Outspoken law teacher and Chair, Board of Directors, International Refugee Rights Initiative (IRRI), Prof. Chidi Odinkalu, on Thursday, remarked that anyone who cared enough to criticise the judiciary is concerned about its state of affairs.
Asserting that what portends real danger is when citizens stop taking and begin to ignore the judiciary, Odinkalu, who was the keynote speaker at the 4th C.O. Anah SAN, memorial colloquium said, “The tendency to regard as adversaries or enemies (I have got tired of counting death threats over this matter) those who offer critical feedback on the judiciary in Nigeria is self-defeating.
“Citizens owe the judges and the courts a duty of candour; for there is something more damaging and more adversarial than being critical of the judiciary in Nigeria; it is ignoring it entirely. May that day never come.”
According to the one-time of Chair of the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), “In Nigeria, the integrity of the judicial system, which underpins the guarantee of fair trial, is no longer a given.
“As evidence of this, of the six Chief Justices of Nigeria since 2011 preceding the current incumbent, only two – Aloma Mukhtar and Mahmud Mohammed – served out their tenures without controversy.
“Of the last three CJNs preceding the current one, two were effectively fired in circumstances that tarnished the judiciary institutionally, and the penultimate scandalized the judiciary with a compulsive disposition towards hawking judicial appointments in a bazaar of undisguised insider-dealing that usually was accompanied by a whiff of political, filial, or genital relations.”
Read the full text of Odinkalu’s paper below.
Anah-Memorial-Colloquium-May-20251
