The Judicial Route to Anarchy, By Olusegun Adeniyi

I am not much into movies but there are some I can watch numerous times without being bored. Two stand out: ‘The Godfather’ and ‘Titanic’. In the latter, the scene I consider most memorable is where the captain informs the ship owner that they had hit an iceberg. “From this moment, no matter what we do, the Titanic will founder,” the captain said rather solemnly. But the message was lost on the ship owner. Having put so much faith in his own propaganda, he retorted: “But this ship cannot sink.” Without missing a beat, the captain responded: “She is made of iron, Sir. I assure you she can. And she will. It is a mathematical certainty.”

I recall the foregoing as a warning against the background of the shenanigans that daily emerge from our courts. If Nigerians come to regard the judiciary as an extension of the political arena and the institution loses its credibility in the process, then we shall have arrived at a destination from which there is no easy return. That destination is anarchy.

I have written several columns about the corrosive effects of this state of affairs and the danger posed by some Judges http://www.thisdaylive.com/index.php/2018/01/04/when-judges-imperil-democracy/. But what is unfolding across our judiciary right now deserves special attention, because it threatens the very foundation upon which our democracy rests. Ordinarily, the law court should stand as the ultimate guardian of the rule of law. But in Nigeria today, the law court is fast becoming a convenient tool in the hands of desperate politicians who are ever out to secure an advantage, however unjust.

When Nigerian politicians go to court these days, they do not file suits to seek justice. They file them to create confusion, buy time, destabilise opponents, and manufacture legitimacy through judicial pronouncement rather than popular mandate. Forum shopping, the practice of filing identical or related cases in different courts to secure a favourable ruling, has become so routine that it barely raises eyebrows. Yet when courts of coordinate jurisdiction issue contradictory orders on the same matter, as has happened repeatedly in the crises engulfing the African Democratic Congress (ADC), Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and Labour Party (LP), citizens are left unsure as to which faction to recognize and what authority to respect. This is the raw material for anarchy.

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In the past few weeks alone, many of our political parties have been reduced to courtroom exhibits. Their internal affairs have been litigated with such frequency and ferocity that politicians now spend more time before judges than before voters. For instance, the ADC has been trapped in a carousel of conflicting court orders over its leadership since the moment former Senate President David Mark assumed the party’s chairmanship. One court says Mark is in charge; another says he is not. The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has swung like a pendulum, removing names from its portal one week and restoring them the next, all in obedience to whichever judicial directive happens to be most recent.

Section 83 of the Electoral Act 2026 was supposed to address at least part of this problem. It stipulates, in clear terms, that “no court in Nigeria shall entertain jurisdiction over any suit or matter pertaining to the internal affairs of a political party.” The provision was designed precisely to prevent the kind of judicial overreach we are witnessing. Yet barely months after the law’s passage, courts are already entertaining suits that plainly fall within the prohibition. Lawyers are filing them. Judges are granting them. And the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA), which should be the profession’s conscience, has been left to issue statements that carry moral authority but no enforcement power.

In a most recent decision, the Supreme Court attempted to draw a principled line: Courts should generally refrain from interfering in internal party affairs. But with a proviso: Intervention is justified where the dispute involves legal rights arising from statutory compliance. That is a reasonable distinction in theory. In practice, however, it has become a loophole through which every ambitious politician drives a convoy of suits. Any dispute, however, trivially internal, can be dressed up as a question of statutory compliance or constitutional interpretation. And once the suit is filed, the damage is done. Interim orders are sought, parallel proceedings are initiated, and the party in question is thrown into paralysis.

What we are witnessing in Nigeria today has been aptly described as a shift from “ballot democracy” to “bench democracy”—a situation in which political outcomes are increasingly determined not by the votes of citizens but by the rulings of judges, often procured through dubious means. This is dangerous for reasons that go beyond the immediate chaos it produces. When elections can be overturned, party structures dismantled, and leadership installed through litigation rather than a democratic process, voters lose faith in the entire system. If your vote can be negated by a court order secured in a jurisdiction you have never heard of, by a litigant you have never met, why bother voting at all? This is how democracies die, through the slow, deliberate hollowing out of institutions by the very elites who swear to uphold them. Some of us have watched this movie before.

Considering that we live in a country where collective amnesia has become an ideology, let me offer a refresher here. Although Nigerians believed at the time (and rightly so) that General Ibrahim Babangida was only looking for a convenient excuse by blaming the judiciary for the presidential election annulment 33 years ago, many observers also knew he had a point. I once shared my experience of what happened on 16th June 1993 and its worth rehashing. On that day, I was at the defunct National Electoral Commission (NEC) headquarters in Abuja with Mr. Sam Omatseye—then at Concord Press but now Chairman of The Nation’s editorial Board. It was Omatseye’s birthday and we were in a very buoyant mood as the results of the presidential election were coming in with our boss, the late Bashorun M.K.O. Abiola, leading by a comfortable margin. Then we got a shocker: The NEC Chairman, Professor Humphrey Nwosu announced the suspension of the results in difference to an injunction from an Abuja High Court.

With this development, I quickly rushed to the office to call the Social Democratic Party (SDP) Presidential running mate, Ambassador Babagana Kingibe, who had asked me to provide him updates regarding the official results. When I told him that NEC had just issued a statement suspending the result, he asked that I come to Transcorp (then NICON-NOGA) Hilton where I met him with a number of SDP Governors. Immediately I handed the statement to Kingibe, one of the governors put a call to an official in his state whom he directed to go and meet a particular Judge: “Tell him to give you an injunction compelling NEC to release the result. Once you have the paper, call me.”

Hardly had this particular governor concluded his ‘business’ when his colleagues took a cue as they also called officials in their states to secure court injunctions. Each had the name of a specific judge to meet. By nightfall, there were as many as four court injunctions from different states—all compelling NEC to continue to announce the presidential results. Even though I was not a lawyer (I am still not one), I knew what was happening could not be right but as to be expected, the media celebrated the several injunctions compelling Nwosu’s NEC to release the results while excoriating the late Justice Bassey Ikpeme for her equally dubious injunction.

Whenever I reflect on what happened that day, I marvel at the way we find it convenient to rationalise, even justify, the wrongs that align with our expectations. There is a reason the courts are called “the temple of justice.” Temples are sacred spaces. They are not (or at least should not be) marketplaces where power is bartered. When Judges trade injunctions the way hungry lecturers trade ‘handouts’, as I once surmised, society is endangered. And when politicians turn the court of law into a commercial centre, it is profaned, and with it, the very idea of justice.

The judiciary exists to advance the public good, protect the rights of citizens, and uphold the rule of law. Not to provide cover for the ambitions of a political class that has largely exhausted its claim to public trust. If we cannot restore this understanding, and the courts continue to be weaponised by those who should be restrained by them, we are building a house on sand. And when the rains come, as they inevitably will, we shall have no shelter.

-Dangote and the Power Sector-

A crispy social media post is doing the rounds on WhatsApp. It begins with the story of Alhaji Aliko Dangote’s recent call for urgent investment in the power sector, stressing that Nigeria must design, fabricate and build what it consumes to achieve true economic independence. “We must build (the) power grids. I keep repeating, we must build it,” Dangote said at the induction ceremony of the Nigerian Academy of Engineering Fellows in Lagos, where he also confirmed that he elected to supply his own electricity rather than take from the national grid. “Together, let us engineer a Nigeria that works not just for some, but for everyone.” One Misbahu Abubakar then added the line that sums up his post: “He is begging them now, but once Dangote builds the power grid, foolish people will start shouting Monopoly.”

The interesting thing is that such a proposition is actually not farfetched. A 17th June 2024 report in BUSINESSDAY newspaper highlighted how it took Nigeria 11 years to add just 760 megawatts of power to the national grid while Dangote was able to generate about 1,500 megawatts of electricity for his businesses in a shorter time. “The challenge of the power sector has not entirely been the scarcity of funds; several trillions of naira have been pumped into that industry,” Charles Akinbobola, a senior energy analyst at Sofidam Capital was quoted to have said in the report. “The sector has been plagued by the shortcomings of its managers”.

Like he did with cement and then refineries, Dangote sees opportunities where others see challenges. And as I have had to explain to those who accuse me of bias in his favour (which I do not deny), the challenge of entrepreneurship in Nigeria is because we have a very few risk takers like him. Most of the people who have also had Dangote’s opportunities have either wasted theirs or bartered them for cheap wealth with which they feed their vanity. Besides, I know many people who were so sure Dangote would not successfully complete his refinery and that it would sink him. But he took the big gamble and after more than a decade facing different odds, he is now reaping enormous rewards.

We must all recall that the licensing process for refineries was liberalised by the President Olusegun Obasanjo administration and to date, no fewer than 70 such licences have been issued but only few have bothered to put in any investment. In fact, on 17 February 2018 in Bayelsa State, at the foundation laying ceremony for the establishment of Azikel Refinery (one of the 22 licences given by the late President Muhammadu Buhari in 2015), Obasanjo publicly lamented that none of the 18 licenses he approved during his tenure performed. “During my tenure, I gave 18 licenses but none were actualized; Nigerians should follow the good step to move the nation forward,” he said.

Even the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited (NNPCL) management that has expended billions of dollars (trillions of Naira) on endless turn around maintenance (TAM) of the federal government-owned refineries is now only talking about signing a curious Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) on a potential Technical Equity Partnership (TEP) with Chinese companies. That precisely is why I aligned myself with the position of the Centre for the Promotion of Private Enterprise (CPPE) on a recent World Bank recommendation that Nigeria should sustain the importation of Premium Motor Spirit (PMS) to stabilise fuel supply.

Although a few people jumped at the idea (before the World Bank deleted the statement from its website), apparently thinking it would hurt the ‘monopolist’, the CPPE had described it as deeply troubling and fundamentally misaligned with Nigeria’s current economic realities and reform trajectory. “At a time when the country is making measurable progress in restoring macroeconomic stability—evidenced by improving foreign reserves, moderating inflation, a more stable exchange rate regime, and growing capacity for the export of refined petroleum products—the policy priority should be to consolidate these gains, not undermine them,” according to the CPPE Director General, Muda Yusuf.

Let me also make something clear here. In the dog-eat-dog business climate, especially in a country like ours, I cannot pretend that a man like Dangote would not rob some of his competitors the wrong way. But I remain firmly convinced that the creation of indigenous ‘monopolies is inevitable for any national economy that wants to achieve global competitiveness. For instance, no one can think of the growth and prosperity of the United States without DuPont, Rockefeller, Ford and others. Nor can we imagine the growth of South Korea without the conscious cultivation of Samsung, Goldster and Hyundai.

For me, Dangote has achieved the unusual. He has demonstrated the possibility of a productive Nigerian capitalism and its extension to the rest of Africa. With the Iranian closure of the strait of Hormuz, he has even made Nigeria part of the global conversation in the supply of Jet fuel from his refinery. And with the way he has boycotted the grid to provide electricity for all his mega projects, Dangote has also proved that power supply is not rocket science. I hope we don’t create a situation in which he dabbles into the sector and then we begin to shout ‘Monopoly’!

• You can follow me on my X (formerly Twitter) handle, @Olusegunverdict and on www.olusegunadeniyi.com