The Doctrine, Stated Plainly
Nigerian law is not actually confused about bail. The Supreme Court and a long line of Court of Appeal authority have said the same thing often enough that it should by now require no restating: bail in appropriate cases is a right, the presumption favours the liberty of the accused, and the burden sits with the prosecution to justify keeping a person in chains before a court has convicted them of anything. Conditions attached to a grant of bail must not be suffocating, unbearable, unworkable, or unduly burdensome, that’s Abacha v. State, 2002, the Supreme Court’s own words, and worth savouring given who was in the dock. Where bail conditions are stringent and onerous to the extreme, that is as good as denying bail outright, and the onus shifts back to the prosecution to justify them. A defendant is not required to grovel before conditions engineered to be unmeetable and call that liberty.
This is the part Nigerian governments treat as a courtesy rather than a constraint. If a court hands down bail conditions dressed up to be functionally unattainable, the correct legal response is that the conditions are appealable, not that the state gets to treat “granted bail” and “still in custody indefinitely” as interchangeable outcomes. And yet, remarkably, each administration seems to locate one individual for whom this settled doctrine simply stops applying.
Buhari and the Colonel Who Kept Winning in Court and Losing in Life
Sambo Dasuki, President Jonathan’s former National Security Adviser, was granted bail by three different courts on the arms-procurement charges against him. Each time, he was re-arrested on a fresh pretext before he could walk out the gate, the state’s preferred technique being to swap one detention basis for another exactly as the previous one expired, a bureaucratic game of whack-a-mole played with a man’s liberty. The pattern got specific enough that when Dasuki took his case to the ECOWAS Community Court of Justice, the regional court found in October 2016 that his continued detention was unlawful, unreasonable and arbitrary, and went further: his re-arrest immediately after being granted bail by a Nigerian court amounted to a mockery of democracy and the rule of law.
Nigeria’s response to a regional court telling it, in essence, “you are making a mockery of your own legal system,” was to shrug. The Buhari government’s prosecution adviser, Okoi Obla, told journalists plainly that the ECOWAS ruling was merely advisory, that the court had no enforcement power, and that Nigeria was under no obligation to obey it. He then offered the sort of analogy lawyers give when they know the argument is thin, comparing Dasuki’s situation to a manslaughter suspect who gets bailed and is then separately accused of an unrelated killing. It did not survive contact with the actual facts, which were that Dasuki was re-arrested on the exact matters the first bail already covered.
Dasuki stayed in Kuje. El-Zakzaky, running the same playbook from a different cell, stayed detained without trial for well over a year despite his own favourable court orders. The lesson Buhari’s government drew from an international tribunal calling its conduct a mockery of the rule of law was: noted, proceeding as planned.
Tinubu and the Governor Who Needs a Civil Servant Who Owns Real Estate in Maitama
Nasir El-Rufai now faces a ten-count corruption charge before the Kaduna courts, later amended to nine after his co-defendant was severed from the case. These remain allegations, not proven facts, and he is entitled to the presumption of innocence until a court says otherwise, a sentence I write with the appropriate seriousness, and one every government official reading this should apply consistently rather than selectively.
But the bail conditions attached to his case are where the doctrine goes to die a second time under a second administration. Reports described sureties required to be serving Grade Level 17 federal civil servants who must also own verifiable property in Maitama or Asokoro, Abuja’s most expensive postal codes, the kind of neighbourhoods civil servants on a GL17 salary do not, structurally, own property in, unless the Nigerian civil service has quietly started paying like an oil major. Add in demands for original Certificates of Occupancy for landed property worth hundreds of millions of naira, and restrictive check-in requirements at security headquarters, and you have arrived, by design or by convenient accident, at the precise thing Abacha v. State forbids: conditions that are unworkable and suffocating, dressed up as due process.
Even El-Rufai’s own erstwhile defenders have not made his case straightforward. MURIC, no natural friend of the government here, and by its own account one of El-Rufai’s most consistent supporters, publicly questioned the authenticity of the medical report underpinning his third bail application, after the issuing agency reportedly disowned it, and the Kaduna High Court dismissed that application on those grounds on 29 June 2026. So this is not a clean story of an innocent man denied bail on pure vindictiveness; there is a genuinely contested corruption file and a genuinely disputed medical document sitting in the middle of it. What is not contested, however, is that the conditions attached to whatever bail he has notionally been granted have functioned, in practice, as a second refusal wearing the paperwork of an approval.
Atiku Abubakar, not a man I’d normally cite as a legal authority, but he is at least asking the right question here, put it as sharply as anyone: when a court insists a defendant produce a serving Grade Level 17 civil servant who also owns verifiable Maitama or Asokoro property, Nigerians are entitled to ask whether the objective is to grant bail or to guarantee that bail stays permanently out of reach.
The Detail Too Good to Leave Out
Here is where the piece earns its place in a blog that traffics in irony rather than mere outrage. Bola Ahmed Tinubu, the president whose government is currently requiring El-Rufai’s sureties to own real estate in Nigeria’s most expensive districts, was himself, in 1994, a co-defendant on a treason charge under the Abacha regime, accused alongside others of conspiring to remove the Head of State by unconstitutional means. He got bail. It is worth noting, with the appropriate irony, that bail conditions set by judges under actual military rule were less stringent than the conditions Nigerian citizens face under the current democratic dispensation, a sentence that should embarrass everyone involved in setting current bail terms, and probably will not.
There is something almost too neat about a man who once benefited from comparatively liberal bail terms while charged with plotting against a military dictator now presiding over a government that treats a civil servant’s inability to own a mansion in Maitama as a legitimate reason to keep a former governor in custody. Abacha’s courts, for all their many sins, were apparently less inventive about designing bail into a locked door than Tinubu’s.
The Structural Point
Strip away the individual names and the pattern is depressingly stable across party lines and regime type: each Nigerian government appears to identify one person it intends to hold regardless of what the courts, the Constitution, or a regional tribunal actually say. Under Buhari it was Dasuki, where even a formal ECOWAS Court finding of unlawful, arbitrary detention produced nothing but an Attorney-General’s shrug about advisory opinions. Under Tinubu it is El-Rufai, where the mechanism has evolved from outright re-arrest to something more sophisticated: bail granted in name, converted into custody in substance, through conditions engineered to fail.
Both approaches achieve the identical outcome the Supreme Court expressly prohibited in Abacha v. State: detention masquerading as due process, indefinite custody laundered through the paperwork of a right nominally granted. The only innovation between administrations is craftsmanship. Buhari’s government simply defied court orders and dared anyone to enforce them against a sovereign state. Tinubu’s has found the subtler, more lawyerly route: comply with the letter of “bail granted” while making the conditions of that bail an engineering problem no ordinary defendant could solve. It is, in its way, more insulting to the judiciary, because it forces the courts to become complicit in their own doctrine’s evasion rather than simply ignored by it.
Nigeria’s appellate courts have said, repeatedly and in terms a first-year law student could parse, that this is not how bail is supposed to work. The question, as always, is whether saying so again changes anything, or whether the next administration is already drawing up its own list of one.
