By Lasisi Olagunju

On October 29, 1974, the Nigerian Ministry of Defence, through the Ministry of External Affairs, wrote to Nigerian missions and embassies abroad that it wanted to buy tonnes of cement to build barracks for its post-civil war armed forces of 200,000 officers and men. The Nigerian Army had just about 8,000 personnel before the war. The ministry not only made that open call for supply of cement, it avoided competitive bidding; it fixed the price at $60/per ton. Analysts noted that that offer price was five dollars more than the prevailing world market price. But, no wahala. Price and pricing have never been a problem for Nigeria. In fact, at that point in our growth (or decadence), the problem we had wasn’t money, it was what to spend it on.

So, between December 1974 and June 1975, our Ministry of Defence, which needed just 6 (six) million metric tonnes of cement, awarded 69 contracts for 16.23 million metric tonnes valued at almost $1billion. Other agencies and departments of government soon got on board the cement armada. History says half of the world’s cement was diverted to Nigeria. One researcher (Fabian Ihekweme, 2000) found that “approximately half the merchant ships in the world which were suitable for carrying cement became involved in supplying Nigeria.” An American newspaper reported that “the massive orders led to an armada of ships anchored off the Lagos coastline…stretching as far as the eye could see. Many were decrepit hulks manned by skeleton crews dispatched by ship owners to collect demurrage costs…”

The end was the famous cement scandal of 1974/75 which The New York Times of June 28, 1976 described as “a web of kickbacks and bribes involving government officials, foreign ship owners, corrupt purchasing agents, unscrupulous middlemen, phony corporations, dubious letters of credit and Swiss bank accounts.”

The scandal was not just about us biting more than our mouths could contain. We not only allowed and accepted substandard cement from suppliers, concessions were granted by Nigeria approving extension of expiry dates for expired products. Hanaan Marwah, an African infrastructure historian formerly with the London School of Economics, did a major work on this in 2020 for Business History. She places the scandal “in the context of debates about corruption, organizational failure and a ‘resource curse’ in Nigeria.” We had a ports congestion of over 400 ships queuing to offload cement. To compensate for the delay at the ports, we offered generous demurrage. We increased payable demurrage from the standard $3,500 per day to $4,100/ per ship per day. Some ships came carrying nothing; some did not come near our ports at all; some never existed. Yet they all claimed demurrage. And we paid. An account says Nigeria ultimately paid an estimated $240 million in real and phony demurrage costs.

In instances when deals were too criminally stark to click, Nigeria demurred in payment of costs for delays. And some audacious fake suppliers went to court to demand payment for their ashy goods. For this, Nigeria had a harvest of court cases, home and abroad. The very interesting UK Supreme Court appeal case number (1978) EWCA Civ J1219-3 appeals to me here. That case was between a company, Etablissement Esefka International Anstalt (Plaintiffs/Respondents) and the Central Bank of Nigeria (Defendants/Appellants).

Lord Denning, Master of the Rolls, who presided over the appeal, tells the story of the case better in elegance of language and in ghastly details – and copiously I am quoting him:

“This is another case involving what has been called in the papers ‘the cement scandal’ in regard to Nigeria. It so happened a few years ago that the Ministry of Defence in Nigeria ordered vast quantities of cement from all over the world. The Central Bank of Nigeria issued letters of credit to pay for all the cement which was coming in, and a good deal of it was payable through London banks.

“Great quantities of cement were shipped to Lagos: and at one time there were 300 or 400 ships waiting outside the port of Lagos to discharge the cement. There were not enough wharves or quays to take it there, let alone all the other goods coming into Nigeria. So immense demurrage was built up on the ships which were lying outside the port of Lagos for months and months. The story of what happened will be found in the case of Trendtrex v. The Central Bank of Nigeria, in which that bank claimed sovereign immunity and said they could not be sued. It was held in this court that they could be sued in the ordinary courts. That was the position in law. This is a further aspect of that “cement scandal”.

“In this case the Ministry of Defence ordered 240,000 metric tons of cement in December 1974 at a price of U.S.$59.90 per metric ton c.i.f. Lagos. The total purchase price was U.S.$14,376,000. That was ordered and agreed to be paid for by the Ministry of Defence in Lagos from a company (I will call it such) called Etablissement Esefka International Anstalt of Liechtenstein, but operating apparently from an address in the Strand, London. The Nigerian Ministry of Defence said that letters of credit would be opened accordingly – transferable, divisible letters of credit. The letters of credit were issued on the 18th March, 1975. The advice was given by the Midland Bank here on the account of the Central Bank of Nigeria for these monies to be paid for the goods against documents. The documents included commercial invoices (four copies), a full set of four bills of lading, an insurance policy and the like. The ordinary set of shipping documents was to come forward. The credit was irrevocable, transferable and divisible: and, furthermore, there was a special provision by annexure for demurrage to be payable in the total sum of U.S.$4,100 a day. That demurrage also came under the letters of credit which were issued by the Central Bank of Nigeria through the London correspondents the Midland Bank in favour of the Liechtenstein company Esefka International.

“I do not suppose that Esefka International had any cement at all themselves. They had to buy it; and apparently successfully in several cases. A good deal of the cement was shipped, a good many of the ships were held up, and a good deal of demurrage was payable. As to a great number of them, no question arises. But a question does arise in regard to eight vessels which were supposed to have shipped about 94,000 tons of this cement. With regard to those eight vessels, the shipping documents, the bills of lading, certificates and the like were presented to the Midland Bank as though everything was in good order. On being presented with those documents, the Midland Bank in London paid out huge sums in respect of these goods. Nearly $6,000,000 were paid out in respect of these ships.

“Lo and behold. I will come almost to the end of the story in a moment. Solicitors from London have been out to Lagos on behalf of the Central Bank of Nigeria. They have been to Greece, and they have obtained very strong evidence that there were no genuine documents at all – that these bills of lading were not genuine, but were forged. There is great doubt whether these eight vessels ever existed at all. What happened was that bills of lading were presented on behalf of three of these vessels by Esefka in Liechtenstein, and five others by a gentleman called Klemo. This is the way they got the money. Mr. Klemo, for example, on the 21st June, 1975 presented to the bank in London four commercial invoices apparently in order, full sets of 4/4 shipped bills of lading apparently in order, giving the name of the ship ex so and so. For instance, I have one before me for the m.t. Lion ex Avgi.In practically every one of these eight ships the bills of lading appeared as if there had been a ship which had changed its name. Nearly all the bills of lading were made out on that basis, and signed by the master, that they were shipped at a port in Greece called Volos.

“When the solicitor from London went out to Greece he found that it was all “moonshine” in effect.They had never had any of these ships in Volos at all. And Volos had not got the quantity of cement or anything like it to fulfil these supposed bills of lading. What is more, the harbourmaster did not know of any being put on board or sent forward, and so forth. So a very strong case was made out that these bills of lading were not genuine at all. They were forged in respect of goods which had never existed.

“In addition, added to these documents, there was a certificate of value given by Mr. Paul Harris, who seems to be a leading member of this Liechtenstein company Esefka International. He apparently lives in Zurich now. He gave certificates of value and certificates of origin of these goods, certifying himself that the invoices were all correct and the goods were produced in Greece and so on. When he was asked for an explanation of it, he said that he signed it in blank thinking that it would be all right in the ordinary way. That sounds a little suspicious to me: people ought not to sign certificates of this kind in blank and leave them for other people to fill in. At all events, there it was.

“Esefka, the Liechtenstein company, got money on three vessels. There is a question of whether those vessels ever existed. Klemo got money on five other vessels, and the same question mark arises about those. And the long and the short of it is that on these supposedly genuine documents Mr. Klemo and the other people got U.S.$6,000,000.

“When the solicitor from London found this out, he advised the Central Bank of Nigeria and the Midland Bank in London that they were not to pay any more money. They were certainly not to pay any demurrage with regard to this claim under these letters of credit when this kind of fraud, as he said it was, had been perpetrated.

“Was there such a fraud or not? Of course it is a debatable question. We have not got anywhere near the trial itself. But for myself, in view of the strength of the evidence which has been collected by the London solicitor in Lagos and in Greece, it seems to be elementary that, if it was a genuine transaction, Mr. Paul Harris (who was obviously the genius behind it) and Mr. Klemo (who was the person who was supposed to have supplied the goods) would have made affidavits or come forward to show that these were genuine goods and these were genuine shipments.

“But there are no such affidavits. All we know about Mr. Klemo is that he supposedly in May 1975 took up a divisible part of 60,000 tons of this supply and took up the transfer of the corresponding letters of credit. There it is…”

That was about us from the legendary Lord Denning.

The Shagari regime of 1979 to 1983 had its “Rice Armada” scandal into which Nigeria reportedly sank over N4 billion. A dollar exchanged for 55 kobo in 1980 when we minted that scandal. The scandal is foregrounded by a story of food crisis in Nigeria. The price of rice tripled with consequent political and social implications. President Shehu Shagari responded with mass issuance of import licences for 200,000 metric tonnes of rice in January 1980. A big scandal soon afflicted the policy. Stories of how sweet sleaze was being extracted from people’s hunger painted the street red. As more and more rice reportedly came in, the price of the commodity was going up, aiming at the roof. Who and who got the licences? Jon Kraus answers that question in his ‘Nigeria under Shagari’ (1982) published in Current History, Volume 81. Kraus writes that when the scandal broke, and the National Assembly demanded a list of the licencees, what it found on the list of rice importers were “records and electronics companies.”

Further to the lawmakers’ horror, on the list were names of their leaders in the Senate and in the House of Representatives. The Washington Post of 26 December, 1980 reported that one of the rice merchants, the deputy leader of the House of Representatives, was very “unapologetic about his floor-tile company receiving one of the highly sought after licenses.” To reporters who questioned him, The Washington Post said the House leader posed a counter question: “Do you think because I am in the House of Representatives I should stop doing business? I have been in business a long time.”

The arrogance in the above statement shocked Nigeria of 1980. If you followed proceedings in our senate in the last seven days, you would know that such audacity of privilege won’t shock anyone in Nigeria of today. Bola Tinubu’s presidency calmly admitted last week that he presented a budget of N27.5 trillion to the National Assembly but the “National Assembly, in its wisdom, increased the amount proposed by the executive by N1.2 trillion.” The lawmakers returned to Tinubu a pregnant budget of N28.7 trillion, largely of borrowed money, for him to sign. And he signed it; no query raised or question asked; no explanation or answer given. Part of that infusion is the provision of scandals that will sink one borehole for N193 million.

All around us here we see what the French call déjà vu – the feeling that you’ve experienced something before. Unlike the French who thought it a mere feeling, here, the experience is real. President Shehu Shagari, in his autobiography ‘Beckoned to Serve’ wrote on what he called “the greed culture” which dominated the legislative life of his regime. He reminisced that “in the 1981 financial year alone, the three million naira that I proposed for improvements to legislators’ quarters was hiked to twenty million naira by the joint committee on finance and appropriation” (see page 269-270). Now, do the calculation. How much would that criminal hike in cost be today? A dollar exchanged for 60 kobo in 1981.

“Nigeria, long known for its flamboyant corruption”, was how the journal, ‘The Historian’, synopsized an article on Nigeria by Steven Pierce five years ago. Because character is smoke, scandals of same hues and similar odour have continued to climb the ladder of time with us. Indeed, the narratives in the cement scandal of fifty years ago would sound so familiar to Nigerians of this day. You remember the oil subsidy scandal and its sad, lurid details. Under the military in 1974/1975, people demanded and got paid demurrage for goods that never existed. In this democracy, people have collected (and may still be collecting) subsidy payments for vessels of petrol that never came here or that never existed.

Our elders say the fear of death does not prevent soldiers from going to war. Tinubu’s friends should tell him to learn to say no to his National Assembly. His success is in saying not yes to whatever is wrong. Great leaders step on toes. I read an article in the Financial Times last year on why saying no may be a virtue. On the very top of that article the author planted a quote: “You can only achieve great things if you know how to say no.” The president presumably saw everything in that budget of transparent sleaze and scandal yet he did not withhold his assent. Tinubu’s office said the big boss closed his eyes to whatever was added to what he presented “in the spirit of democracy which allows give and take.” Yet, last Friday, the president waxed patriotic. He told his visiting party patricians: “As we are fighting corruption, smugglers and old subsidy beneficiaries, they most certainly will fight back. All those who falsified records and became losers with the subsidy removal, they will fight back. But we will defend our people. The treasury belongs to the people, and that sacred trust must not be abused.”

It was so nice hearing the president pronounce “the treasury belongs to the people.” But some carnivores plan to sink 427 boreholes with N82.5 billion public funds and the president endorsed it with his signature. What else is the meaning of complicity?

By Festus Adedayo

Talented filmmaker, Tunde Kelani, recalibrated a popular Yoruba folklore in his famous Agogo Ewo (the forbidden gong) movie. A supremacy battle ensued between Eledumare – God, and Land. The two earthly ancient principalities had gone hunting and jointly killed an Emo rat. When it was time for sharing of the game, both got locked in a duel on who was the eldest and thus should take the chunkiest part of the animal. Armistice could not be found. In unspeakable display of greed, Land eloped with the totality of the ground game. Furious at this despicable treatment, Eledumare relocated from the earth to the firmament. From then onwards, like the proverbial bitter yam whose excesses made it a pariah and ineligible for a pounded yam meal, Land’s excesses led to its total rejection. In sympathetic protest against Land, all that Eledumare created withdrew their bestowals upon the earth. Rain, for instance, sheathed its downpour and plants adamantly refused to sprout, leading to massive hunger in the land. Weeping and wailing sundered the earth, so much that the mammary glands in maidens’ breasts withered unceremoniously.

Abiodun, wife of highly respected and one of the best known, critically acclaimed Yoruba dramatists to have emerged from postcolonial Africa, Duro Ladipo, also known as Moremi or Oya, was the narrator of the folklore. She leads the chorus of the Yoruba incantatory song, Olunrete and her children listeners spice it with the backup, “Aja nrete ja.” Then, Duro-Ladipo delves into an epic poem of the evil machination of a selfish combine of leaders in an imaginary country named Jogbo. These leaders, she narrates, are locked in a conspiratorial gang-up to castrate the land.

It is important to quote the epic poem verbatim for its relevance in today’s Nigeria: “You form yourselves into parties to selfishly deceive us that you would reform Jogbo. In utter contravention of the spirit of your advertised intention, our collective game which we jointly killed has become the booty you share among yourselves. You are embezzlers (egbe apapin) who shave and beautify one part of the head, wickedly leaving the other half unattended. You indulge in splendor but forget the masses of our country.” The epic ends with the narrator enjoining the masses of Jogbo country to be watchful and vigilant.

Last Tuesday, a roiling crisis struck the Nigerian senate like lightning. When it subsided, it revealed the Nigerian parliament’s sinkhole appetite for filthy lucre. Storm petrel and unapologetic northern Nigerian senator, Abdul Ningi, representing Bauchi Central Senatorial District, had stirred his usual hornet’s nest. The recently passed Nigeria’s 2024 budget had undergone serious disparaging from Ningi who claimed it was padded with the sum of N3.7 trillion. As usual, he also attempted to weaponise and whip up Nigeria’s fragile ethnicity sentiment

What Ningi did was to pelt the naked parliament with reeking faeces. The whitewash crew of Senators Solomon Adeola (Chairman, Senate Committee on Appropriation, representing Ogun West) Michael Opeyemi Bamidele of Ekiti Central and Jimoh Ibrahim (Ondo South) immediately sprung up to rescue their pot of soup. As they attempted to dress the parliament in borrowed robes of righteousness, it boomeranged. All that the people saw was naked sanctimony. Unfortunately, their glib talks could not remove the stench from the senate. Rather, they succeeded in making a hero of Ningi, a staunch member of the Apapin Jogbo leaders who, for 17 years, had been part of the rot.

Adeola mellifluously defended the budget. Bamidele delivered one of the most self-serving speeches ever. He went on a binge of ethnicizing a fraternal, group sharing of Nigeria’s budget. He cited the history of gang-ups in the National Assembly and how the senators had been collaborating to undermine the Nigerian people. He then, metaphorically, concluded that it was time for the south under Akpabio to take ownership of the buccaneer sharing of national patrimony that has been going on in the parliament since 1999. Senator Jimoh Ibrahim wanted the police IG to arrest Ningi. He sounded like one suddenly seized by an undertaker mentality. Revelations after the stormy session have shown that, rather than Ningi alone, all the senators who authored that leaflet’s padding should be in the slammer. The deodorants were either too little or too late.

You would imagine that you were listening to Shakespeare’s Mark Antony. Suave, sweet but poisoned chalice.  The senators’ speeches were another “friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears; I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.” Like a whirlwind, they aimed to blurry the vision of Nigerians from seeing the maggots wriggling inside the 2024 Appropriation Act. Adeola was at his glibbest best. Bamidele descended into the primordial. Jimoh Ibrahim spoke like a butcher in the abattoir, seeking companionship in the cadences of disorder and violence. Ningi must be arrested for treason, he sermonised ad-nauseam. The senators later came across as shrouds deliberately spread to cover the over-two-decades pastime of huge sleazes that have become the way of Nigeria’s parliament. You could compare them to well-fed maggots wriggling out of carrion; maggots whitish in colour but enveloped by dark rots. Senate President Godswill Akpabio was also at hand to wield the gavel. That gavel has given vent to vultures’ feast on Nigeria’s resources in the last 24 years of the Fourth Republic.

After suspending Ningi, the triumvirates must have clinked glasses of celebration. They had succeeded in stoning Ningi, the bird which alerted a flock of vultures to their chunky game. The initiate of the fraternity who betrayed the cult by his unholy disclosure on BBC Hausa Service radio had been handed his just recompense. The senators had hardly dropped their wine glasses when, in the manner of a broken water tap, revelations began to burst out with the fury of Anthony Joshua’s punches. Nigerians began to push back with revelations from the budget. Today, Ningi’s allegation of N3.7 trillion padding is proving to be icing on the cake of a massive heist gone burst. As such, the analogy of Jogbo is proving to be the most fitting explanation of the shameful revelations.

The Apapin concept, whose explanation can be found in a hunter’s forest, I explain underleaf: Apapin is a Yoruba hunters’ lingo. It speaks to the earlier Duro-Ladipo narrative of theft and embezzlement. I once espoused, in Hunting buffalo in presidential jet, (15 October, 2023) that dialogues in the forest can explain the unequal nature of our human society, especially between those who are in government, their families and the governed. It can also explain the inequality in the economic systems of the world, capitalism and socialism and the divide between leaders and their followers. In hunting expeditions, the first thing hunters do is to identify what particular forest to go. When they have done this, judging by prior knowledge of the forest or tales told about them, they then identify the particular game that makes that forest its habitat. This could range from antelopes, porcupines, buffalo, fox, to leopards, etc. When a hunting crew embarks on this journey, it divides itself into two. The first set of hunters is one that holds dane guns; they are often about two or three persons. The other crew, usually many, as many as ten, is called the “forest encircling hunting group.” The job of this group is to envelope the identified forest. With sticks, stones and any other objects, they make sufficient noise and discomforting howls to unsettle the animals from their holes. The aim is to get the animals suddenly fleeing and scampering to other parts of the forest. In the process, the animals run into the crew of about three whose guns are readied to fire. Then the escaping animal gets pounded by a fiery volley of bullets which immobilises it and prepares it as a fitting gourmet for dinner.

Game successfully hunted, with blood dripping from it, the hunters then heave the animal, depending on its weight, on their shoulders, on a journey back to the village. It is time for sharing of the meat, the spoil of the hunting expedition; what is called Apapin – literally, kill and share. The crew that encircles the forest, which disrupts the animal from its hole, is decidedly and actually, the one that does the most herculean of the task. It is comparatively less armed and harm could easily come its way on the expedition. It also exerts the greatest energy, having to walk inside thorns, briers and thistles to get the animal scramble off its comfort zone. The other crew merely holds the gun and shoots when the animal attempts to escape. But, in the sharing of the now dismembered animal, the formula does not follow this pattern of contribution to the hunting. The shooting crew gets the meatiest part, ranging from the thighs, the neck to even the torso while the “encircling crew” is given less.

What has been happening in Nigeria’s parliament – Senate and House of Representatives – in the last 24 years can be easily explained by the above long narrative of hunters and apapin. Nigerians and the parliamentarians jointly hunted game. Nigerians were the bush encircling crew. The parliamentarians held the gun, the Appropriation Act. At each budget cycle, when it is time for sharing of our collective game, the parliament deploys licit and illicit tricks to swindle Nigerians. It then goes home with the chunkiest meat of the game, leaving miserable bones behind. One top senator in the 8th Assembly was reputed to always send his foot soldiers to “nondescript” federal commissions, agencies and parastatals to solicit their DGs to ask senate to vote funds for their infrastructural projects. The senator would then fight for the projects’ inclusion in the budget. Immediately after budget is passed, he would send his contractors to execute them. Many of the senators have become stupendously wealthy through this trickster gambit. Yet, the game is our collective patrimony. We are hungry, even lean as skeletons, while Nigerian parliamentarians grow rotund cheeks.

Make no mistake about it: Nigeria’s parliament is a fraternity. A coven of witches. Since the revelations of gross trickery in this year’s budget, how many senators of Peter Obi’s Labour Party, PDP of APGA has resigned their positions, or spoken against the padding menace? None. This is because, in fraternities, it is about group interest and nothing else. While the coven/fraternity is cobbled together by secrecy and blood oaths, the Nigerian parliament may, in reality, not be ruled by blood oaths. However, its own oath is mutual sucking of the blood of Nigeria’s collective heritage. For instance, just as it is done in Nigeria’s parliament, a significant portion of Ogboni fraternity operations are deliberately shielded off non-members. Like it, too, the yearly federal budget rituals are deliberately hidden from ordinary eyes. At the death of Ogboni lords, their corpses are (allegedly) requested by living initiates, allegedly with the brief to sever the hearts off the cavity. Such, many times, brings the dead initiates’ families in conflict with the Ogboni elders, most of whom are always in the dark about the card-carrying membership of their departed ones.

In 1960, Peter Morton-Williams did a locus-classicus on the opacity of Yoruba fraternity and cult organizations in his The Yoruba Ogboni Cult, published in Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, Vol. 30, No. 4, pp. 362-374. An earlier work on this cult which Yoruba call “secret society” was carried out in 1910 by self-taught German ethnologist and archaeologist, Leo Frobenius, whose works influenced Aime Cesaire and Leopold Sedar Senghor’s Negritude. Frobenius discovered the controlling importance of cults in Yoruba religious organizations and promptly became initiated into the Ibadan Ogboni cult. Subsequent similar scholarly works emerged dwelling on what actually interested the Yoruba in esotericism. One of such was Babatunde Lawal’s A Ya gbo, A Ya To: New Perspective on Edan Ogboni, published in African Arts, vol. 28, no. 1, 1995, pp. 36-49, 98-100, Lawal B.’s “Ejiwapo: The dialectics of Twoness in Yoruba Art and Culture,” African Arts, Spring, 2008, and Hans Witte’s Earth and the Ancestors: Ogboni Iconography. The books written by Susanne Wenger, a longstanding German devotee of classical Yoruba spirituality and art, known as Adunni Olorisa, who publicly claimed to have been a member of the Ogboni society, are also strong indicators of this. Wenger’s works, like A Life with the Gods and The Return of the Gods:The Sacred Art of Susanne Wenger, where a picture of hers with Ogboni elders is attached, most likely after her initiation rituals, made direct reference to the inaccessible operations of Ogboni cult, its beliefs and symbolism.

When a group of people are united by a common goal, common purpose and mutual financial aspiration, especially when such aspiration is illegal, they become a fraternity. They then sacrifice everything, anything within their powers for the sustenance of that common purpose. King Sunny Ade, famous Juju maestro, dwelled tangentially on the nocturnal minds of fraternities and witchcrafts in one of his albums in the 1970s. He sang that the witch who got drenched by a previous night rainfall will suffer the tyranny of non-disclosure. Where does she tell neighbours she was coming from when the downpour occurred? On an Arise television programme last week, when confronted with details of the opaque nature of Senator Ningi’s suspension from the parliament, Enyinaya Abaribe latched on to an Igbo aphorism for explanation. The palmwine tapper does not say everything he sees on top of the tree. The palmwine tapper’s non-disclosure is against the spirit of a democratic open society. It is regrettably the code of operation in the Nigerian parliament.

As antithetical to modernity as it may sound, the logic of fraternities can be grounded in and corroborated by the history of blood oaths in Africa. Our forefathers’ scamper to seek existential explanations from Ogboni, witches, wizards’ cults and fraternities are poignant reminders of the existence of the sustenance of group interests. This is done through the Aboriginal Ogboni Fraternity or the Reformed Ogboni Fraternity, with their esoteric orders. In this same vein, the Nigerian parliament has proven to be a reincarnate of those sacred groves of fraternities. It holds the executive by the jugular as the constitution empowers it to do. It can castrate and relieve the executive of its office. Since the executive too has dinosaur-sized skeletons in its cupboard, it easily becomes a marionette in the hands of this fraternity. What transpired before, during and after the Tuesday stormy session leading to the suspension of Senator Ningi is a testament to this.

Abdul Ningi violated one of the sacred codes of fraternities and he had to be disciplined by the chief priests of the fraternity. In covens, public disclosure of sacred tenets is equal to treason. Where we copied this democratic system from, Akpabio and all the dramatis personae of this evil attempt to filch Nigeria’s collective wealth would tender their letters of resignation. And walk out of the Three Arms Zone, shamefaced and straight to a jailhouse. Those who scooped maggots into the 2024 Appropriation Act should face the music. The wind has blown. And we have seen the rump of self-centered buccaneers.

Festus Adedayo is an Ibadan-based journalist. 

By Chidi Anselm Odinkalu

On 27 February, 2024, Nigeria’s National Judicial Institute (NJI) in Abuja opened a continuing education course for judges. The opening featured an address by the Chief Justice of Nigeria (CJN), Olukayode Ariwoola, who invited the participants to eschew “unethical conduct that could expose the judiciary to ridicule.” Beneath his text, it seemed as if the Chief Justice desired to warn the participants to stay away from interfering with a brief that he has chosen to make entirely his own. Under his watch, judicial appointments in Nigeria have become corruptly farcical.

The fortnight before this address, it emerged that the CJN’s daughter-in-law, Oluwakemi, was at the top of a list of 12 nominees to fill judicial vacancies in the High Court of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT). In the preceding six months, he had also appointed his son, Kayode Jr., as a judge of the Federal High Court; elevated his nephew, Lateef, to become a Justice of the Court of Appeal; and made his own blood brother, Adebayo, the auditor of the National Judicial Council (NJC), which he chairs in his capacity as the CJN. With this CJN’s retirement from office due on 22 August 2024, the concerted effort to annoint his daughter-in-law to the bench would presumably showcase his credentials for gender equity within his family. Let’s not digress though.

That these appointments have occurred when they did is no coincidence. They are spoils of office for the CJN. Nor is it any coincidence that the same list that proposes the CJN’s daughter-in-law for appointment as a judge of the High Court of the FCT also contains the names of the daughters of the Chief Judge of the FCT, Hussaini Baba-Yusuf; and of Ariwoola’s predecessor in the office of the CJN, Ibrahim Muhammad Tanko.

As a federal institution, however, section 14(3) of Nigeria’s constitution requires that appointments to the High Court of the FCT “shall be carried out in such a manner as to reflect the federal character of Nigeria and the need to promote national unity, and also to command national loyalty, thereby ensuring that there shall be no predominance of persons from a few State or from a few ethnic or other sectional groups in that Government or in any of its agencies.” If these nominations in favour of the children of the Chief Judge of the FCT and the CJN were to be implemented, then their respective states, Kogi and Oyo, will have three judges on the bench of the court while a state like Ebonyi would have none.

It requires no original insight to understand that this kind of outcome is hardly compatible with the requirements of Federal Character. Sadly, the senior judges who are supposed to protect this high constitutional value are the people willfully endangering it.

Last month, Azubuike Oko, a lawyer from Ebonyi State, sued accusing the CJN and the Chief Judge of the FCT High Court of unconscionable insider-dealing in judicial appointments. In response to the suit, the CJN and his satrap in the FCT High Court did not bother to confront the serious allegations levelled against them. Instead, they sought to disqualify Mr. Oko from litigating the issue by arguing that he lacked the standing to sue, claiming, contrary to a long line of relevant jurisprudence, that he had not suffered any personal injury.

On 15 March, the Federal High Court in Abuja presided over by Inyang Ekwo, upheld these shameful objections by the CJN and the Chief Judge of the FCT High Court. According to the judge, in order to establish standing to question this high racketeering in judicial office by the two officials responsible for stopping it, Mr. Oko needed to show “how the appointment being considered by the defendants has affected him as a person…. This, he would have done, by showing that he applied to be considered by the defendants for appointment but he was ‘routinely excluded and marginalized.” How he was supposed to show do this in a situation in which the CJN and the heads of courts who work under him will not allow a fair and credible process of judicial recruitment, only the judge can tell.

This is the latest in a line of cases in which senior judges use their offices to steal judicial appointments for their children or mistresses and then use lower court judges to make it legal. In 2020, the Justice Reform Project (JRP), an entity comprising several Senior Advocates of Nigeria (SANs), sued to restrain former President, Muhammadu Buhari, from going forward with the appointment of 21 persons to the bench of the High Court of the FCT who, according to the JRP, “failed to meet the mandatory requirements under the NJC Procedural Rules.” That round of hires, like the latest, was bounty for judicial insiders. On 30 September, 2020, Okon Abang, then a judge of the Federal High Court, ruled that the “JRP lacked the legal right to challenge the NJC’s actions and that the National Industrial Court and not the Federal High Court was the proper court to approach as it was an employment-related case.”

The appeal by the JRP against this judgment has been pending since 24 November, 2020. Meanwhile, for his efforts, Okon Abang got elevated to the Court of Appeal in October 2023 along with the nephew of the Chief Justice.

The JRP are not the only SANs openly scandalized by what the CJN and his colleagues are doing with judicial appointments. In January 2024, seven SANS from Kogi State sued the State Chief Judge, Josiah Majebi, and the Kogi State Judicial Service Commission, alleging egregious perversions in the nominations into high court vacancies in the state, including the nomination of a wife of the then outgoing governor of the State, Amina, whose only claim to the nomination appeared to be her marital relationship with the then incumbent in the office of the Governor. The SANs effectively claimed that the effort by the Chief Judge of Kogi State and the Judicial Service which he chairs, to nominate Amina Bello as a judge of the Kogi High Court was meant as a parting gift to the state governor, who was term-limited, making it clear that this was not a lawful or relevant factor in the exercise of powers of judicial appointment.

While this case is pending, the NJC has suspended the process of appointment of new judges in Kogi State. In neighbouring Edo State, however, the appointment of new judges is suspended by the ego of Governor Godwin Obaseki. In June 2023, the NJC approved the appointment of eight new judges to the High Court of Edo State. Over eight months later, the Governor has refused to consent to their appointment or to swear them in. Adaze Emwanta, a former Commissioner in Governor Obaseki’s Cabinet, sued late last year seeking to compel the Governor to formalize these appointments.

A manifestly unwilling Governor Obaseki has chosen instead to use the case as his excuse for refusing to appoint them. While the case pends, these judicial nominees waste. Because they have been nominated as judges, they can no longer undertake legal work to subsist or earn. But because they have not yet been formally appointed as judges, they cannot be paid in that role. In effect, Governor Obaseki does more than merely choose not to appoint them as judges. He has chosen to destitute them and ruin their lives.

While all these scandals unfold, the leadership of the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA), under the presidency of Yakubu Maikyau, SAN, has chosen to the path of eloquent silence. The president of the NBA is a member of the ational Judicial Council and he is entitled to nominate three other representatives of the Association into that body. For the record, the stated motto of the NBA supposedly is “promoting the rule of law.”

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