There is a certain genre of legal story that is uniquely Nigerian — one where the judiciary delivers a courageous, intellectually rigorous judgment, the kind that gets cited in law schools and quoted in hushed, admiring tones by constitutional scholars, and then the government simply… ignores it. Not quietly ignores it, mind you. Loudly, legislatively, retroactively ignores it, while also making it illegal to point out that it was ignored.
Lakanmi & Kikelomo Ola v. Attorney-General (West) & Others [1971] 1 UILR 201 is that story. It is a case about constitutional limits, corporate accountability, the rule of law — and ultimately, about what happens when you tell a man with a gun that he cannot do something.
Spoiler: he does it anyway. And then he passes a decree saying he always could.
The Background: Assets, Tribunals, and a Very Unhappy Military Government
Following the military coup of January 15, 1966, Nigeria found itself governed not by elected representatives debating policy in a legislature, but by soldiers issuing Decrees from above. The Federal Military Government (FMG) governed by Decrees; the Regional Military Governors by Edicts. One such Edict was the Western State Assets Forfeiture Edict, under which a tribunal was established to investigate individuals, seize their assets, and generally make their lives uncomfortable — all without the inconvenience of a proper court process.
Lakanmi and others were subjected to exactly this treatment. Their assets were seized. They did what any sensible Nigerian with a lawyer would do: they went to court.
The courts, remarkably, agreed with them. Their challenge succeeded.
At this point, a government operating under the rule of law would have accepted the judgment, released the assets, and — perhaps whilst grumbling — respected the decision of an independent judiciary. The Federal Military Government, however, was not that government. Instead, it enacted the Forfeiture of Assets (Validation) Decree No. 45 of 1968, which retroactively validated the forfeiture, nullified the court’s judgment, and effectively told the judiciary: thank you for your contribution; we will not be needing it.
Lakanmi went back to court. The Supreme Court, displaying what can only be described as extraordinary institutional courage, ruled in his favour again — and in doing so, laid down some of the most important constitutional principles in Nigerian legal history.
The Constitutional Principles Established
1. Military Government Is Revolutionary, Not Sovereign
The Supreme Court made a distinction that was as legally precise as it was politically electric: the military did not govern by inherent sovereign authority. It came to power through revolution — an extra-legal, factual event — and therefore its authority was necessarily limited by the nature of its origin. The court distinguished between a de jure constitutional government and a de facto revolutionary one.
In plain terms: having the guns does not give you unlimited legal power. The barrel of a rifle is not a constitutional instrument. This was not merely academic — it was a direct challenge to the military’s self-conception as an omnipotent governing authority.
2. Military Legislative Powers Are Not Unlimited
Building on the above, the court held that even a revolutionary government cannot legislate without limits. Specifically, it cannot retroactively nullify judicial decisions already delivered. A decree cannot reach back in time, erase a court judgment, and punish individuals for acts that were lawful at the time of commission. To allow otherwise would make the rule of law an elaborate theatrical performance — courts sitting, judges deliberating, judgments being delivered — all meaning absolutely nothing because the government could simply unmake the outcome by decree the following Tuesday.
3. Judicial Supremacy Over Military Edicts
Here the court took its most consequential stand. It asserted the power of courts to review military edicts for constitutional validity. Regional Edicts — as distinct from Federal Decrees — were not immune from judicial scrutiny. The Western State Edict establishing the tribunal was found to violate existing constitutional frameworks, particularly the right to fair hearing and the prohibition on retroactive criminal liability.
This was constitutionalism in its purest form: the proposition that even those who govern by force are bound by law, and that courts exist precisely to say so.
4. Fundamental Rights Survive Military Rule
The court affirmed that fundamental human rights — particularly the right to fair hearing under Section 22 of the 1963 Constitution — were not simply dissolved by the act of soldiers seizing power. A bayonet may change a government, but it does not, of itself, abolish the legal personality of the citizen or strip them of the protections accumulated through decades of constitutional development.
5. Separation of Powers Has a Residual Core
Even under military governance, the court implied that judicial power cannot be entirely usurped by the executive-legislative military authority. There is a core of judicial independence that must remain inviolate — and retroactively invalidating a court’s judgment by decree was a direct assault on that core.
Piercing the Corporate Veil: Accountability Behind the Company Façade
As if all of the above were not enough constitutional excitement for one case, Lakanmi also contributed a significant principle to the law of corporate liability — one that would prove remarkably prescient in a country that would go on to develop something of a national talent for hiding assets behind corporate structures.
The complication in this case was that some of the assets targeted were held through companies, raising the classic question: can you go after the man when the company technically owns the assets? And if the company is a separate legal person — as established since the famous English case of Salomon v Salomon [1897] — is the man not simply an innocent shareholder?
The court’s answer was a firm and sensible: not always.
The doctrine of piercing the corporate veil — looking behind the separate legal personality of a company to the individuals who truly own and control it — was held to apply in the context of criminal and quasi-criminal investigations. Where a corporate structure is being used as a mere façade or vehicle to hold what are, in substance, an individual’s assets; where the individual exercises such effective control over the company that the company is, in truth, his alter ego; and where strict adherence to corporate separateness would defeat the ends of justice — then the courts are entitled to treat the company’s assets as the individual’s own.
This was notable for several reasons.
First, it indigenised the doctrine in Nigerian law. Veil-piercing was not invented in Lakanmi — it had long existed in English common law. But the case gave it a distinctly Nigerian judicial stamp, applying it to the specific context of state investigations and asset forfeiture.
Second, it extended the doctrine beyond civil disputes. Prior to this, most veil-piercing cases arose in commercial contexts: creditors chasing shareholders, tax authorities tracing liabilities. Lakanmi established that the principle had equal application in criminal and investigative proceedings, where the state is seeking to attribute liability or asset ownership to the individuals lurking behind the corporate form.
Third — and this is the part that echoes loudest in contemporary Nigeria — it established an early intellectual foundation for asset recovery. Incorporating a company, the court implicitly held, does not launder the origins or true ownership of what is inside it. The corporate veil is a legitimate legal tool; it is not a magic cloak.
Given that Nigeria would spend much of the following five decades grappling with spectacular corruption, looted public funds, and the creative use of shell companies to conceal illicitly acquired wealth, it is almost poignant that this principle was established so early — and so thoroughly ignored for so long.
The Military’s Response: A Masterclass in Legislative Audacity
One might expect that, having twice received clear judicial guidance on the limits of its authority, the Federal Military Government would reflect, reconsider, and engage in some degree of institutional humility.
One would be wrong.
The government’s response was Decree No. 28 of 1970 — the Federal Military Government (Supremacy and Enforcement of Powers) Decree — which accomplished the following with breathtaking economy of language:
- It retroactively validated every decree and edict issued since January 15, 1966;
- It ousted the jurisdiction of all courts to question the validity of any decree or edict; and
- It directly reversed the Lakanmi judgment itself.
Read that again slowly. The government responded to a court ruling that it had limited powers by decreeing that it had unlimited powers — including, magnificently, the power to declare that it always had unlimited powers, going back in time to the day the soldiers first arrived.
This is the legal equivalent of losing a chess match, flipping the board, declaring that chess is now illegal, and then insisting you won.
The Enduring Significance
Lakanmi was legislatively overturned. The assets were not returned. In the narrow, immediate sense, the litigants lost.
And yet the case endures — cited, studied, and revered — because law is not only about outcomes. It is about frameworks, principles, and the slow accumulation of constitutional wisdom that outlasts any particular government, military or otherwise.
The case established:
- A framework for judicial review of executive and military action that would inform constitutional thinking for generations;
- The principle that legality is not synonymous with force — a proposition Nigeria has had to relearn, painfully, several times since;
- The doctrine of corporate veil piercing in criminal contexts, which remains directly relevant to modern anti-corruption efforts;
- A template for arguing against ouster clauses — those legislative provisions that attempt to exclude judicial oversight entirely — that constitutional lawyers still reach for today.
There is also something deeply instructive about the military’s own response. In enacting Decree No. 28, the government inadvertently confirmed everything the court had said about the nature of its authority: that it rested not on law, but on force; not on constitutional legitimacy, but on the willingness to override any institution that stood in its way. The overreaction was itself a confession.
A Final Thought
Lakanmi is, at its heart, a story about institutions. A court that did its job with integrity, in circumstances where the consequences of doing so were real and serious. Lawyers who pressed a case that required courage to press. And a government that, in its very act of retaliation, demonstrated exactly why independent courts matter.
Nigeria would go through several more military governments after 1971. It would take until 1999 for a sustained democratic dispensation to take root. But the intellectual architecture built in cases like Lakanmi — the insistence that government is bound by law, that individuals have rights, that corporate structures cannot be used to shield wrongdoing — formed part of the foundation upon which that democracy was eventually constructed.
Even judgments that are overturned leave footprints. Sometimes, the footprints are the point.
Centre for Nigeria Progress 