By Lillian Okenwa
For more than fifteen years, Nigeria has confronted terrorism principally as a security challenge. Public debate has revolved around military deployments, intelligence gathering, weapons procurement, casualty figures, rescue operations and the search for stronger operational strategies. Governments have responded with new commands, expanded military campaigns, increased security budgets and fresh legislation. The emphasis is understandable. Armed violence demands an armed response, and no nation can preserve its territorial integrity without capable security institutions.
Military operations, however, represent only one part of the constitutional machinery of the State. Every successful counter-insurgency campaign eventually reaches a stage where lasting progress depends less on the territory recovered than on the institutions capable of governing and protecting it. Communities devastated by violence require functioning schools, accessible courts, reliable policing, effective prosecution, compensation for victims and public agencies that command confidence long after military operations have ended. Without those institutions, tactical victories seldom mature into lasting peace.
Curiously, one institution that has shaped Nigeria’s constitutional history for decades has occupied only a marginal place in that national conversation. While security agencies, political leaders, intelligence experts and military strategists continue to dominate discussions on terrorism, the organised legal profession has remained largely outside the wider debate on how constitutional law itself can strengthen the country’s long-term response to organised violence.
This observation does not diminish the work of the criminal justice system. Terrorism suspects have been investigated, prosecuted and convicted under the Terrorism (Prevention and Prohibition) Act and other applicable laws. Prosecutors have discharged their responsibilities, defence counsel have represented accused persons and the courts have determined criminal liability in accordance with due process. Those proceedings remain indispensable to the administration of justice.
They do not, however, exhaust the possibilities offered by the law.
Across constitutional democracies, some of the most enduring institutional reforms have emerged not from executive directives but from carefully prepared litigation that compelled governments to fulfil obligations already imposed by constitutions and statutes. Judicial decisions have reshaped policing, prison administration, electoral governance, environmental protection, public accountability and victims’ rights without requiring judges to assume executive authority. The courts simply insisted that public institutions remain answerable to the law under which they exercise power.
Nigeria’s campaign against terrorism presents a comparable constitutional opportunity.
National debate has understandably concentrated on troop deployments, intelligence failures, negotiations with armed groups, rehabilitation programmes and criminal prosecutions. Those issues deserve sustained attention, yet they leave largely unexplored another question that reaches beyond individual criminal trials. Has the law itself been deployed as strategically as the military campaign it is intended to complement?
Criminal prosecutions determine whether particular individuals committed criminal offences. Strategic constitutional litigation asks a different question altogether: whether public institutions charged with protecting citizens are complying with the legal obligations imposed upon them by the Constitution and by legislation enacted in the public interest. The objective is not to substitute judicial authority for executive responsibility, but to strengthen the institutional framework within which that responsibility is exercised.
For a country that has lived with insurgency, mass abductions and organised violence for well over a decade, remarkably little attention has been devoted to public interest litigation as a means of improving institutional performance. Courts cannot direct military operations, pursue armed groups through forests or rescue hostages from captivity. They possess another power that is no less important in a constitutional democracy. They can require public authorities to discharge legal duties, explain decisions affecting fundamental rights and remain accountable for the exercise of powers entrusted to them by law.
Few professions understand that constitutional discipline better than the legal profession. Nigerian lawyers have repeatedly stood at decisive moments in the country’s democratic development, challenging military decrees, defending political prisoners, protecting judicial independence and expanding the frontiers of civil liberty through strategic litigation. Those interventions did more than resolve individual disputes. They strengthened institutions and helped define the constitutional character of the Republic.
The spread of terrorism presents another moment of constitutional consequence. It also presents an opportunity for the organised Bar to consider whether one of the gravest threats to Nigeria’s constitutional order has received the sustained legal engagement it deserves.
That question extends beyond criminal defence, prosecution or public commentary. It reaches into the broader responsibility of the legal profession to use the Constitution not merely as a document to be interpreted after crises occur, but as an instrument capable of strengthening the institutions expected to prevent those crises from becoming permanent features of national life.
Whether that opportunity has been fully explored is the question to which the next part turns.
