is not academic. It is civilisational.

A Note on This Moment

This is the twelfth edition of The Sunday Stew.
Three months ago, this column launched with a single ambition: to occupy a different intellectual space — one between journalism and scholarship, between immediate events and deeper structures, where Nigeria’s crises could be examined not only through reportage or theory, but through original reflection and framework construction. What has emerged from that ambition has exceeded the original brief.

In twelve editions, this column has produced two original analytical frameworks. The Insecurity Triad — theorising the mechanism by which armed networks sustain themselves relative to state authority through the convergence of a ransom economy, land contestation, and ideological capture — has been presented and deposited across six scholarly repositories, and has received scholarly engagement.
It has increasingly moved beyond commentary toward contribution within debates on the Nigerian state.

The Trinity of State Decay, developed as its companion diagnostic, theorises the structural condition that the Triad sustains: a decoupling into rival sovereignties, in which the state performs authority it no longer possesses while shadow orders exercise authority the state has vacated.
These are not borrowed frameworks dressed in local language. They were built here, in this column, for this crisis.
That is what this lineage — from Azikiwe to Awolowo to Chinweizu — ultimately demands: not admiration, but continuation. The Sunday Stew is, in its modest but deliberate way, an attempt to honour that demand.
Twelve editions. Two frameworks. The work continues.

Trust is Sacred. Stay Seasoned.

Dr. Max Amuchie is the CEO of Sundiata Post and architect of The Insecurity Triad and 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

“Divine right is an old, established principle. It means that kings have the right – ordained by God – to act in any way they wish. Human-made laws are of no consequence beside the awesome power of God, and God’s representative, namely the monarch.” — Vija Prashad, Washington Bullets, 23 (2020)

Sovereignty is a complex concept in law and political science, but its primary attributes entail three inter-dependent monopolies. One is a monopoly of legitimate dispute resolution. The second is a monopoly of legitimate taxation; and the third is a monopoly of the instrumentality of legitimate violence.

Students of political science are most familiar with the last of these monopolies, but it is actually the first that guarantees coexistence in society. The polarizing 19^th century German philosopher, Georg Hegel, was quite clear about the place of dispute resolution in the job specification of the ruler: “the administration of the law is to be looked upon as the duty quite as much as the right of the public authority. Whether to delegate the discharge of this office to some power or not is not at the option of any individual.”

Few – if any – of the offices in the state rival the judiciary in the skill of the dark arts. Professors in law faculties feed students with a deadly doctrinal diet of judicial independence. Some even manage to persuade themselves that judges are indeed independent.

In reality, judicial independence is more about appearances than reality. In his Draught of a new plan for the organisation of the judicial establishment in France issued in 1790, Jeremy Bentham boils down the expectations of a judge to two: “that he be a good one and that he be thought to be so.” To the question who must think the judge a good one, there has never been a straight answer and reasonable people mostly differ.

Judges are not instruments of revolution. In reality, the judge has two primary jobs about which few, least of all lawyers, are willing to be honest: to protect themselves by protecting the sovereign. Put simply, the judiciary is an organ of the status quo. Therefore, strategic defection from the path of dependency on the ruler does not come easily to them.

For this purpose, every country maintains a judicial administration. Of the organs of the public service, few are as hierarchical as the judiciary. Judges may think themselves independent, but every judge is under the authority of an administration which must determine whether the judge measures up. Through this structure, every system determines what quantity and kind of judicial independence it can tolerate or live with in the interest of the ruler(s).

This is why judicial administration is a dark art. Those who run the judicial branch have to perform independence while at all essential times doing dependence. For this purpose, every system needs a “Judge dan Maliki”, that is to say; the judge who best embodies the attributes of a loyal son of the ruler.

Judicial administration under colonial rule found this relatively easy to accomplish because judges under that system held office at the pleasure of the foreign sovereign. They were expendable and there was no pretence about the absence of independence. To the natives, the language of the system and its traditions were foreign. Its location and routines were equally distant. There were also few natives knowledgeable enough in the ways of colonial law.

Following independence, judicial administration did not much depart from the path of fidelity to the interests of the ruler. In Uganda, for instance, the president appoints the Chief Justice, who notionally heads the judiciary; but real power lies in the Chief Administrator of the Judiciary, who is the Permanent Secretary and chief accounting officer of the judicial branch. He is also an appointee of the president.

Unlike the Chief Justice who is bound by the optics of judicial independence, the Chief Administrator has latitude to deploy dirty tricks or dark arts as the situation warrants and usually has a direct line to the president. When President Yoweri Museveni appointed a new Chief Administrator in July 2019, the leading newspaper in the country reported it the following day under the caption “[Pius] Bigirimana takes over judiciary.”

Below the office of the Chief Justice, different countries have other designations for the dispersal of hierarchies for judicial management. In Tanzania, the Jaji (Judge) Kiongozi is the name given to the principal judge, with responsibility for the administrative management of the High Court in Tanzania. The Judge Kiongozi is effectively the second-in-command in the country’s judicial hierarchy and manages deployment, postings, and dockets in the High Court.

In Nigeria, that role falls to the respective Chief Judges of the various High Courts across the country at both state and federal levels. The Chief at this level is both sorcerer and serpent. The most important role of the Chief is docket management and case assignment. For this purpose, the Chief must have a good nose for the predilections of all the judges under him or her as well as their foibles and failings.

The most important decision made on a case, especially one affecting the essential interests of the sovereign or his party, is which judge is to hear it. With just one stroke of the pen to assigning a case, the outcome is foreclosed. The most important role of the Chief Judge at this level, therefore, is to divine the will or interest of the ruler and to allocate case work so as to ensure that nothing concerning the ruler suffers in his court.

For this purpose, every Chief encourages the cultivation of judges deeply solicitous and protective of their ruler. As judges have become the ultimate deciders of electoral fates in Nigeria, the Federal High Court – which has primary jurisdiction in such cases – has emerged as the court system where this species of judging has become a career path and a guarantor of judicial career progression.

The most recent list of elevations to the Court of Appeal demonstrates why or how this works. The most prominent names on the list were judges of the Federal High Court whose claim to fame was that they enjoyed a near monopoly of cases involving high political interests of the ruling party or its acolytes. The predictability with which these cases ended up before them suggested that they had been cultivated or identified by the Chief for precisely that talent.

This is why it felt odd recently when it looked as if the Chief Judge of the Federal High Court was in trouble with allegations of code of conduct violations and appearances of high law enforcement interest in the peregrinations of Ghana-Must-Go bags of foreign currency reportedly associated with the movement of his spouse. As magically as they had appeared, those reports vanished with predictable alacrity. Whatever the problem was – assuming there was any – had been quickly settled.

With the resumption of normal judicial service in these circumstances, the search is on for a candidate in the Federal High Court for the role of Judge dan Maliki. The terms of the order granting bail to the former governor of Kaduna State, Nasir el-Rufai, in his on-going trial before the Federal High Court, suggest the search may already be over. The judge, Abdulmalik, granted him bail in the sum of N100 million. She required his surety to be a senior civil servant with property in the choicest part of Abuja.

The surety, she continued, must deposit their title instrument with the court together with their international passport. Importantly, the judge did not offer the putative civil servant any protection against reprisal. This is the art of the judicial dan Maliki at its finest – performing independence even when under “superior” orders.

Of course, any civil servant who meets these conditions will be neither free nor civil servant for much longer. The cap fits Abdulmalik. All that awaits now is the formalization of the office of Judge dan Maliki.

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.

For more than a year, a conscientious, cosmopolitan retired senior military officer from the North has told me that his worst fear for Nigeria is the prospect of terrorists and bandits from the North extending their bloodstained tentacles into Yorubaland. He said it would provoke the sort of communal convulsion that would take on a regional and ethnic hue. He doubts Nigeria can survive it.

When news emerged of the abduction of students, teachers and other residents, including the chilling, tear-jerking slaughter of a teacher known as Michael Oyedokun in Oriire Local Government Area of Oyo State by armed terrorists, he reached out to me again yesterday to say his worst fears appeared to be materialising.

Before he reached out, my own thoughts had gone to what he had been telling me immediately after I read the news. I kept thinking: How will the people of the Southwest react to this heartrending incident?

What happened wasn’t a run-of-the-mill terrorist or bandit attack. It was a vile, criminal spectacle calculated to elicit raw emotions. It’s the kind of tragedy that every part of the North has endured in silence for years.

Several people forwarded to me the video of Oyedokun’s beheading. I couldn’t bring myself to watch it. I simply lack the mental and emotional strength to put myself through that kind of soul-depressing anguish. Yes, I confess to being a wimp when it comes to issues like that.

Even so, the story of Oyedokun’s decapitation, especially the last words he was reported to have uttered before he was beheaded, still haunts me. What sort of insensate beasts in human form snuff out life like that for fun?

My older friend’s fear is that, human beings being human beings, villainy from outsiders tends to be refracted through primordial lenses. And recriminatory responses to assaults against a group identity tend to target innocent people living among the victims, which provokes an endless cycle of unjustified retaliatory violence.

We have seen that in the tragic rupture of the centuries-old relational harmony between Hausa and Fulani people in northern Nigeria, about which the country seems oblivious, but which has spilled over to social media and is becoming the inspiration for so-called Hausa-Zalla [Hausa-only] associations.

Years of sustained rural and urban banditry in the Northwest, particularly in Zamfara, Kebbi and Sokoto, have caused many Hausa people to interpret what is happening to them in ethnic terms, which is perplexing to outsiders because the depth and breadth of the ethnic and cultural alchemy of the two groups is such that only self-conscious genealogy can tell them apart.

Ordinary Fulani people in rural Northwest Nigeria, who are not bandits and who are themselves victims of the horrors of bandits who happen to be Fulani, became targets of attacks by Hausa victims of persistent banditry who had been stumped by the steadily escalating virulence of attacks against them.

The tit-for-tat violent attacks between Hausa and Fulani people in the Northwest are off the radar of the institutional media because, as I pointed out in my December 29, 2018, column titled “Triple Jeopardy of the Unending Zamfara Mass Murders”, the media “lack ready-made, stereotypical mental representations with which to frame the conflict, so they either avoid reporting it altogether or minimise its horrors if they report it at all. The news media thrive on Manichean binaries, conflictual differences, and sensation. The Zamfara mass slaughters don’t lend themselves to that.”

Of course, under Buhari’s presidency, many northern Muslims had an incentive to conceal the recriminatory violence that went on between the Hausa and the Fulani in rural areas. They did not want to “embarrass” or undermine Buhari. That incentive is gone now.

If attacks like the tragic incident at Community High School, Ahoro-Esinle, persist, extend to other parts of Yorubaland and cause serious threats to education, the most prized commodity in the region, something is going to give, and it won’t be pretty for Nigeria. That was the core of my friend’s concern.

Human beings, in general, do not interpret identical acts through identical moral categories. They interpret them through group identity, threat perception and prior suspicion. Had an armed gang of Yoruba youths done exactly what the terrorists from the North did in Ahoro-Esinle, Yoruba people would likely say, “These are criminals,” “These are area boys,” “These are jobless youths” or “The state has failed.” The crime would be individualised.

But because the perpetrators are northerners, it is more likely to be ethnicised or Islamised. The perpetrators cease to be merely criminals. They become representatives of a larger feared category.

As I said, this isn’t unique to Yoruba people. It’s a human trait. And it’s not hypocrisy. Were the situation to be reversed, that is, an armed gang that happened to be Yoruba abducting and slaughtering innocents in any part of the North, it would be interpreted in ethnic terms.

Scholars actually have a name for this. It’s called intergroup attribution bias. Some call it the ultimate attribution error. It means people tend to explain bad behaviour by in-group members as situational, individual or exceptional, but explain bad behaviour by out-group members as revealing something about the out-group’s character, culture or hidden agenda.

As I despair over the disquieting prospect of terrorist and bandit attacks by northerners devolving into a theatre of mutually assured destruction, I recall President Tinubu’s self-professed raison d’être for being president in his memorable 2022 “Emi lo kan” speech in Abeokuta, and it gives me a little relief.

He said the irreducible minimum condition he gave Muhammadu Buhari for supporting his presidential aspiration in 2015 was that Buhari “must not joke with Yoruba interests” [“Mo sì sọ fún un pé kí ó má fi ọ̀rọ̀ Yorùbá ṣeré.”]

He also framed his presidency as the turn of the Yoruba. People don’t seem to realise that before he said “Emi lo kan” [It is my turn], he first said, “Yoruba lo kan” [It is the turn of the Yoruba]. “This time, it is the turn of the Yoruba,” he said. “And among the Yoruba, it is my turn.”

Especially with the appointment of Major General Adeyinka Famadewa (rtd) as Special Adviser on Homeland Security, perhaps Tinubu will prove, as he told Buhari not to “joke with Yoruba interests”, that his presidency won’t countenance terroristic banditry in Yorubaland.

Should he do that, that would be one instance when I would celebrate ethnic particularism. It would be a positive use of ethnic solidarity for at least two reasons.

One, seeing the government aggressively and concertedly go after these bloodthirsty scum of the earth whose only reason for existing is to visit violence, death and misery on innocent people will reduce the temptation toward retaliatory violence against innocent northerners in the Southwest, which could propel reprisals against innocent southerners in the North.

We all know that in moments of inflamed national passions, most southerners can’t tell Hausa, Fulani, Nupe or Angas people apart. And northerners lump Yoruba, Igbo, Bini, Efik and other southerners into one undifferentiated group.

Second, if the terrorists from the North who have crossed over to the Southwest are vanquished, they won’t be alive to torment our people anywhere. And, of course, they won’t be alive to “repent”, be “de-radicalised” and “re-integrated” back into society, from where they wreak more havoc.

Yoruba lo kan shouldn’t be limited to exclusivist elite appointments. It should manifest in protecting the people from the existential threats posed by terrorists and bandits. That would, interestingly, benefit everyone in the country. I hope Yorubaland is where terrorism and banditry finally go to die.

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