By Festus Adedayo

In her biography of Ayo Rosiji, one of the key politicians of Nigeria’s first republic, entitled Man With Vision, Australia-born historian, Nina Mba, citing a Holmes, called biographers “People who knead people.” In other words, biographers knead their subjects from raw flour into edible form. You then wonder what the late lecturer in the History department of the University of Lagos would have called autobiographers. Self-conjurers, perhaps. For, in the process of piecing together bits about themselves, those who write their life histories have been accused of selfishly adding together a mish-mash of two unrelated traditional soup recipes, (luru and sapa) falsifying realities and mis-painting the picture of truth. Last week, sidekick of the Nigerian president and former Chairman of the All Progressives Party, (APC) Chief Bisi Akande, chose to conjure the spirit of a dead dog. In a podcast interview with popular broadcaster, Edmund Obilo, which centered around his autobiography, My Paticipations, the 86-year-old came under heavy shellacking on allegations of historical revisionism. The specifics were that he kneaded a wrong dough of history and made a wrong portrayal of himself. In that interview, Akande coasted home with a self-portraiture as a man who sat by the edge of a smelly sewage but chose not to smell the rank odour of rot.

By the way, I passed Akande’s country home, Ila-Orangun, Osun State, by about a week ago. I was on my way to the burial of the mother of Oba Adedokun Omoniyi Abolarin, the Orangun of Oke-Ila. You cannot fail to notice Akande’s house. Its arrogance and domineering spirit in the midst of abject poverty are worn on the mansion’s lapel. Architectured to sit imperially among natives’ poor houses, the mansion fittingly tells the story of a countryside-born boy made good. Don’t bother yourself with the architectural gaffe of such a mansion being surrounded with lock-up shops. It still doesn’t diminish the majesty you see in Akande’s home. Its outward finishing struck me as a repeat of same architecture of his house in Oluyole, Ibadan. Both bear similarities with the State Secretariat’s roofing and burnt brick finishing at Abere I also saw. His government constructed the secretariat. So, when, in the Obilo interview, Akande kept referencing his retirement to his Ila country home, planting pepper at his backyard and deliberately choosing not to live the posh life of a president’s consort in Abuja, do not be fooled to believe that the old man lives in less splendour.

Sorry, I digressed. Akande made two weighty assertions in his controversy-baiting interview. One is that the presidency under Olusegun Obasanjo allegedly killed Chief Bola Ige. The second was that the pan-Yoruba socio-cultural group, Afenifere died with the assassination of the Attorney General of the Federation. As the Yoruba say of words in convoluted circumstances as this, they need to be surgically placed in their contexts (ela l’oro). In doing this, let me begin from Akande’s assertion on Afenifere’s purported death. There is no denying the fact that Chief Ige was the darling of Southwest Nigeria. At his death, the Yoruba lost its most valuable political leader who was famously referred to as Chief Obafemi Awolowo’s heir apparent. At campaign grounds, the evocative song sang to usher Ige into such arena was “Ige has arrived! Ige has arrived! Awolowo’s heir apparent has arrived!” (Ige de, Ige de o! Arole Awolowo, Ige de o!).

The truth however remains that the January 1999 D’Rovans hotel presidential primary election of the Alliance for Democracy (AD) which took place in Ibadan marked the beginning of the cracks in the wall of the AD and Afenifere. It has been alleged that Ige sponsored the creation of alternate sociocultural groups to get back at the so-called “Ijebu Mafia” who allegedly worked against his presidential aspiration. To that extent, Akande may be right that Ige saw the fractionalization of the original Afenifere. To however say that Afenifere died with Ige will be excessive hyperbole.

Again, after the death of Ige, there doesn’t seem to exist again, apart from the two factions of the sociocultural group – either Chief Reuben Fasoranti or Ayo Adebanjo’s – who deifies or factors in Yoruba’s recent ancestor, Chief Awolowo, in all they do as the two groups. I am sure the man Chief Akande is his sidekick, Tinubu, in his closet or among his coterie of Yoruba hangers-on, gloats, like Obasanjo did in his autobiography, that the presidency which Awolowo couldn’t attain in his lifetime, was handed him on a platter. Since Tinubu became president, unless I missed it, I am yet to hear him pay tribute to Awolowo’s fabled sagacity in governance. I do not know if Bisi Akande, who is now mouthing Afenifere’s Catholicism, more than the Pope, has ever spoken to the president about this historical memory loss. It was good Obilo asked Akande if the Fasoranti who Tinubu visited in Akure as president wasn’t head of the same Afenifere he claimed was dead or if the members of the group Tinubu hosted in Aso Rock belonged to Ohanaeze Ndigbo. Such selective memory is said to be Akande’s stock-in-trade. When he engages in this kind of revisionism, his opponents remind us of his self-confession he made that he was never an Awoist until Chief SM Afolabi invited him to be a member of Awo’s Committee of Friends.

On the assassination of Ige in 2001, there is also no doubting the fact that the failure of the federal government to find the killers of this highly respected Nigerian is a blot on the Obasanjo government. On the list of assassins who possessed the raison d’être to kill Ige, the fact that the presidency ranks top is an unassailable fact. If you knew the awe with which Ige was held in Yorubaland, his resignation from the Obasanjo government would indeed have dented the Ota farmer’s second-term presidential bid. However, with Ige’s obsession for his Yorubaness and the disdain and awe with which the north held an obsessive Yoruba in power at that time, Ige’s presidential aspiration could not have stopped Obasanjo’s second-term bid. After all, even when the Southwest refused to vote for him in the first term, Obasanjo still became president. If Akande was desirous of Ige’s killers being apprehended, why didn’t he factor in more theories on the assassination? For instance, could some persons, who nursed ambition to be Nigeria’s president someday, have stopped him, knowing that an Ige presidency in 2003 could put paid to their ambition? Yes, the theory of armed robbery has been eliminated due to the clinical planning of the assassination, but, is there any possibility that we cast our nets too narrowly?

It is of great importance for us to drill down further into Bisi Akande’s claim that the government headed by Senator Rashidi Ladoja, as Oyo State governor, demanded and got a nolle prosequi in the trial of alleged Ige murderers. Was it a deliberate attempt to play politics, attempt to even political score or share political banditry? Not only did Ladoja denounce this claim with facts, he went ahead to accuse Akande of a penchant for lying while threatening to drag Akande to court for defamation.

It should also be said that while Akande was enamoured of unraveling the killers of his mentor, Chief Ige, under his leadership and direction as governor of Osun State, his ‘boys’ supervised the impeachment of his deputy governor, Iyiola Omisore, allegedly so that the Ile-Ife-born politician could lose his immunity and be ready to face trial for the same murder. If I were Akande’s interviewer, I would have raised further questions for his answer on what his government did to unravel the assassination, a few days before Ige’s murder, of an Osun State legislator, Odunayo Olagbaju. So, what moral right does he have to ask Obasanjo to find Ige’s killers when his own government equally looked the other way when Olagbaju was felled? In the interview, Akande made many other assertions on Ige’s death which should make the police ask him, instead of Ladoja, to come forward for interrogation so that the spirit of Bola Ige could get justice finally. He appeared to know more than he was telling the world, even by his own admission.

Let me go to another issue of importance in the Akande interview. Of recent, the power apparatchik that surrounds the Nigerian president must have discovered that the narrative that all his life, Bola Tinubu had wanted to become president, was flawed. At a meeting with some political operatives immediately after attending a Chatham House engagement in December, 2022, Tinubu was seen on video telling them that “Political power is not going to be served in a restaurant. They don’t serve it a la carte. At all cost, fight for it, grab it and run with it”. The vehemence with which then presidential aspirant Tinubu told these operatives of the cold-bloodedness of power had same cadence and grits with the vehemence with which a leopard pursues an impala.

No political juggernaut in the Tinubu political clan had enough cognate sidekick ‘followership’ around the president to dissolve the above narrative in the minds of the world like Bisi Akande. Since they both left office as governors of Osun and Lagos in 2007, Akande has maintained his political ‘follow-follow’ role around Tinubu. He was the most qualified for the task. So, in the Obilo interview, Akande attempted to push a counter-narrative. Tinubu didn’t want to be president, he emphasized. There was a bedlam in the Tinubu camp when he told all the scroungers around him that he would not be contesting for the presidency, Akande said further. Pius Akinyelure attempted to convince him, yet he would not bulge. Akande then had to be enlisted to do the convincing. He then told Tinubu that his being Nigeria’s president was a clarion call which he must yield to. In other words, Tinubu was persuaded against his earlier wish to be Nigeria’s president.

But, as James Hadley Chase volunteered in one of his classics, a liar must have a very good memory. The interviewer then momentarily badged in. But, that same Tinubu told Nigerians it was his lifelong ambition to be Nigeria’s president? Obilo asked. In fact, at the famous but controversial Abeokuta campaign in June 2022 where it was believed he dared Muhammadu Buhari to do his worse, Tinubu actually told the world that he, the godfather, had come to take over a throne that rightly belonged to him.

The final issue of concern in the Akande interview is his claim that only lazy Nigerians are hungry. While the interviewer squared up with him admirably over this claim, Akande’s fabled gambit of playing the ostrich sprang up here. He couldn’t see hunger in the land, he claimed. To be fair to the ex-APC chairman, he may not see hunger if his impoverished kinsmen in Ila-Orangun have found him too insulated from their existential plights, so much that going to him for help is a waste. None of his children, it is obvious, with his role as consort of the Villa, would feel the hunger in the land. So, how could he see hunger? Even when confronted with palpable cases of hunger under the government of a man he claimed was next good news after the so-called discovery of River Niger by Mungo Park in 1795, he still defiantly claimed that the pepper he allegedly planted at his backyard was the antidote to the impoverishment sown by the Tinubu government. If I may ask, why did Chief Akande ask the president to put his daughter in charge of dollar-denominated National Agency for the Control of AIDS (NACA) and not ask that she heads Ogun-Osun River Basin Authority so that she would plant “one grain of corn and reap a thousand cobs”?

All the above put together remind me that, in their daily fight for dominance and conquest, a fleeting nature of power and dominance exists among politicians. It is the type found among the lion and a warthog. In Nigerian politics, there is an unending, constant and relentless struggle between preys and predators, with each seeking dominance and conquest. Politicians deploy worldly cunning to foist false narratives on the populace. Bisi Akande’s interview and a huge chunk of his autobiography are a further reinforcement of this frightening fight in the wild.

By Lasisi Olagunju

It happened one sunny day in mid-May 2003. I was preparing to go to the office around noon when Tayo, the editor’s secretary, called me. “Mr Olagunju, don’t come to the office, Baba Adedibu is here looking for you. He came with his boys.” There were no two birds bearing ‘hawk’ in the skies of Ibadan at that time. Alhaji Lamidi Adedibu was the strongman of Ibadan politics. He earned that appellation in practical terms on the field of battle. Adedibu was death that thundered before killing; he was lightning that shrieked before striking. Alhaji Adedibu was the buyer who entered the market, bought all and paid for none. Before him, there was none so hard; after him, there has been none so dreaded.

What did I buy on credit from Alhaji Adedibu’s tray? If you offended him and he wanted you, you would surrender to him or find yourself in his presence. That was the man who came looking for me. He had enough big, street boys who made things happen for him and they were with him on that visit. I quickly checked the gate to my house and the door to my flat. I did a mind check of my recent activities. There was nothing that should make me a candidate for Adedibu’s trouble.

Tayo’s voice on the phone brought me back. “Baba said there is a report against him in the paper today and that you wrote it. He said someone in Tribune hinted to him that any story published without the author’s name was written by you, the news editor.” I laughed at that conclusion. I remembered that report. ‘Adedibu demands 12 out of 14 commissioner slots.’ The headline was something like that. I didn’t write the story. A colleague did. But I passed the story for publication because the source was very credible. The godfather didn’t like the report. He was livid at the audacity of the writer, and possibly wanted to use his visit to get a hint on who spilt the beans.

Chief Adedibu came fully prepared for me, the supposed writer of the story. He was adequately briefed on when I would arrive at the office. But he didn’t meet me. He couldn’t have met me. My masquerade did not put on its costume in the city centre and so would not suffer Adedibu’s rending effect. Eégún t’ó bá tì’gboro se l’aso won máa nya. Before that moment, I had spent all my years in Ibadan avoiding having anything to do with the old man. As a reporter, I always had excuses for not going for official duties at his popular palace at Molete, a place noted for anything and everything. Yet, Alaafin Molete’s palace was just five minutes’ drive from Tribune House and of the same distance to where I lived.

The story we published was correct. Adedibu, Ibadan’s kingmaker, wanted more than enough from the governor he made just three weeks earlier. The godfather wanted to govern the new governor and run the coming government from his home. Adedibu’s godson, Senator Rashidi Ladoja, who had just won the governorship had not even been sworn in when Chief made that demand. Fortunately, both were Ibadan – very heady, crafty and stubborn – and so were a perfect match for each other in the unfolding war. Godfather wanted everything as fruits of his labour; godson thought he could be independent of the kingmaker. The result was that they fought. If Ruth Watson’s ‘Civil Disorder is the Disease of Ibadan’ was acted as a drama, one of the two would be the hero, the other the anti-hero. Ibadan had them and felt them. Limbs were broken; heads got cracked; there were accidents at home and on the road; lives got lost; tenure got truncated. The rest is history.

Four years earlier in Maiduguri, a similar incident had opened the floor for godfathers to drag godsons. Governorship elections were held across Nigeria on Saturday, 9 January 1999. For Borno State, Mallam Mala Kachalla of the All Peoples Party (APP) won the seat with 388,058 votes. His opponent, Baba Ahmad Jidda of the PDP polled 348,800 votes. The victor and his followers started preparing for the swearing-in ceremony scheduled for May 29, 1999. But, amid all the preparations, the state’s outgoing military administrator felt a storm gathering. He got a troubling intelligence report in March that there were plans to impeach the man who had not even taken the oath of office. It was funny; it was not funny. But it was true.

Ali Modu Sheriff, born 1956, was Kachalla’s godfather. Kachalla was born in 1941, 15 years before his godfather was born. Before the election, Ali Modu Sheriff called Kachalla ‘Baba’. He was his father’s friend. During the election, there was a reversal of role; Kachalla worshipped the 43-year-old Sheriff. It is never by age, it is a matter of cash and Ali Modu Sheriff had it and gave plenty of it in service of Kachalla’s ambition. Godson won. Godfather wanted returns from his investment; he allegedly drew a list of cabinet members for the governor-elect. Godson reportedly said no; he picked some and dropped some. He flapped his wings and thought he could fly independent of the godfather who bought him the throne. He paid dearly for it. There was turbulence. His plane fatally suffered loss of altitude. Sheriff had his boys; Kachalla countered with his own boys. But if iron hits iron, one will bow to the other. Kachalla’s iron got bent and broken; the earth quaked. The next election, power changed hands, kingmaker made himself king. Godson lost everything. Life continued.

The godfather is the consummate ego tripper. Phillip Athans, author of ‘Devils of the Endless Deep’, describes the godfather as the “invader” who is determined “to be in charge of something, from the entire universe down to some back alley in the thieves quarter of the city.” The characterization is right. Even when they know that no king wants to share his throne, they still make a dash for power and the palace. Take Olusegun Obasanjo as an example. He was made president by some people in 1999; some people picked the bills. He became president and announced that if anyone thought his presidency was an investment, they had lost that investment. And for eight years, he did exactly as he promised. The same Obasanjo picked his successors in 2007 and 2011. Did he let them be? He wrote in his ‘My Watch’ (Volume 3, page 3): “I have learned from the Yoruba adage that ‘the kingmaker who does not hide his head after the installation of the king will be the first victim of the king’s wrath.” Now, did Obasanjo “hide his head after the installation of the king” as preached by him? He didn’t. The result is the long list of complaints we read in most of the pages of his three-piece memoir. It is the nature of power. The godfather is the kingmaker. He is never satisfied with half measures. The reason they are endangered and in perpetual state of war. It is the reason those very deep in Yoruba power-play say that the kingmaker’s blood provides the canvas for the king’s coronation dance (eni bá fi wón j’oyè, èjè rè ni wón máa ntè wo’lé). I heard that from my late father.

Nasir el-Rufai is fighting two wars at the same time. He is fighting the power caucus in Abuja and fighting local with Governor Uba Sani, his protégé in Kaduna. He tried to link the two fronts in a social media post last week. El-Rufai is angry because he lost his investment in Governor Sani to a more wily partner who has chased him out of a profitable partnership in Abuja. He spanked his governor for his undisguised support for President Bola Tinubu: “Every day I see this governor embarrassingly and sycophantically rambling, I used to wonder why? However, confirming that Federal Government ‘reimbursements, interventions, and grants’ in excess of N150 billion have been given selectively to Kaduna by Tinubu in the last 18 months now explains everything. By all means, defend Asiwaju for the conditional cash transfer. Asiwaju has earned it, coming from you. The people of Kaduna State will judge at the right time and place. Have a nice day,” the former governor wrote on X.

El-Rufai is (or was) godfather in Kaduna; he thinks he deserves that title too in Abuja – he, after all, led northern governors’ 2023 rebellion against Buhari’s from-north-to-north succession agenda. He thinks the revolt provided the wings for Tinubu’s eagle to fly into the northern space and into power. Truly, Bola Tinubu’s 2023 victory dress was sewn by a large confederation of provincial godfathers. El-Rufai was just one of them. Now, he, like many of the kingmakers, is down, locked out of the luxurious palace since May 2023. His lockout will be two years in May this year. He is very hurt and very angry. And justifiably so. If you eat gbì, you must be ready to die gbì. Watch him. He won’t stop until he is done. He has just started.

Follow closely the Mudasiru Obasa saga in Lagos. It is a tragedy that closes and unfolds like abracadabra. Some agents are said to have usurped the powers of the principal. They crossed the red line and are digging in. It is the digging in that intrigues me. Does it mean the palace eunuchs have grown balls, and boys have become men? Whatever answer that question attracts, I see this matter having very profound implications for politics at the national level. I see slithering snakes waltzing into the yawning walls of Lagos.

The noise over Lagos’ speakership today is because a pride of cats thought they could barbecue Mr Jones’ bull in the Animal Farm and get away with it. Imperial Lagos is a mafiadom. There are rules governing every mafia’s operations. The bojúbojú removal drama of Obasa as Lagos speaker resembles more an operation by the Mafia of Sicily. Norman Silverstein says in ‘The Godfather- A Year After’ (1974) that “What makes the Mafia frightening is its creeping secrecy, its being a closed society, its weapon (of) secret terror – defending and offending.” That reads like Lagos’ conclave. It is an elaborate structure that diminishes the intelligence of those who contrived democracy as the best form of government. What next for Lagos? Read Orwell’s 1984: “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever.”

The godfather may also have a godfather to whom he does not say no. The senior godfather may not necessarily be a politician. He may be the king’s son, his brother or, more insidiously, his marabout, babalawo, pastor or Imam. In the south, pastors and Alfas call the shots; in the north, the clerics hold the yam and the knife.

Now, how did we arrive here? A northern Nigerian story gives some insights:

Northern region’s first and only premier, Alhaji Ahmadu Bello, the Sardauna of Sokoto, had this young Islamic scholar called Sheikh Abubakar Gumi. Sheikh Gumi was the father of the Sheikh Ahmad Abubakar Gumi that you are very conversant with today. The older Sheikh Gumi, who died in September 1992, did humanity a lot of good by documenting his everything in an autobiography. ‘Where I stand’ is the title he gave that book of enlightenment, and I wish we all read it to understand how the Nigerian rain started and why it is still pouring.

The Sardauna loved Gumi, his brilliance and his ways and took him as his son. Godfather confided in godson on almost all matters. One day, the two had a deep discussion that changed radically the course of the Sardauna’s political career and the direction of (Northern) Nigeria’s politics.

“I was with the Premier in his house one day when he began to lament to me openly about the money he spent in the course of his political campaigns,” Gumi writes on page 101 of his ‘Where I stand’. He writes that the Sardauna lamented further that “he had spent whatever personal money he had almost to the point of bankruptcy.” The premier was disappointed in some of his lieutenants who were not as committed as he was to their joint political journey. And what was Gumi’s response? I quote Gumi in the book:

“But if it costs you personally and the party so much, why don’t you do something that would make you more popular, not only with the people but also with God?” I suggested to him.

“What could that be?” he asked.

“You see”, I explained, “if you spent, say, ten percent of the money you now lose to politics to promote the religion, it would earn you more supporters. This is beside the fact that it would be more directly in the service of God.” Gumi said the Sardauna “listened carefully and I explained to him further.” Gumi did not state what his further explanation was but he believed that was the point the Sardauna began to “pay more attention to Islamic matters”, courting local Imams for his politics, and giving “them some money, whenever he went out on campaign visits” (page 102). Mighty oaks from little acorns grow. From that point, Gumi became the guide, the godfather showing the leader the way.

Today, religious leaders play godfathers to the godfather. Behind the crisis in Kaduna and Lagos are some prophecies and predictions about 2027. The clerics are the prophets. They are the gods to appease if there will be peace.

By Chidi Anselm Odinkalu

In 1954 Sir John Verity lost his job because he won an argument. It was in his ninth year in office as Chief Justice of colonial Nigeria. Sir John arrived in Nigeria in October 1945 from the British Guyana, where he had served in a similar position since 1941. At the time, Nigeria was still a unitary system under colonial rule.

Two years before Sir John’s arrival in Nigeria, the Native Courts (Colony) Ordinance of 1943 had created a “Supreme Court of Justice” for the Colony and Protectorate of Nigeria. Taslim Elias, the distinguished academic who was destined to play a significant role in the administration of law and courts in post-colonial Africa, described the structure of the colonial court system that Sir John met on arrival in Nigeria as comprising “a Supreme Court, which is the highest court for the territory. It consists of two parts, a Divisional Court and a Full Court (as in the West African colonies), or a High Court and a Court of Appeal (as in several other colonies such as Jamaica, Singapore and Kenya), or simply a High Court (as in Uganda and Northern Rhodesia).”

That system had existed with modest adaptation since the Amalgamation in 1914. In his Amalgamation Report in 1919, Frederick Lugard, Nigeria’s founding Governor-General, pointed out that it was made up of a Chief Justice and Puisne Judges who “sat at certain places and visited on Assize the ‘District Courts.’”

Six years into Sir John’s tenure as Chief Justice, in 1951, the colonial government turned the country into a federation. Two years later, one of the issues to engage the constitutional conference that began in London was the implication of this new structure for judicial administration. As the conference began, the delegates – mostly politicians who preferred in the language of the day to be called “nationalists” – advocated the decentralisation of the judiciary. Sir John opposed the proposal, venturing with what proved to be accurate foresight, that such a step “might lead to judges and magistrates becoming tools in the hands of politicians” and “might eventually lead to the control of the judiciary by the Executive.”

The conference relocated to Lagos in 1954 where the politicians overwhelmingly approved the proposal to regionalize the judiciary. Having lost the fight over the future of the judiciary that he led, Sir John opted to take early retirement from the office of Chief Justice. He was the penultimate English man in the role.

In the reorganisation of the court system that followed upon the conclusion of the constitutional conference, the Federal Supreme Court (FSC) was created in 1954. The regions had high courts from which appeals could go to the FSC. The highest court for the country remained the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London.

By 1963, the nationalists fighting for independence one decade earlier had metamorphosed into political incumbents seeking control of the courts (like their colonial predecessors). The Privy Council had effectively ruled in favour of the opposition Action Group (AG) on the question whether the regional governor could remove renegade premier, Ladoke Akintola, without a formal vote in the regional parliament.

Confronted with the loss of a prized ally helpfully decimating the ranks of a loathed political foe (like a certain minister is doing today for the ruling party), the then-ruling federal coalition led by the Northern Peoples’ Congress (NPC), legislated the Privy Council out of existence, abolished the Judicial Service Commission, and made the Supreme Court Nigeria’s apex court. Sir John’s prophecy had become reality.

Although the 1963 Constitution enabled the court to sit “in such other places in Nigeria as the Chief Justice of Nigeria may appoint”, the Supreme Court has functioned from its seat, first in Lagos when it was the capital city for the first three decades after independence and, thereafter, from Abuja, the current federal capital. The fortunes of the court have waxed and waned in symmetry with the political economy of Nigeria. Unlike other courts in the country, there are no divisions of the Supreme Court.

For much of its life, the Supreme Court was an all-comers affair for appeals “on questions of law.” As the claims on the court’s judicial bandwidth rose and the political economy of the country grew more complex, it was predictable that its docket would increase. The sensible thing to do was to reform the law governing access to the Supreme Court – as well as its doctrine – to keep pace with the increasing demand for the rarefied attention of the court and preserve its authority. This was not done.

Instead, since the onset of the current elective dispensation in 1999, the Supreme Court became preoccupied with electoral and political disputes. Among the many consequences from this, two are notable. First, the preoccupation of the court (and of the judiciary below it) with political and electoral disputes increasingly tasks its credibility. Second, the resulting prioritization accorded by the court to political cases has created an intolerable backlog to which there is no sensible solution under the current system of judicial administration. The result is that appeals not involving senior politicians or election results vegetate interminably in the bowels of the Supreme Court with no reasonable chance of getting heard.

It is right that this situation should engage the attention of senior lawyers and senior politicians. Manu Soro, the member of the House of Representatives representing Darazo/Ganjuwa Federal Constituency of Bauchi State, has decided to bell the proverbial cat. On World Anti-Corruption Day, 9 December 2024, his bill for Supreme Court reform was gazetted.

The bill proposes – among other things – to authorise the establishment of five regional divisions of the Supreme Court, with the one in Abuja serving as the headquarters. The bill comes complete with a political geography of the proposed divisions: Umuahia (Abia State) to serve the south-east; Bauchi (Bauchi State) for the north-east; Uyo (Akwa Ibom) for the south-south; Lagos (Lagos State) for the south-west; and Kano (Kano State) for the north-west. The declared objective of the bill is “to enhance access to the highest justice, to minimise the logistical cost of accessing justice and to ensure timely dispensation of matters brought before the apex court.”

Commendable as it is for initiative, this bill is plainly misguided for many reasons. First, it misconceives and mis-characterises the mission of the Supreme Court. Second,  it has no diagnosis for the problems that ail the Supreme Court and, to the extent that it evinces any, offers no reasonable solution to them. Third, it offers a misplaced geographical and genealogical solution for a crisis of jurisdictional sclerosis and unimaginative judicial administration that it is unable to see.

The most charitable anyone can be about this bill is that it is hare-brained. The solution that it offers is guaranteed to make the situation worse, not better. It will also disestablish the court because a “Supreme Court” that sits in judicial divisions will be neither apex nor supreme.

The crisis of appellate throughput and its consequences which presently afflicts Nigeria’s Supreme Court is too serious to be banished to post-codes defined by geographies of genealogy. To address it, the supply of appeals to the court will need to be constrained significantly. The administration of the court needs to be overhauled and professionalized; and case management needs attention too. The one thing the court cannot afford is precisely what this bill seeks – to cannibalise it into a collection of judicial Bantustans.

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

By Prof. Mike Ozekhome, SAN

I am surprised and greatly disturbed to hear that members of the NASS are proposing 31 additional states to the present already behemoth, over-bloated and unwieldy 36-state structure that Nigeria operates. I see this needless venture in the midst of more critical national issues as nothing but jesters playing out Baba Sallah’s Alawada Kerikeri histrionics and buffoonery. How can they be talking about creating additional 31 states when over 2/3 of the present states are unviable entities existing on life support and merely dependent on the federal centre for monthly oxygenation under section 162 of the 1999 Constitution? How can we be talking of going through the stringent provisions of section 8 of the 1999 Constitution for a meaningless exercise that adds no value to a nation gasping for existential breadth?

How can they be talking about creating new states when hunger, starvation, squalor and melancholy envelop inhabitants of the present minion states that literally beg for crumbs from the Abuja master’s table? All that Nigeria needs now are only two things to correct the inherent injustices in our warped federalist system and move towards growth and development: one additional state in the South East to equal others; and a brand new Constitution that is legitimate people-driven, autochthonous, credible and referendum-compliant to help correct our deep fault-lines and lopsided federation that make some states mere vassals consumers of the national cake without knowing or caring how the cake is baked.

The NASS should immediately drop this provocative, funny and phoney butterflies-chasing and stop insulting our collective intelligence. Their present venture amounts to rubbing hot pepper deep inside Nigerians’ already bruised bodies of gaping sores. NASS, enough is enough, please.