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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.
The slogan gained prominence in the aftermath of the Birmingham pub bombings and the subsequent conviction of six Irish men the now infamous Birmingham Six. Their case quickly became a lightning rod for allegations of coerced confessions, police misconduct, and a justice system more interested in closure than correctness.
When a customary marriage is dissolved in Nigeria, the distribution of property and assets does not follow the same rules as a statutory (court) marriage. While statutory marriages are governed by Section 72 of the “Matrimonial Causes Act (MCA)” which grants judges wide discretion to divide matrimonial properties equitably, customary marriages are governed strictly by “Native Law and Custom”, subject to constitutional tests of fairness.
