It is either Nasir El-Rufai is a very lucky man, or he is a very strong man. He was arrested by his friends, charged variously for multiple offences, none of the various courts has yet ruled on his bail application, but he arrived home in Abuja on Saturday. His jailers mourned with him and said he needed to arrive home early enough to bury his mother who died the previous day.

“But, the court is already seized of the matter. How did he do it outside the courtroom?” An exasperated lawyer asked me.

“That is the definition of power; you can’t find it in any dictionary,” I told him.

A disciple of Confucius asked him: “Is there any one word that could guide a person throughout life?” Confucius replied: “How about ‘reciprocity’! Never impose on others what you would not choose for yourself?” So, here, one question lingers: if Nasir were president, would a former friend in his custody be allowed to go home and mourn such a loss? It is a question he owes the public an answer to.

While we wait for his answer, let me add, quickly, that his arrest and prosecution illustrate a deeper contest between reason and unreason. Arrested on February 16, 2026, detained, released two days later, and rearrested immediately on February 18, the sequence reads less like a coherent legal process and more like a struggle for control of the levers of power. The situation raises an unsettling question: should process itself become punishment? If an offence is bailable, must the system wait for personal tragedy before conceding a right already guaranteed by law? In this drama, the court emerges diminished, reduced to learning, from social media, what it had deferred to pronounce.

One only wishes Nigeria could extend the  ‘right’ enjoyed by El Rufai to all detainees. But that is not the way of the world. When a slave falls sick, the household rebukes him as a habitual invalid; but when the master’s child complains of fever, medicine and delicacies compete for his lips.

Chief Ebenezer Babatope was the Director of Organisation of Chief Obafemi Awolowo’s Unity Party of Nigeria (UPN) in 1983 when General Muhammadu Buhari axed the second republic. Babatope was detained without trial by Buhari throughout his 20 months in power. His father fell ill while he was in Buhari’s jail. When Babatope’s father died, he pleaded with Buhari to let him go home to bury and mourn his father. The reply he got from Buhari was a query on how he knew that his father died. Ebino Topsy was supposed to be incommunicado in detention.

You’ve heard repeatedly that there is something called karma, a concept of moral cause and effect. Rooted in Hindu philosophy, karma slithered its way into English language and became a moral weapon against the wicked. Roman statesman, Cicero, uttered it his elegant way: “ut sementem feceris, ita metes” (literally: “as you have sown, so shall you reap”). Others said it in a shorter form: “quod severis metes.” The translation is the same.

Beyond Roman philosophy, most religions affirm the principle of sowing and reaping as an inevitability in human life. Yet, it does not operate evenly for all.

If you are strong and lucky, every force on earth, including karma, will worship you and stand on your mandate. I cite the luckiest Nigerian ever, Muhammadu Buhari. Buhari’s autumn came in August 1985, he lost power and was detained by his friend and successor, Ibrahim Babangida. Then his mother died. How was he treated? Because he was not Babatope, the General did not get the same treatment he gave the UPN man.

Buhari’s biographer, John Parden, wrote in the book ‘Muhammadu Buhari: The Challenges of Leadership in Nigeria’ that “after the death of his mother in December 1988, Buhari was released and (he) travelled to Daura for the mourning.”

Different strokes. Detained Nasir El-Rufai was back in Abuja on Saturday, released outside the formal processes of the court, to mourn and bury his mother who died the previous day.

I have nothing against Bola Tinubu releasing his destiny helper from where he kept him. After all, as the Yoruba remind us, “bí a bá ńjà, bí i ti ikú kọ”—our quarrels are not meant to be fatal. Besides, in this season, every birth, every death is political and should be so treated. Someone said if the president did not release the man on time to bury his mother, the sun would have risen in the west and set in the east. They said the president’s politics would have suffered the fatwa of the mallam(s). I don’t know if I should believe that.

The lesson here (if it is a lesson) is that if you are strong enough, it is possible to sin against the powerful, get arrested by a motley of agencies, have your lawyers file your bail application, have the matter adjourned till March 31, and yet secure freedom on March 28 without any formal pronouncement from the court.

Literature has long anticipated this tense drama. I consult the master here, William Shakespeare. In ‘Measure for Measure’, power bends justice even as it preaches morality; authority manipulates outcomes while cloaked in virtue, and the law becomes theatre. In ‘King Lear’, power detaches from moral legitimacy: authority remains, but justice collapses. In ‘Macbeth’, ambition overrides order, hollowing out legitimacy and turning institutions into mere instruments. Across these works, the pattern is constant: when power escapes restraint, process becomes performance, and justice, an afterthought.

Beyond Shakespeare’s theatre of power, Jonathan Swift’s satire speaks with unvarnished contempt for its duplicities. In ‘Gulliver’s Travels’, he exposes the absurdity and arbitrariness of legal and political systems that hide behind the façade of rules. Consider the tiny officials of Lilliput, quarrelling over trivialities while exercising immense authority. Their pettiness is not comic relief alone; it is a mirror showing how institutions often cloak arbitrariness in the language and ritual of procedure.

Dig deeper into literature and you encounter Franz Kafka’s ‘The Trial’: the protagonist here was arrested and prosecuted by a system he cannot comprehend.

“I don’t know this law…It probably exists only in your heads,” he told those keeping him.

“You’ll find out when it affects you,” a policeman replied the detainee.

Kafka’s enduring insight is stark: a legal system that cannot explain itself has already abandoned justice. The quintessential nightmare of opaque authority.

Then comes George Orwell, the great anatomist of political power. In ‘Animal Farm’, rules shift with the convenience of those in control; in ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’, authority goes further still, defining reality itself. In Orwell’s world, power bends process, rewrites it, works hard on it until truth becomes whatever power says it is.

At the burial of his mum on Sunday, those who jailed El Rufai were fully there. They sat with him as co-mourners.

“Will he go back to jail now that the burial is over?”,  a ‘wicked’ professor-friend asked me.

 I didn’t know what answer to give.

What, then, are the implications of El-Rufai’s ordeal and reprieve for democracy?

The episode raises profound questions about institutional integrity. Judicial supremacy is eroded when outcomes of trials appear to originate from outside the courtroom. The court, in such circumstances, risks becoming symbolic rather than decisive. Citizens are left to ask: where does authority truly reside?

When a justice system begins to operate with two courts, one visible, the other invisible, democracy is already in a kidnappers’ den. If bail and other legal reprieves are granted without transparent legal grounding, they invite a deeper anxiety: that the same unseen authority that grants relief can, with equal arbitrariness, impose punishment.

In all of this, the real losers are the courts: arbiters turned onlookers, spectators in their own game.

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

By Max Amuchie | The Sunday Stew

There is a different kind of silence in the countryside. It is not the anxious quiet of a ringing phone, but the heavy stillness of abandoned farmlands. Crops rot where they were planted. Footpaths disappear into overgrowth. Entire communities live with one eye open—not listening for a call, but for the distant echo of motorcycles approaching.

Brigadier-General Lawal Bature Mohammed (rtd), former Commander of the Zamfara Community Protection Guards (CPG), was meant to be part of the solution. Instead, he became part of the story. Popularly known as Dan Gusau, he was shot by bandits in a brutal attack last year, sustaining severe bullet wounds that required evacuation to Egypt for advanced medical treatment. He would later succumb to those injuries.
His funeral prayer was held on Thursday evening, March 26, 2026, in Sabon Gari, Gusau, the Zamfara State capital, where he was laid to rest in accordance with Islamic rites.
In a functioning system, men like him secure the land. In this one, they are claimed by it.

Last week in The Sunday Stew as we examined kidnapping in the first part of The Insecurity Triad, I promised that today we would turn to the next front in Nigeria’s deepening security crisis—banditry. If kidnapping is the marketplace where human lives are traded, then banditry is the siege that makes that market possible. It is the slow, grinding occupation of Nigeria’s rural heartland.
While kidnapping targets the individual, banditry targets the land itself. This is no longer just a “Nigerian problem.” In a world of fragile supply chains, the rural siege of Northern and Middle-Belt Nigeria has become a critical bottleneck for global food security.

From Raids to Occupation

Banditry in Nigeria has evolved beyond sporadic violence into something more structured and enduring. What began as cattle rustling and opportunistic raids has matured into a system of territorial control.
Across vast stretches of the North-West and North-Central, armed groups now operate within what are effectively “ungoverned spaces”—zones where the authority of the state is weak or absent. In these areas, bandits do not simply attack; they administer, regulate, and extract.

In the vast “ungoverned spaces” of the Northwest, banditry has evolved into a medieval form of territorial sovereignty. It is no longer enough for criminal gangs to raid a village; they now “tax” the very act of survival.

The Harvest Toll: Farmers in states like Katsina, Zamfara, and Niger are forced to pay “protection fees” just to plant their seeds, and a second “exit fee” to harvest their crops.

The Price of Defiance: Refusal to comply often invites violent reprisals—raids, kidnappings, or the destruction of entire communities.
This is not taxation in the civic sense. It is coercion, enforced through fear and sustained by violence.

The Abandoned Acre

According to recent agricultural surveys, over 2.5 million hectares of arable land remain uncultivated due to the threat of violence. Entire farming seasons have been lost, not to drought or flood, but to insecurity.
For the Nigerian farmer, the land is no longer just a source of livelihood—it is a contested space. Stay and risk death. Pay and perpetuate the system. Or flee and lose everything.

This has triggered widespread displacement, with thousands of rural families relocating to urban fringes or internally displaced persons (IDP) camps, where livelihoods are uncertain and futures diminished.

Perhaps nowhere is this convergence more evident than in Zamfara State, where banditry and illegal mining have become dangerously intertwined. In these territories, the bandit is no longer just a raider of farms, but a gatekeeper of gold. Control of land now means control of both harvest and mineral wealth. This dual economy—agricultural extortion above ground and illicit extraction below it—has created a powerful incentive structure that makes the crisis far more difficult to dismantle.

But this model is no longer confined to Zamfara. It has expanded into the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) and its neighbouring states—Niger, Nasarawa, and Kaduna—evolving into what can only be described as a sophisticated conflict economy.

Recent security assessments from agencies such as the EFCC and the Ministry of Solid Minerals indicate that these armed groups no longer rely solely on kidnapping or rural taxation. They are now actively managing, taxing, and securing mineral extraction as a parallel revenue stream to fund their operations.

The “Mining–Insecurity” Nexus

The Federal Government has identified illegal mining as a primary enabler of banditry. The Minister of Solid Minerals, Dele Alake, has noted that many bandit attacks are not random acts of violence, but are often linked to efforts to clear communities from mineral-rich lands.

Attacks in parts of the FCT—such as Kwali, Kuje, and Bwari—have forced residents to flee. Once these areas become effectively “ungoverned,” illegal mining syndicates move in to extract gold, lithium, and lead without resistance.

Security data from late 2025 suggests that over 60% of bandit camps in the North-Central region are located within 10 kilometres of illegal mining sites, highlighting the strategic overlap between violence and resource extraction.
This is not incidental. It is deliberate—violence as a precursor to extraction.

Revenue Streams and the Financing of Violence

Illegal mining now funds banditry through multiple, structured channels:
•Direct Extraction: Armed groups occupy mining sites and compel artisanal miners, who are often displaced work under coercion. The extracted minerals are sold to middlemen and trafficked through porous borders.

•Protection Fees: Mining syndicates pay “rent” or protection money to bandit leaders to guarantee uninterrupted operations and shield themselves from rival groups or security interventions.

•Barter Systems (Minerals for Arms): In some cross-border corridors, gold and lithium are exchanged directly for small arms and light weapons, bypassing formal financial systems and making these transactions extremely difficult to trace.
What emerges is a closed-loop system where natural resources finance insecurity, and insecurity protects resource exploitation.

Geographic Hotspots: The New Resource Frontiers

The mineral-rich belt surrounding Abuja has become a focal point of this evolving crisis:
Niger State (Shiroro & Munya): Rich in gold deposits, these areas have seen bandits transition from cattle rustling to controlling mining pits, using proceeds to acquire more advanced weapons and logistics.
Nasarawa State: The recent lithium rush has triggered a surge in illegal mining. Security agencies have uncovered multiple sites where so-called “conflict minerals” are extracted to fund local armed groups.

FCT Forest Corridors: Remote zones along the Bwari–Tafa axis serve as strategic transit hubs, where minerals are aggregated before being transported to urban centres or smuggled across borders.
These zones form a resource corridor of insecurity, linking rural violence to national and transnational economic networks.

Economic Loss and the Limits of State Response

The financial implications are staggering. Nigeria is estimated to lose approximately $9 billion annually to the illegal export of gold and other solid minerals.
In response, the Federal Government established a specialised Mining Marshal Corps in 2025 to secure mining sites and disrupt illegal operations. However, reports indicate that these forces are severely stretched. Many illegal mining locations are situated in deep forest territories, where bandit groups have established fortified positions and high-intensity operational bases.
The result is a familiar pattern: a state struggling to project authority into spaces where criminal economies have already taken root.

A Self-Inflicted Famine

As I argued in the second edition of The Sunday Stew, “A Country Without Earthquakes,” nations across the Sahel often endure poor harvests and famine as a consequence of natural forces—chief among them desertification. History offers even starker examples, such as the devastating famine in Ethiopia during the 1980s, where environmental stress combined with structural weaknesses to produce humanitarian catastrophe.

Nigeria’s case, however, is more troubling. Our crisis is not primarily driven by nature, but by human agency. Banditry—this self-inflicted disaster—is now producing conditions of severe hunger. Farmers are heavily taxed, fields are abandoned, and entire communities have been emptied of productive life.
What drought and desertification achieve through nature, banditry is now replicating through violence. The result is the same: scarcity, displacement, and hunger—but with one critical difference. This is a crisis we have created, and therefore one we can resolve.

From Farm to Table: The Inflation Spiral

For the international observer, this is a clear case of what can only be described as “Agricultural Terrorism.” When the acclaimed “Breadbasket of Africa” is under siege, the consequences extend far beyond national borders.
Nigeria’s food inflation, currently hovering at record highs, is a direct result of this disruption:
Reduced agricultural output leads to scarcity;
Scarcity drives price increases;
Rising prices erode household purchasing power.
The result is a vicious cycle of economic strain, hunger, and vulnerability.

The “Bandit Tax” and the Price of a Meal

The correlation between banditry and food costs in 2026 has moved beyond temporary disruption. It has hardened into what can only be described as a structural tax on the Nigerian dinner table.
While headline inflation figures have shown signs of statistical moderation, the lived reality tells a different story. The underlying cost of food remains stubbornly high, driven by persistent insecurity in Nigeria’s primary “food basket” regions.

Insecurity has created an invisible but deeply entrenched cost layer—what analysts describe as an informal tax regime imposed by bandits. Farmers in Zamfara, Katsina, and Niger are compelled to pay ‘protection fees’ and ‘harvest taxes,’ costs that are passed directly to consumers.

Apart these taxes imposed on Zamfara, Katsina and Niger farmers there is also Transportation Premium: Transporters moving goods to Abuja now pay between ₦5,000 and ₦50,000 per trip, adding an estimated 20%–30% to retail prices.

This is taxation without representation, enforced not by the state, but by armed actors embedded within the supply chain.

Current Food Prices in Abuja (March 2026)

Despite a modest decline in overall inflation (15.06%), food inflation rose to 12.12%:
Rice (50kg): ₦75,000 – ₦90,000
Maize (50kg): ₦60,000 – ₦70,000
Beans (50kg): ₦70,000 – ₦85,000
Garri (50kg): ₦45,000 – ₦60,000
Yam (per tuber): ₦2,500 – ₦4,000

For the average Nigerian household, these are not just prices—they are signals of a shrinking economic margin of survival.

Closing the Gate

For the Nigerian government and the international community it is important to state that food security is not a climate issue; it’s a security sovereignty issue.

If kidnapping is the “venture capital” of the Triad, then banditry is its “real estate strategy.”
To break the siege, Nigeria must pursue economic sovereignty:
Secure the value chain;
Deploy surveillance technology;
Reclaim indigenous control of land.

Banditry is the quiet strangulation of Nigeria’s food system and the slow erosion of rural life. A nation that cannot secure its farms cannot secure its future.

Join me next week for Part III: The Ideological Ghost and the War for Nigeria’s Soul.

Trust Is sacred. Stay seasoned.

•Max Amuchie, CEO of Sundiata Post, 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

As Africa approached the turn of the Millennium, the leaders of the continent were well on the way to reaching a consensus that “democracy, good governance, respect for human and peoples’ rights and the rule of law are prerequisites for the security, stability and development of the Continent.”

To many, this meant the conduct of elections. Indeed, two decades later, the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights would affirm that the only legitimate basis for the exercise of political power on the continent is “regular conduct of free and transparent elections … through universal suffrage.”

Around the same time, the leadership of the continent in the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) was grappling with the meaning of “free and transparent elections.” Senior ambassadors of the OAU reached a decision recommending to the organization to outlaw “manipulation of the Constitution aimed at preventing a democratic change of government” or “any form of election rigging and electoral malpractice, duly established by the OAU or ascertained by an independent and credible body established for that purpose.”

One decade earlier, in 1989, the OAU deployed to observe the referendum on the independence of Namibia, marking the first that the continental organization would observe an election in Africa. Until then since its creation in 1963, the OAU did not much concern itself with the business of how governments came to power anywhere in the continent. In the first decade of its involvement in election observation, the OAU did not see an election that it did not agree with.

This was a source of comfort for rulers all over the continent. In Nigeria, for instance, Sani Abacha, the four-star general who ruled Nigeria from November 1993, did not have anything against the idea of an election as long as it did not lead anyone into the misapprehension of a contest.

By June 1998, General Abacha was on the cusp of transitioning the country into elective governance. In the election that would have been overseen by him, there were five recognized parties. These were: the Democratic Party of Nigeria (DPN); United Nigeria Congress Party (UNCP); National Centre Party of Nigeria (NCPN); Grassroots Democratic Movement (GDM); and the Congress for National Consensus, (CNC). All five parties shared one presidential candidate in General Sani Abacha.

The death of General Abacha in June 1998 sadly frustrated that plan but opened up a playbook in election management that had, until now, not been seriously revisited in Nigeria.

By the time the All Progressives Congress (APC) came to power in Nigeria in 2015, the African Union (AU), successor to the OAU, had logged about 500 election observer missions around the continent. Over that period, the OAU/AU still did not see an election that it did not approve of.

The AU did, however, evolve some underlying principles to govern elections, which were eventually embodied in a continental charter on democracy, elections and governance. These require the existence of independent election management bodies to manage the elections, such as Nigeria’s Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC. They also require respect for “political pluralism and tolerance”, another way of saying that elections should not exclude competitive candidates.

The African Union usually deploys observer missions to these elections. Where there are disputes, the AU also requires an independent judiciary to resolve them.

This is usually done by way of election litigation. Cases around elections can occur before or after the vote. Historically in Nigeria, this distinction is very important. Regular courts oversee pre-election litigation but only election petition tribunals can adjudicate on disputes over the outcome of an election.

Until 2007, that distinction appeared well settled.

However, following the 2007 cycle of elections, the Supreme Court awarded the governorship election in Rivers State to Rotimi Amaechi who was not even on the ballot in the vote. He had been manipulated out of the party primaries in an act of party political impunity. In response, the Supreme Court hijacked the election outcome on his behalf by judicial fiat in a case that had in fact originated as a pre-election dispute.

That case raised the significance of pre-election disputes in Nigeria and consolidated the transfer of the right to vote in Nigeria from citizens to the judges. By 2019, the Supreme Court awarded the Governorship election in Zamfara State to a well-beaten candidate after disqualifying the winner in a pre-election dispute and precluding his party from the contest by refusing to order a re-run.

Under colour of law, African governments have increasingly used the courts to re-make elections as largely free of contest. Six months ago, for instance, the president of Côte d’Ivoire, Alassane Ouattara, used the courts to ban all competitive candidates from the presidential election. When the result was announced, the election management body awarded him some 90% of the votes.

This past week, retired President of the Court of Appeal, 82 year-old Isa Ayo Salami, floated the idea of such un-contested elections for Nigeria in remarks that simultaneously disparaged his former colleagues in the judiciary while also querying why they sanctioned the candidacy of Peter Obi of the Labour Party in the 2023 general elections.

It is worth recalling that in 2011, a committee of the National Judicial Council chaired by former President of the Court of Appeal, Umaru Abdullahi, considered a consolidated set of petitions concerning the conduct of Isa Ayo Salami in the Sokoto State governorship election in 2007. One of the complaints included “call logs that throughout the month of September up to October 2010 when the judges wrote and delivered the judgment in Ekiti,…. Justice Salami,…. and the person he claimed to be Justice Salami’s said agent….were in close telephone contact by voice or SMS with the counsel to [Action Congress] candidate and official of the party.” The Committee in the end did not have to make a finding on this but the allegations of close affinity between the former judge and the party that is now the All Progressives Congress (APC) are not new.

Isa Ayo Salami has floated a kite which could consummate an Abacha-style election under a ruse of law. The Electoral Act 2026 creates ample room for such mischief. Among other things, the Act, which became law on 19 February, requires all parties to maintain “a digital register of its members containing the name, sex, date of birth, address, State, Local Government, ward, polling unit, National Identification Number and photograph in both hard and soft copies.”

The logic of keeping this register in hard copy defies understanding. The staggering cost and logistics – not to mention waste – of doing so should not detain us at the moment. The Act goes further: the parties must submit the register (presumably both hard and soft copies) to the INEC at least 21 days before party primaries, which must occur between 23 April and the end of May. In effect, the parties, which have until now not been required to have digital registers, must create them in less than two working months. The cost of failure to do this is will be disqualification of their candidate(s) from the contest.

In 1979, the Federal Electoral Commission tried to disqualify Nnamdi Azikiwe of the Nigeria Peoples Party (NPP) and Aminu Kano of the Peoples’ Redemption party (PRP) from the presidential elections. The courts saved them.

Nigeria’s judiciary has evolved and not necessarily for the better in the intervening period. There is ample room for pre-election judicial mischief in the 2026 Electoral Act, which the courts could easily use to preclude competitive candidates from the contest.

It will be surprising if this is not deployed to block competitive candidates from the presidential election in January 2027. The irony is that the president whose claim to fame is his advocacy against military rule, could be the person who eventually appropriates the methods of Nigeria’s maximum military ruler to make himself the only competitive candidate in an un-contested election in 2027.

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