There is an old trick in the governance of frightened places, and Edo State has lately rediscovered it with the enthusiasm of a man who has just found his father’s gun in the attic and cannot wait to wave it at the neighbours. The trick works like this: identify a real fear, cultism, kidnapping, insecurity, the whole grim catalogue and then use that fear as cover to build an apparatus of power that owes nothing to law, precedent, or the tedious business of legislative due process.
Once the apparatus exists, point it wherever is politically convenient. The genius of the trick is that anyone who objects to the pointing can be accused of sympathising with the fear itself. Object to arbitrary CCTV directives and you are soft on kidnappers. Object to a Senior Special Adviser inventing new categories of criminality by press statement and you are, apparently, a cultist yourself, or at least dressed like one.
Edo state has, in the space of a few weeks, produced a small museum of this trick’s variations. It is worth walking through the exhibits, because taken individually each looks like an overzealous official having a bad news cycle. Taken together, they describe something closer to a governing Akpakomiza method.
ACT I: THE COURT THAT MEANS TO EXECUTE YOU
Start with the judiciary, because that is where the trick is meant to end, not begin. On 19 June 2026, the Secretary to the Edo State Government wrote to the Chief Judge, Justice Daniel Okungbowa, requesting the constitution of a special court for cultism and kidnapping cases. This followed Governor Monday Okpebholo’s public vow, made a day earlier while parading suspects before television cameras, that he would “sign it”, the death warrant, that is, for convicted kidnappers, and that the execution would be public, at the Kings Square, so that “the whole Edo people will see.” By 25 June, the Chief Registrar had gazetted Special Criminal Court 1, sitting in Benin City from 1 July.
There is nothing inherently improper about a state constituting a dedicated criminal court to clear a docket. Nigerian judiciaries do this routinely, and Edo’s kidnapping and cult-related caseload is a genuine emergency, not a manufactured one. What is improper, indeed what should trouble anyone who has read a constitution rather than merely sworn to uphold one, is a Governor publicly pre-announcing execution before trial, “Kings Square” theatrics and all, and a Chief Judge’s office constituting the court that will try those very cases within days of receiving the request that followed that announcement.
Section 36 of the 1999 Constitution presumes innocence and guarantees a fair hearing by a tribunal established by law and unafflicted by the appearance of having taken its marching orders from the Government House. A special court is not unconstitutional. A special court summoned into being on the tailwind of an executive death threat, however, does rather less for public confidence in the fairness of the tribunal than the Chief Registrar’s press statement would have you believe. Lewis Carroll got there before Nigerian constitutional law did: sentence first, verdict afterwards.
The statutory instrument doing the heavy lifting here is the Secret Cult and Similar Activities (Prohibition) Law, 2025, which replaced the 2018 law and introduced, among its stiffer penalties, capital punishment for cult-related killings.
ACT II: THE CAMERA THAT ISN’T A LAW
If the courts furnish this season’s most dramatic exhibit, the CCTV directive furnishes its most administratively naked one. In early July, the Edo State Security Squad, an executive creation, not a statutory body, announced that all business premises in the state must install functional CCTV cameras by 30 or 31 July (reports differ, which is itself instructive), with the Governor apparently extending the deadline informally to 1 August in subsequent remarks.
Enforcement, the spokesman promised, would begin immediately after the deadline lapses. Asked by Premium Times what law backed the directive, the state’s Commissioner for Information offered not a citation but a rhetorical counter-punch: does the kidnapper have legal backing?
This is, whatever its motivational value, not how the rule of law is supposed to work, and it is not a small point. The absence of a kidnapper’s compliance with law is not a substitute for the state’s own compliance with law; if anything it is precisely the reason the state’s own conduct must remain lawful, since a government that polices crime by abandoning legality is not defeating the criminal method, it is adopting it.
Nigeria’s 1999 Constitution vests law-making power in the House of Assembly, not in a security squad’s press briefing. An executive “directive,” however sensible its underlying aim, cannot create an enforceable legal obligation on private citizens, still less specify punishment for non-compliance, without an enabling statute passed by the Assembly. Nobody has produced one.
The Edo State House of Assembly has not been shown to have debated, still less passed, a CCTV mandate. What exists instead is a security spokesman’s warning that enforcement teams will “go round to force business owners to install CCTV” an admission, cheerfully offered, of exactly the kind of executive self-authorisation that Diceyan constitutionalism was invented to prevent. One is reminded that even the Military administrations, not famous for its tenderness toward due process, at least went to the trouble of gazetting its ordinances before enforcing them on the people.
The irony, worth pausing on, is that a genuinely well-drafted CCTV law might do real good, and Edo’s traders, per Connected Advocacy’s rather more measured intervention are not even objecting to the aim, only to being asked to bear an unbudgeted capital cost on the strength of a threat with no statutory spine.
A state that wanted these cameras installed durably, rather than installed by August and quietly uninstalled by October once enforcement enthusiasm cools, would have passed a law, specified a subsidy or tax incentive, and given the policy the permanence that only legislation confers. Instead it has a memo, a deadline that keeps moving, and a Commissioner for Information whose defence of the policy amounts to daring journalists to prefer kidnappers to cameras.
ACT III: THE BERET AS PROBABLE CAUSE
And then, arriving almost on cue to prove the wider thesis, came the Senior Special Adviser to the Governor, Collins Aghahowa, known online as Nominddem, whose reported remarks around the visit of Omoyele Sowore and the African Action Congress to Edo State is most instructive and most darkly comic exhibit.
According to accounts of his statements on social media including YouTube, Aghahowa suggested that AAC members wearing the party’s yellow berets were deemed engaged in an act of criminality, or were at minimum indistinguishable from members of a secret cult; that supporters wearing plain face caps, fell outside any such suspicion. And that such persons with yellow berets would be beaten and handed over to the police. And when found guilty, the governor will sign their death warrant for execution at the Kings Square.
The claim that a colour of headwear is itself evidence of cult membership is not merely absurd as criminology, genuine Nigerian confraternities do, as it happens, use coloured berets as insignia, which is precisely why the claim is so useful as a smear: it borrows the real vocabulary of a real menace and drapes it over a political rival’s merchandise stall. The Secret Cult and Similar Activities (Prohibition) Law, 2025 criminalises membership in and promotion of secret cults; it does not, and constitutionally cannot, criminalise membership in or support for a lawfully registered political party merely because a Special Adviser finds the party’s colour scheme uncongenial.
That the same official is reported to have carved out an express exception for face caps does the rest of the analytical work for me. A law that forbids yellow berets but not blue ones, cult insignia but not party insignia, selectively, and only for the opposition is not a security law being enforced. It is a security law being weaponised, and Orwell supplied the epitaph decades before Nominddem needed it: some caps, it turns out, are more equal than others.
There is also the small matter that Sowore’s presidential candidacy for the AAC and his party’s right to campaign in Edo ahead of the 11 July local government elections are protected, not merely tolerated, by the Electoral Act and by the freedoms of association and assembly under Sections 40 and 39 of the Constitution.
Calling political opponents “cultist” is not a security assessment; it is a campaign insult wearing a security uniform, deployed by a government aide days before a local government poll his principal’s party is contesting. If the aim was to chill turnout for a rival party’s rally under implied threat of an anti-cult law with a death penalty attached, that aim should be named plainly, because “vague public safety directive” is doing a great deal of camouflage work across all three exhibits in this essay, and camouflage is the entire point.
ACT IV: THE STRUCTURAL DIAGNOSIS
None of this is unique to Edo state, and none of it is even particularly new; it is only unusually concentrated. The pattern across the special court, the CCTV memo, and the beret theory of criminal liability is the same pattern this publication has traced before in Nigerian document-falsification defences and FAAC diversions: a government that treats law not as a constraint on its own conduct but as a resource to be deployed, selectively, against whoever is inconvenient this week.
The special court borrows the legitimacy of “fighting cultism” to stage a pre-trial execution announcement. The CCTV directive borrows the legitimacy of “fighting kidnapping” to impose an uncosted, unlegislated burden with unspecified punishment for defiance. And the beret theory borrows the legitimacy of the Secret Cult Law itself to recast a rival political party’s uniform as prima facie evidence of criminality, while quietly exempting the ruling party’s own merchandise from the same logic.
What connects all three is the absence of the one thing Nigerian constitutionalism actually requires before liberty may be curtailed: a properly enacted, sufficiently precise law, passed by the body constitutionally empowered to pass it, enforced by procedures that do not presume guilt before the alleged offence has even occurred.
The doctrine that a criminal or quasi-criminal prohibition must be clear enough that an ordinary citizen can know in advance what conduct is forbidden, void for vagueness, as American courts call it, though the underlying due process logic long predates that particular Latin, exists precisely to prevent officials from filling in the blanks of an ambiguous law with whatever answer is politically convenient on a given Tuesday. Edo’s governing style at present supplies the vagueness and lets Special Advisers supply the rest.
The tragedy is that the underlying fears are not manufactured. Cultism has killed Edo residents in real numbers; kidnapping has genuinely displaced diaspora investment the state can ill afford to lose.
A government serious about both problems would welcome the discipline of properly legislated, properly bounded law, because durable authority is legislated authority, it survives the next Special Adviser, the next security squad spokesman, the next Governor.
What Edo has instead is authority improvised weekly by whoever is holding the microphone, dressed in the borrowed clothes of public safety, and pointed, with striking consistency, at whichever citizen happens to be wearing the wrong colour beret to the wrong rally in the wrong month before a local government election.
Sentence first. Verdict, one imagines, whenever it becomes politically convenient to hold one.
Centre for Nigeria Progress 