By Chidi Anselm Odinkalu
WHEN the Economist described Nigeria over 18 years ago as a “democracy by court order”, it ventured into prophetic journalism.
In the period since then, partisan politicians have become comfortable with playing second fiddle to judges, a sizeable number of whom have emerged as the most avid tribe of belligerents in the mortal combat of Nigerian politics.
In many ways, political harlotry in a court’s name is increasingly an international affair. In a recent article for the Journal of Democracy, Andrew O’Donohue of the Harvard Radcliffe Institute outlines five ways in which “courts frequently undermine democracy.” They can do this by enabling authoritarianism, undermining credible elections, restricting participation and associated civic rights, empowering non-elected elites, or indulging in a jurisprudence of excess of jurisdiction.
Many will recognise these patterns in Nigeria. When he addressed the annual conference of the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) in August 2025, the Sultan of Sokoto complained that judicial verdicts in the country had become a “purchasable commodity.” In a rigged judicial market, it is evident that the winners will almost always be the most powerful. In Nigeria, they are politicians.
As dangerous as it may sound, the commodification of court orders is by no means the worst form of political prostitution of courts in Nigeria. The methods by which a judge in Nigeria can procure judicial complicity in partisan project have become a lot simpler.
When the Court of Appeal delivered its now infamous judgment in the appeal by interim Chair
of the African Democratic Congress (ADC), David Mark, against the interim order of the Federal High Court in the case instituted by provocateur, Nafiu Bala Gombe, the three-man panel dwelt at considerable length on determining primacy between the enrolled order of a court on the one hand and the text of a court’s ruling on the other.
According to the Court of Appeal, whenever there is contradiction between these two, the latter must prevail. There is a deafening eloquence, however, to what the court could not bring itself to say: that it is anomalous for such a contradiction to occur in the first place. Yet, these days, that occurs with disquieting regularity.
It is possible to explain this as human error not entirely unconnected with the febrile atmosphere under which Nigeria’s judges work. This cannot be excluded entirely but even if that were to be the case, much of the stress is self-inflicted. Replicating a practice more closely associated with sex workers, some judges appear keen to crawl the political kerb, strutting their judicial wares for the attentions of grasping, partisan customers who are only too happy to gratify them.
From habitually granting politicians implausible and inexplicable shunts on the queue of judicial dysfunction which exist for lesser mortals only; through creating exceptional jurisprudence without precedent in cases involving political parties and politicians; to assuming jurisdiction in cases in which that is explicitly excluded, a not insignificant number of judges in Nigeria appear increasingly of the view that prostitution is too important an enterprise to be abandoned to sex workers alone.
These practices appear to be always designed to cause maximum benefit to one side in high profile partisan disputes or maximum political damage to another. When, for instance, the Supreme Court assumed appellate jurisdiction to decide a case that was still pending in the Federal High Court in Port Harcourt, the court did not pretend to be doing law. It simply chose a side in a partisan dispute and inflicted maximum damage on another side, while weaponising the fullest panoply of its constitutional standing.
Even this tendency could be managed, if the tale were to stop here and no further, but it does not. The phenomenon of mutually contradictory orders by courts of equal jurisdiction, Africa Report has cautioned, “threatens to lead Africa’s largest democracy into chaos.”
On April 22, 2026, the Supreme Court decided that it lacked appellate jurisdiction a decision of the Court of Appeal sitting as the final instance in appeals from decisions of the National Industrial Court of Nigeria (NICN). Two weeks later, on May 8, the same court inexplicably claimed jurisdiction to overturn a decision of the Court of Appeal in an appeal originating from the NICN and involving a former Deputy Governor of Kogi State. The same Supreme Court cannot turn around tomorrow and claim seriously that it is overworked.
One trick in the tool-box of judicial duplicity is the art of the indecipherable court order. Quite often, it is written in mangled syntax or Latin. Nigerians are now weaned on a diet of judicial orders requiring a return to status quo ante-bellum by judges who are too lazy or cannot be bothered to say clearly when the bellum began or how.
The result is that “instead of court decisions bringing finality to disputes, they now generate fresh controversies because different parties interpret the same judgment to suit their political interests.” This is all very deliberate or at least foreseeable. One writer has described Nigeria’s courts in this role as “authors of confusion.” Olusegun Adeniyi says this is the “judicial route to anarchy.”
Another practice is the art of judicial verdict without judgment. More than a fortnight after the Supreme Court handed down the judgment in the party-political disputes involving the leadership of the Peoples’ Democratic Party (PDP) and the ADC, respectively, the judgments remain unpublished.
Similarly, nearly one week after a judge of the High Court of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) reportedly issued a judgment in defamation requiring the Socio-Economic Rights and Accountability Project (SERAP), a non-governmental organization, to pay N100 million to two officers of the State Security Service (SSS), it is still an item of judicial oral tradition. Despite the best efforts of many, no one has seen it.
This phenomenon of judicial verdict without judgment creates damage and feeds confusion in many ways. In the dispute over the Kano Emirate two years ago, for instance, Abdullahi Liman, then a judge of the Federal High Court in Kano, infamously ruled that an ex-parte ruling did not have to be seen by nor served upon a party before it could be binding on that party.
The flagrant audacity of requiring a party to inhale like oxygen a judicial order issued without having been afforded a hearing to begin with was of not of any bother to a judge who seemed comfortable to trade impunity for judicial deliberation. He chose to foist on Kano an entirely avoidable reality of two Emirs asserting judicially backed claims over one stool and got promoted to the Court of Appeal while at it.
There is, of course, the fact that in politically tense situations, judicial verdict without judgment is often patented for irreversible harm. In the by-election into the Ebonyi South Senate seat necessitated in 2024 by the appointment of David Umahi as a Minister, Hyeladzira Nganjiwa, a judge of the Federal High Court, waited until two days before the ballot to make a pronouncement in open court disqualifying the candidate of the PDP, Silas Onu, from the contest.
It did not matter that the judge knew very well that he lacked jurisdiction in the matter because the claimants in favour of whom he made the order manifestly lacked standing to sue. The design was to weaponise judicial power in favour of the candidate of the ruling party and crater the support of the opposition candidate without publishing any judgment.
Over six months later, the Court of Appeal vacated the crooked order, but the judge had procured his design.
Litigants in cases involving party political interests have for long been used to judgment without justice. The phenomenon of verdict without judgment is new, however, because the absence of judgment is itself injustice and the vacuum in time until it is produced can do damage, both foreseeable and unpredictable. The scary thing is that it’s impossible to say that this is not deliberate because there is evidence to show that judgments can be available on the day they are issued. Some Nigerian judges do that as a matter of habit. Why many of their peers choose not to do so should bother the Chief Justice of Nigeria.
A lawyer & a teacher, Odinkalu can be reached at chidi.odinkalu@tufts.edu
