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NIGERIA has a disturbing habit of allowing those in power to treat constitutional restraints as inconveniences rather than obligations. Once again, the country is confronted with questions over presidential absence, constitutional compliance and the willingness of its institutions to hold the powerful to account.
It was 2008. The country was being asked to choose a president, and Clinton’s famous campaign advertisement presented the image of sleeping children, a ringing telephone in the White House and a question: Who do you want answering the phone?
The late Sam Mbakwe, first civilian governor of Imo State and a man whose impatience with mediocrity remains legendary, once declared that he would gladly invite the British back to rule Nigeria for another fifty years. Other politicians have echoed the sentiment over the decades, usually after another round of epileptic power, collapsed roads, or the discovery that the latest “transformation agenda” had transformed mainly the bank balances of its authors. The quip is usually delivered with a sigh, half-joke, half-confession: better the colonial taskmaster who at least kept the trains roughly on time than the indigenous ones who treat the national timetable as optional reading.
Enoch Powell famously observed that “all political careers end in failure.” Whether one agrees with the man or not, the aphorism has endured because politics is an unforgiving profession. Few modern British politicians illustrate it more vividly than David Cameron.
Nigeria’s judicial budget is a complex, contentious issue at the intersection of constitutional design, fiscal federalism, political power dynamics, and the practical realities of justice delivery. While the 1999 Constitution (as amended) enshrines judicial independence including financial autonomy the implementation reveals deep gaps between legal provisions and on-ground realities.
