Reporting News and opinions
Nigeria’s president is locked in a fierce reelection battle — one that is not just playing out among voters ahead of January polls, but pitting teams of lawyers and lobbyists against a lone litigant half a world away in California. Remarkably, this latter-day David just won a significant victory over Goliath.
There is an old legal maxim that justice must not only be done, but must also be seen to be done. Somewhere between Osadebe Avenue and King’s Square, however, that venerable principle was evidently fed into a shredder, doused in kerosene, and traded for prime-time television ratings.
Passports are supposed to be the great equalizers of national identity. If two people carry the green-backed book stamped with the Nigerian coat of arms, the constitution insists they share the exact same claim to fundamental dignity and justice. But citizenship, like roaming data on a prepaid SIM, appears to depend entirely on which borders your passport happens to cross.
In the theater of Nigerian criminal justice, bail is the sparkling prop they wheel out to dazzle the audience with tales of constitutional benevolence, only for the curtain to fall on a punchline so absurd it would make a stand-up comedian blush. Our dear leaders preach presumption of innocence while tying defendants in knots tighter …
In 1999, Olusegun Obasanjo and Atiku Abubakar rode into Aso Rock together, a presidential double act that Nigerians assumed would age like most political marriages: quietly, then not at all. They survived one term. They won a second in 2003. Then, somewhere in that second term, Obasanjo discovered a constitutional itch that the 1999 Constitution's two term, eight year ceiling on the presidency simply would not scratch. He wanted a third term. Atiku, nursing a presidential ambition of his own and possessed of the inconvenient habit of reading the Constitution literally, said so publicly. The friendship ended there.
