When politicians discover defamation law, the courts become a theatre of wounded vanity
Something curious has been happening in Nigeria’s courts. Politicians men and women whose public careers have been built on the cheerful suspension of truth have rediscovered honour. Not the governing kind, mind you. Not the kind that might prompt one to return a constituency project fund unspent, or decline a suspicious envelope at a hotel lobby. No. The honour they have found is the legal kind: the kind that can be quantified, filed, and most importantly announced to the press.
The libel writ has become the new political weapon of choice. A rival makes a statement. An opponent circulates a claim. A social media account says something inconvenient. Within days, a suit is filed. The figure? Never modest. We are talking billions of naira. Ten billion. Twenty billion. Fifty billion. The numbers arrive with the confidence of a man who has never once paused to ask whether the court, or indeed the public, believes a word of it.
The public, to its credit, does not. The ordinary Nigerian, watching a political figure claim that his reputation has been damaged to the tune of ₦10 billion, reaches not for sympathy but for arithmetic. What, precisely, constitutes this reputation? Is it the projects abandoned in the third year of a four-year tenure? Is it the contracts awarded to brothers-in-law with registered addresses in a bedroom? The public takes these billion-naira assertions of wounded dignity with precisely what they deserve: a pinch of kobo.
But here is the legal problem that nobody in the rush of political blood seems to have noticed. The civil procedure rules in Nigeria do not calibrate court filing fees to the value of the claim. Unlike in England where a claimant seeking substantial damages must pay a court fee proportionate to what they are asking for, an arrangement that has an admirably sobering effect on litigation enthusiasm the Nigerian system charges a flat, relatively modest fee regardless of whether you are suing for ₦500,000 or ₦500 billion. The cost of your ambition at the filing counter is, in practical terms, the same.
This is not a trivial distinction. In England and Wales, the relationship between claim value and court fees functions as a civilising brake on the wilder impulses of aggrieved litigants. A claimant seeking £300,000 pays thousands in fees. The exposure is real. It concentrates the mind. It encourages a man to sit quietly with a cup of tea and ask himself whether he genuinely wishes to have his affairs examined in open court, or whether, on reflection, the allegedly defamatory statement was perhaps not so far from the truth as to warrant the investment.
No such mechanism exists in Nigeria. A politician may claim ₦20 billion in damages, pay a filing fee that would not embarrass a market trader, and proceed to announce his legal action to every camera that will receive it. The suit is not always meant to succeed. Often, it is meant to intimidate. Sometimes it is meant to distract. Frequently, it is simply meant to generate a headline in which the word “billion” appears next to the politician’s name preferably in a context suggesting injury rather than indictment.
There is a second deficiency. In most Nigerian civil litigation, the winning party does not routinely recover their legal costs from the loser. This is the costs-follow-the-event principle as it operates in England: you lose, you pay. It is an arrangement that makes frivolous litigation expensive in a direct and personal way. In Nigeria, the absence of this discipline means that a defendant a journalist, a civil society organisation, an opposition spokesman must spend considerable sums defending a claim that, even if dismissed entirely, will not be reimbursed. The asymmetry is instructive. Filing is cheap for the claimant; defending is expensive for the defendant. The suit need not succeed to cause harm.
The reform, therefore, is not complicated to identify. Scale the court fees to the value of the claim, as England does. Restore the costs principle so that a claimant who brings a billion-naira suit and loses faces a billion-naira moment of reckoning, or something approximating it. These two adjustments alone would introduce into Nigerian libel litigation something that is currently conspicuously absent: consequence.
A politician who genuinely believes his reputation has suffered ought to have no objection to this. He already knows his reputation is worth ₦20 billion; he said so on the claim form. Surely he can afford the filing fee to match. And if he wins, he will be made whole. The only person disadvantaged by fees proportionate to claim value is the person whose claim value exceeds his actual confidence in the claim.
That, of course, is precisely the category of politician currently flooding the courts.
Nigeria’s judiciary has enough on its hands without becoming the venue for competitive displays of manufactured grievance. A libel action is supposed to vindicate a genuine reputation, not to perform one. Until the civil procedure rules are amended to impose real financial skin in the game, the courts will continue to receive suits that begin with a press conference and end, quietly, without a hearing their purpose already served in the newspaper headline.
The reputation of Nigerian politicians is a matter for the electorate to assess. The reputation of Nigerian courts is a matter for the legislature to protect. Aligning court fees with claim values would serve both interests admirably, and it would spare the public the quarterly spectacle of a man who has spent twenty years in public life suddenly discovering, at the precise moment his opponent speaks, that he had a reputation worth billions all along.
Centre for Nigeria Progress 