The ritual of the “Call to Bar” is the formal ceremony for the  admission of new entrants into Nigeria’s legal profession.

When Olusegun Obasanjo took over in the middle of 1976 from the slain Murtala Mohammed as Nigeria’s military Head of State, the regime was already committed as a matter policy to transition power to an elected civilian administration in 1979.

It is no longer news that on Wednesday, 17 September 2025, I honoured the invitation by the X-Squad Unit of the Nigeria Police Force, Imo State Command, over allegations of “Criminal Defamation of the Governor of Imo State” and “conduct likely to cause a breach of the peace.”

The judgment of the Supreme Court of Nigeria on 19 January 2006 concerning the state of emergency in Plateau State came down 20 months after the proclamation and 14 months after the emergency had expired.

In January 1993, Ibrahim Babangida was Nigeria’s military ruler. He was supposedly in the last year of an interminable transition at the end of which he promised to hand over power to an elected civilian administration.

When the House of Lords, as the upper chamber of the UK Parliament is called, debated the Courts Bill introduced by the government of Edward Heath in December 1970, Lord Hailsham was in the Woolsack as the Lord Chancellor.

Seven years ago, in 2018, my good friend and former Dean of Law at the University of Ghana at Legon, Professor Raymond Atuguba, undertook a path-breaking study which sought “to move away from the perception that Justices of the Supreme Court dispense justice impartially under a constitutional democracy and reflect on the influences on the Justices as they are taking decisions.”

In 1981, Chief Gani Fawehinmi was already 16 years at the Nigerian Bar and one of its brightest stars.

By Chidi Anselm Odinkalu Abdul Oroh is an unlikely avatar of the Nigerian dream. An Afenmai from Ivbiaro in Owan West Local Government Area of Edo State in the south-south of Nigeria, Abdul had the privilege of seeing Nigeria’s promise at independence and its descent to the edge of the proverbial precipice. Born in August […]

On 6 December 1977, Olusegun Obasanjo, Nigeria’s military Head of State, received a group of young men from the east who had come to present him with a trophy won in the field of football contest against the rest of Africa.

One month ago, in Abuja, a small circle of friends, literary enthusiasts, human rights activists, politicians, public intellectuals and thinkers gathered to listen to Chidi Odinkalu read from his latest offering, The Selectorate: When Judges Topple the People.

Three different decisions of the highest court in the country over the past two decades illustrate how the judicial conspiracy against popular sovereignty in Nigeria has prospered.

“The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government; this will shall be expressed in periodic and genuine elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage and shall be held by secret vote or by equivalent free voting procedures.”

“Sovereignty belongs to the people of Nigeria from whom government through this Constitution derives all its powers and authority.” Section 14(2), Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, 1999

A little over two decades ago, away from its perception as a shrine for the resolution of the most rarefied disputes in the country, the Supreme Court of Nigeria played host to a Nigerian drama.