Reporting News and opinions
WHEREAS Section 14(2)(b) of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, 1999 (as amended) declares—perhaps optimistically—that “the security and welfare of the people shall be the primary purpose of government”;
A Certified True Copy (CTC) is an officially certified duplicate of an original document kept in court records or government custody. In Nigeria, CTCs are commonly required for court appeals, land matters, visa applications, verification processes and legal transactions involving public documents.
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.
On 23 August, I wrote on this platform about the danger of treating the law as an optional accessory in suspicious deaths. I asked a simple question: when a Nigerian dies suddenly and in circumstances requiring investigation, who decides how that death occurred? The family, or the law?
In the United States, corporate culture has a colorful vocabulary for the hyper-sycophant: the brown-noser, the bootlicker, the corporate shill. But in Nigeria, this behavior isn't just a personality trait of that one annoying guy in middle management. It is a highly sophisticated, deeply institutionalized standard operating procedure known colloquially as "Eye Service."
