Tag: Constitution

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Edo State’s CCTV Mandate: When Government Decides Shop Owners Are the New Police Force by Lawson Akhigbe

Shops is now an extension of the state’s security infrastructure. Congratulations! You’ve been promoted from entrepreneur to unpaid auxiliary detective. Pay for the cameras, the electricity (when NEPA remembers you exist), the cloud storage or DVRs, the maintenance, and the inevitable technician who speaks only in riddles. All so the government can claim progress while the actual primary purpose of government remains… whatever it was doing before this.

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The Log in Our Eye: The Quiet Tragedy of Nigeria’s “Lost” Inmates by Lawson Akhigbe

The grim reality of the Nigerian justice system was laid bare recently in a devastating report by Arise News. In 2007, a 14-year-old boy named Gospel Kinani disappeared from Ogoniland, Rivers State. For nearly two decades, his family searched for him in vain; the profound grief even claimed the lives of both his parents. Eighteen years later, Gospel was finally found not dead, but alive, broken, and languishing inside the Port Harcourt Correctional Center at 33 years old.

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ITS THE CONSTITUTION, STUPID: A QUESTION THAT NEVER NEEDED ASKING By Lawson Akhigbe

The Supreme Court’s 6–3 ruling in Trump v. Barbara successfully blocked an executive order attempting to end birthright citizenship. But the real scandal isn’t that Trump tried to delete the Fourteenth Amendment with a memo—it’s that the Court elevated this transparent stunt into an 18-month crisis by agreeing to hear it at all. You cannot amend the Constitution via an executive order or a regular congressional bill; doing so requires the grueling, historic process of Article V. Treating a foundational constitutional right as a casual negotiation opener is political vandalism from the White House, and a "romantic delusion" from a Court that gave the attack a stage. The constitutional wall stood, as it always was going to. The pity is that the judiciary treated the assault on it as a debate worth entertaining, putting the status of 255,000 children a year on trial for pure political theater.

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Independent and Unaccountable: A New Code for Nigeria’s Judiciary by Chidi Anselm Odinkalu

Among the doctrines that underpin the legal process in Nigeria, few are as profound and pervasive as judicial independence, but no doctrine in the ecosystem of the law rivals its elusiveness. The idea is ubiquitous in the syllabus of every programme leading to the award of a degree in law, in political science or public …

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