I have spent time on the Third Floor of the United Nations Headquarters in New York, where the press corps works. It is not a gentle place. The journalists there are seasoned professionals drawn from every region of the world: people who have reported wars, corruption scandals, and the fall of governments. They are interested in facts, not impressed by titles.

They ask the question behind the question, and they do not move until they have an answer. When a Permanent Representative walks into that building to speak for 220 million people, the world watches. And so, on behalf of those 220 million people, I am watching too.

I am watching with grief.

Last week, President Bola Tinubu appointed Senator Jimoh Ibrahim to New York as Nigeria’s Permanent Representative to the UN. The congratulatory messages arrived immediately, as they always do in Nigeria, where appointment is confused with achievement and proximity to power as evidence of character.

The Ooni of Ife called him the right man for the job. Former Senate President Ahmad Lawan called him one of the finest Nigerians he had worked with. Governor Dapo Abiodun said something about a “distinguished career.”

I invite these men to examine the record.

Ibrahim’s business career is not one of creation or upliftment.  It is of acquisition and collapse. That is why, for years, his name has circulated in connection with financial disputes, asset issues, indebtedness, investigations, forgery, tax allegations, embezzlement, money laundering, and massive debt recovery proceedings.

Consider: NICON Airways: acquired, collapsed, approximately 300 workers left without wages from May 2007. The National Industrial Court awarded those workers N1.5 billion in 2013. Ibrahim appealed. The Court of Appeal dismissed the appeal in 2017.

In 2024, a statement from former staff representatives confirmed that N808.7 million in salary arrears remained unpaid, along with N8.1 million in pension contributions that had been deducted from workers’ salaries but never remitted. Nearly two decades later, that money—their money, taken from their wages—has cruelly not reached them.

Air Nigeria: taken over in 2010, collapsed in 2012. The National Assembly’s own Joint Committee on Aviation stated on the record that the airline was grounded because Ibrahim diverted a N35.5 billion government intervention loan—guaranteed by UBA, funded by the Bank of Industry—into his family company, NICON Investment Limited.

His Finance Director, John Nnorom, a qualified accountant who resigned and was then prosecuted on Ibrahim’s initiative, submitted detailed evidence to a Senate committee in 2016, including the acquisition of Energy Bank of Ghana with Afrexim loan funds registered not in Air Nigeria’s name but in Ibrahim’s personal name. He was later discharged and acquitted. The Senate’s 2014 resolution directing the CBN Governor to recover the aviation funds from Ibrahim was never enforced.

NICON Insurance: acquired, gutted. Former managers say Ibrahim fired 85 per cent of staff, and the company went from national market dominance to less than one per cent of its pre-privatisation client base. In 2016, the Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS) sealed its offices for N182.7 million in unremitted taxes.

FIRS filed a 10-count criminal charge against Ibrahim personally—not his company, him—for five years of unpaid taxes totalling N4.86 billion and for producing and presenting forged Tax Clearance Certificates to renew expatriate quota positions for 30 persons. That charge sits in the Federal High Court in Abuja.

In November 2020, the Asset Management Corporation of Nigeria seized 12 named properties from Ibrahim over a N69.4 billion debt. AMCON said publicly that Ibrahim and his companies had been “recalcitrant and unenthusiastic” about repayment despite multiple exit opportunities. The court filing—Suit No. FHL/L/CL/776/2016—was filed in 2016. It took four years to obtain the seizure order. How much of that N69.4 billion has been recovered?

Remember the famous NewsWatch magazine?  Until a court stopped him, Ibrahim was the one who tried to rip it out of the soil and throw it away.

In New York, Aersale Inc. dragged Ibrahim to the US District Court, claiming over $7.68 million for breach of aircraft lease agreements in which he had signed as personal guarantor. In 2012, EFCC agents interrogated him for hours; sources at the time reported he had burned documents before the interrogation and sustained visible injuries in the process.

These are the credentials of the man being promoted by Aso Rock to represent Nigeria at the UN.

Now consider the environment. The Nigerian Mission’s anaemic website is a monument to institutional abandonment. Its most recent UNGA session archive stops at the 72nd session, which ended in 2018. There are no recent events or records, and no evidence of a functioning communications operation.

The building, just one block from the UN, is, in effect, a ghost. Into this ghost is Nigeria thrusting an operative who will abandon hundreds of unpaid workers, billions in court-ordered debts, criminal charges, a burned archive of documents, and the wreckage of at least three institutions that Nigerians trusted.  What message will he bring to the world: that he represents Nigerians?

The timing makes it worse. Ibrahim travels to the media capital of the world that already knows Bola Tinubu by name.  Sadly, that is not from reporting great success on the UN podium of conquering insecurity in Nigeria or in implementing the Sustainable Development Goals.  Instead, it is from the federal courthouse in Chicago, where the drug scandal of 1993 is a matter of permanent public record and in a country where Tinubu is begging to hide his records because they would do him “irreparable harm.”  International journalists know about these ghosts.  And when they want to ask about them, who will answer for Nigeria?

Apparently: Jimoh Ibrahim.

This is not governance. It is the re-circulation of embarrassment. It is what happens when a government has contempt for its own people, when it trusts that outrage will not last, that the congratulatory messages will drown out the record.

Ibrahim’s appointment is not a diplomatic strategy. It is a confession: that in the grotesque estimation of this administration, Nigeria’s seat at the world’s most important table is a reward to be bestowed, not a trust to be honoured.

I have written previously about the comatose state of the Nigerian Mission to the UN. I write again now, with the same outrage—and something heavier than outrage. I write with grief. The grief of a country that keeps asking its citizens to lower their self-esteem. The grief of workers in Abuja waiting for wages since 2007. The grief of a continent that could be represented with distinction.

Only last week, in front of an international TV audience, presidential adviser Daniel Bwala infamously demonstrated the pain and humiliation of a compromised operative being ruthlessly disrobed.  Several of the ambassadors that the Tinubu government is currently trying to shoehorn into relevance are known to be of the same mould of hypocrisy and charlatanism. Nigerians are being systematically desensitised to shame by a government with a sense neither of smell nor of vision.

This is an insult in real time.  It is irreparable harm to Nigeria.

Sonala Olumhense

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

The thought returned to me during a quiet moment of reflection after signing off on the maiden edition of The Sunday Stew. It triggered the memory of a conversation from many years ago with Professor Jibril Aminu, the elder statesman who passed away on 5th June 2025, in Abuja at the age of 85. In the days following his death, many tributes recalled his intellectual brilliance. Those who knew him in his student years often spoke of his exceptional performance at the medical school of the University of Ibadan. I was told that he had set an academic record there that remained unmatched for many years. Whether that record still stands today I cannot say with certainty, but his reputation for academic brilliance has certainly endured.

My awareness of him, however, did not begin in medical circles. I cannot remember precisely when his name first entered my consciousness, but I do know that he became Minister of Education the year preceding my admission as a student at the University of Calabar. A year after he was appointed minister, a nationwide controversy erupted over the location of a cross at the Christian chapel of the University of Ibadan. The debate stirred strong opinions across campuses and in the wider public space, reflecting the delicate intersection of faith, identity, and public institutions in Nigeria.

Like many students of that era, I followed the debate closely. His name surfaced repeatedly in the national conversation.

But my earliest personal recollection of someone speaking about him with familiarity came a little later.

It was during our NYSC orientation camp in Zaria, Kaduna State. In the first days of camp, friendships formed quickly, as they often do when young graduates from different parts of the country suddenly find themselves sharing the same uncertain future. One of the friends I made was Sanusi Maiwada, who had studied agriculture or agricultural engineering — I can’t remember precisely — at the University of Sokoto, now Usmanu Danfodiyo University.

We spoke often about what life after national service might look like. Opportunities, ambitions, the usual uncertainties that follow graduation. At one point during one of those conversations, Sanusi mentioned casually that after camp he intended to travel to Lagos to see Professor Jibril Aminu about his future plans. I remember being struck by the ease with which he spoke the name — as though access to a figure of such stature was not unimaginable. This is because at the time we were at the orientation camp, Aminu had left office as minister but remained one of the truly influential Nigerians of the day.

 ​I felt Sanusi Maiwada was very lucky to be associated with a figure of such formidable stature: an ex-minister who remained deeply consequential in the national scheme of things.

 That brief exchange stayed with me. I lost contact with Sanusi Maiwada after NYSC and never learned what became of his plans. But the moment lingered. It was another small thread that kept Professor Aminu present in my awareness long before I would encounter him personally.

Years later, in 2012, that meeting finally happened. I was the Bureau Chief of BusinessDay in Abuja when my colleague, Tony Ailemen, arranged an interview with Professor Aminu at his Asokoro residence. By then, he had left active public life, having held a succession of roles that exposed him to the breadth of governance and academia: Executive Secretary of the National Universities Commission (NUC), Vice Chancellor, University of Maiduguri; Minister of Education, Ambassador to the United States, and Senator of the Federal Republic. He had seen Nigeria from the corridors of policy and politics, and he had seen the world — engaging with foreign leaders, international institutions, and global challenges.

That meeting revealed a man whose insight was shaped not by speculation, but by decades of experience in public service and leadership at the highest levels. He remained a widely respected figure in the then-ruling People’s Democratic Party (PDP) and commanded considerable regard in his home state of Adamawa. Yet despite his stature, he carried his perspective lightly: measured, observant, and quietly piercing.

During that interview, against the backdrop of global natural disasters — Hurricane Katrina in the United States, famine in Ethiopia, the harshness of the Sahara Desert, earthquakes in Haiti, Japan, and Turkey, and typhoons in the Philippines — he made a remark that has lingered with me ever since: while other nations contend with nature’s fury, we in Nigeria, largely spared from these hazards, somehow manage to create disasters for ourselves.

Delivered quietly, almost conversationally, the observation was unmistakably clear.

Across the world, geography dictates many of the challenges nations must confront. Japan lives with earthquakes powerful enough to reshape coastlines, as seen in the 2011 Tōhoku Earthquake and Tsunami which triggered the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. In the Caribbean, the 2010 Haiti Earthquake reduced entire sections of Port-au-Prince to rubble. More recently, the 2023 Turkey–Syria Earthquakes flattened neighbourhoods across southern Turkey and northern Syria. Across the Pacific, the Philippines regularly braces against storms like Typhoon Haiyan — among the most powerful tropical cyclones ever recorded.

In Africa, the famine in Ethiopia in the 1980s claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, while the harshness of the Sahara Desert shapes both the lives and survival strategies of communities and countries across the Sahel. In these cases, nature imposes hardship, yet human ingenuity and adaptation often determine survival.

 In Nigeria, by contrast, the crises we face are largely self-imposed, avoidable, and yet persist due to governance failures and neglect. These are nations and regions where nature itself periodically rebels; Nigeria, in contrast, faces no such geological hostility.

We sit outside the world’s major earthquake belts. We have no active volcanoes threatening cities. Hurricanes rarely form along our coastline. Nature, in many respects, has been generous to Nigeria.

Yet our country often operates under the shadow of permanent disaster. Not because the earth trembles beneath us, but because we repeatedly create tremors ourselves.

Our most persistent crises are not natural. They are manufactured: kidnapping, insurgency, banditry, corruption, collapsing infrastructure, policy inconsistency, and institutional fragility have become recurring emergencies in our country. None of these emerged from the soil. They emerged from decisions.

Consider insecurity. Across large parts of our country, farmers abandon fertile land out of fear. Highways that should connect markets instead generate anxiety. Communities negotiate daily life under the shadow of armed groups. This is not the work of nature. It is the consequence of institutional weakness and leadership failure.

The same pattern appears in infrastructure. Countries prone to earthquakes enforce strict engineering standards because the ground beneath them cannot be trusted. Nigeria faces no seismic threat. Yet buildings collapse with disturbing frequency. The earth did not move. Standards did.

Even flooding, one of the few natural hazards we occasionally experience, often reveals deeper governance failures. Blocked drainage systems, chaotic urban planning, and construction on waterways transform ordinary rainfall into catastrophe. The rain falls everywhere. But disaster follows where planning disappears.

The observation Professor Aminu made that afternoon still lingers. It was a simple remark, delivered almost in passing. Yet the longer one reflects on it, the more unsettling its truth becomes. Nigeria is not threatened by earthquakes. We are not battered by hurricanes. Nature, in many respects, has been kind to us. Yet we often behave like a nation permanently under disaster.

In the next edition of The Sunday Stew, we will take a deeper look at this paradox — examining, one by one, some of the most significant self-inflicted and man-made crises that continue to hold the country back. Because if our greatest problems are indeed created by us, then understanding them clearly may be the first step toward finally overcoming them.

Don’t miss it.

Stay seasoned.  See you next Sunday.

•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], +234(0)8053069436

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

By Chidi Anselm Odinkalu

When the then Chief of Army Staff, Ibrahim Babangida – a two-star general – turned the page on the military regime of Muhammadu Buhari in the last week of August 1985, political opposition was largely decimated in Nigeria. A mixture of brute force, regime nihilism, and carefully targeted lynching sold as a fight against rampant corruption had combined to quieten the coalition of restiveness comprising the press; organized labour and students; and politicians.

The only active constituency of opposition left were professionals, comprising some doctors in the Nigerian Medical Association (NMA) and lawyers in the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA). For Ibrahim Babangida, his route to regime longevity lay in co-opting both. From the medical profession, he persuaded Olikoye Ransome-Kuti, a respected pediatrician with activist pedigree, to become his Health Minister. Professor Ransome-Kuti was the elder brother of rebel musician, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti. Their other brother, Bekolari Ransome-Kuti, was one of the leaders of the protesting medical doctors.

The NBA was by far the most effective of the critical outposts in the country but it embodied two mutually contradictory camps. The president of the association at the time was Bola Ajibola, an Egba blueblood, who led the association in articulating activist opposition against the default of the Buhari regime to military tribunals in defiance of liberal notions of fair hearing before civilian judges. As “Special Military Tribunals increasingly replaced law courts”, Prince Bola Ajibola emerged as the unlikely face and voice of a constituency of enlightened values.

In opposition to Ajibola from within the Bar, a former national Public Secretary of the NBA, Chief Gani Fawehinmi, threw his considerable support behind the campaign of the Buhari regime against what was widely perceived as plunder by the civilian politicians whom it overthrew. For Gani, radical measures were required to course correct from the path to which the politicians had set the country. As far as he was concerned, the steps by the Buhari regime were consistent with that and deserved support.

This high-profile tension within the NBA on such an existential issue of regime survival added spice to the moment and, somewhat ironically, bolstered the association’s public standing. Ibrahim Babangida could not resist the allure of the gold-dust of the NBA for his mission of regime usurpation.

In one deft move, he decided to decapitate the association by making Bola Ajibola an offer to be his Attorney-General of the Federation and Justice Minister at a time that he knew Ajibola could not resist. After all, it was an invitation to undo the mess for which he led the NBA to an irretrievable falling out with Muhammadu Buhari. Ebele Nwokoye, the first Vice-President of the association served out the remainder of Ajibola’s tenure before being elected president for a two-year tenure until August 1987.

For the next six years, Bola Ajibola held sway in one of the most consequential tenures in the office of the Attorney-General of the Federation and Minister of Justice. When Taslim Elias died in August 1991 while serving as a judge of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague, Babangida nominated Ajibola to serve out the remainder of the term of Judge Elias. To replace Ajibola as Attorney-General of the Federation and Minister of Justice, he returned and captured yet another president of the NBA, Clement Akpamgbo.

In succession to Clement Akpamgbo, Priscilla Kuye, then first Vice-President of the association, stepped up, becoming the first (and thus far the only) female president in the history of the NBA. The association was due to elect a new president the following year and Priscilla Kuye threw her hat into the ring for an elective mandate as president in her own right. It did not materialize.

The 1992 conference in Port Harcourt, Rivers State, at which the association was to conduct the election disintegrated in disarray and pandemonium amidst fisticuffs, ex parte court orders and allegations of wielded firearms. It was the year before the election that was supposed to exit the military from power in Nigeria.

A secret post-mortem convened by the senior-most surviving past-president of the NBA at the time, Frederick Rotimi Alade (FRA) Williams, identified several structural factors in the crisis, including polarization in the association, increased (political and security) interest in the office of NBA president, and “external influence”. Among the immediate causes, the report – which was never officially published – listed “too many participants” and “over-use of money” in the contest for the NBA presidency as well as what it called “election fever.”

Underlying the recommendations of the report was a sense that participation in the leadership elections of the association should be a privilege of longevity and networks at the Bar not a right of all members. At that time, there were fewer than 20,000 lawyers – both living and dead –  on the Roll of lawyers in Nigeria. It advised the NBA to consider a system described as “assured succession” or “hierarchical ascendancy” in which leadership would circulate among a magic circle of male, senior lawyers.

As the association resumed life six years later, participation in elections in the NBA evolved from a mass membership entitlement to a privilege of a small circle of delegates. These comprised the elected officers of the association, members of the National Executive Committee, selected delegates representing the branches pro-rated to the official size of each branch, as well as Life Benchers and Senior Advocates of Nigeria, SANs. The Association felt captured.

One decade later, the movement to open up elections in the NBA to every member caught fire on the back of new opportunities created by the digital revolution. It was increasingly a matter of when not if. In 2015, Augustine Alegeh, the president of the association, achieved a constitutional amendment mandating digital elections based on universal suffrage for every member of the association who meets the criterion of paying the annual Bar Practising Fees.

Since then, elections in the NBA have become even more intensely contested and more controversial too. A population used to opaque, backroom deals and tactile politics showed up as deeply suspicious of elections decided in the ether. A segment of senior lawyers in the association have since advocated a return to the discredited delegate or indirect system of leadership election and has gone as far as to blame the “so called universal suffrage” for  “indiscipline at the bar.”

2026 is another election year in the NBA. Already, two different judges of the High Court of Oyo State in Ibadan have issued orders restraining the NBA’s electoral processes.

One suspiciously audacious court order among the two effectively requires the association to only recognize one aspirant for the contest for the presidency of the NBA, on the ground that he is the “consensus candidate” of a body called “Egbe Amofin”, a society of lawyers of Yoruba descent. His name is Muyiwa Akinboro and his denial that he is desperately shopping for a judge to impose him as president of the NBA in 2026 increasingly rings hollow. By a rotational arrangement written into the NBA constitution, the presidency of the association this year will come from the old Western Nigeria.

There are a few problems with this order though. The “Egbe Amofin” is unknown to the constitutional organs of the NBA. Relatively few voters in the association belong to the body. The order of the High Court in Ibadan will subsist until 15 April, by which date the association will be struggling for time to accomplish an incident-free transition.

The idea of a president of the NBA imposed by order of a high court judge with no regard for the franchise of the members is no longer such a far-fetched proposition. Of course, that will guarantee an end to the NBA as we know it.

The points of coincidence with the Port Harcourt debacle of 1992 are tantalizing. It is the year preceding a national election in 2027. Externalities are very palpable. A woman is the ring as a leading candidate for the presidency of the association. Once again, court orders are in the picture, essentially to frustrate her. It may not be 1992 all over again but it sure does feel like, for the NBA, the more things change, the more they remain the same.

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

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