AT the end of July 2017, the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime, UNODC, and Nigeria’s National Bureau of Statistics, NBS, issued a joint report on the public experience of and response to bribery in Nigeria. Among its findings, the report ranked several institutions with reference to public perceptions or experience of demand for […]

 “The judiciary has immense power. In the nature of things, judges cannot be democratically accountable for their decisions. It therefore matters very much that their role should be regarded as legitimate by the public at large.”— Jonathan Sumption, Law in a Time of Crisis, 121 (2021) FOR a cumulative period of 17 years between 1885 and […]

IN the last week of April 2024, Pastor and Chairman of Nigeria’s Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC, Ola Olukoyede, swore that he would “resign as EFCC chairman if embattled former Kogi State Governor, Yahaya Bello, is not prosecuted.” Unaccompanied as it was by any calendar or deadline, this undertaking cannot be regarded as having been […]

IN the month since 23 May 2024, when – during hours reserved by nature entirely for meetings of witches and wizards – he began sitting as Kingmaker for the Emirate of Kano, Abdullahi Liman, a senior judge of Nigeria’s Federal High Court, has handed down at least five rulings. Defying settled Supreme Court jurisprudence, he has […]

Umuawulu, a sleepy settlement in Awka, the capital of Anambra State in the South-East, is the unlikely origin of one of the greatest sporting resumes ever to come out of Nigeria. In the bowels of this village lies Holy Cross High School, the site from which the story sprouted.  Until the politicians contrived to destroy education […]

LESS than a decade ago, the detention centre of the International Criminal Court, ICC, in Scheveningen on the outskirts of The Hague could easily have been mistaken for a committee meeting of leaders of the African Union. One of its long-term guests was Laurent Gbagbo, a former president of Côte d’Ivoire. From neighbouring Liberia, Gbagbo’s […]

IN a country and a season in which candour is not always seen as a virtue, those who make it the currency of their daily lives are either idolized, endangered or idolized into endangerment. On the Nigerian streets, a person who addresses issues of public significance with candour can be described as having “broken the table”. […]

MUHAMMAD Ali, the American boxing phenomenon whom the British Broadcasting Corporation, BBC, voted the Sports Personality of the 20th Century in 1999, often promoted pugilistic enterprise in verse. When then ruler of the country formerly known as Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo), Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu wa za Banga, invited him to […]

MOHAMMED Ladan Tsamiya probably believed he was a commodities trader who happened also to moonlight as a Justice of the Court of Appeal. To him, both vocations seemed to provide mutually reinforcing revenue streams. Sometimes, he transacted business as one while doing the other. In keeping with this tendency, it was an unsuccessful transaction in the […]

By NICK DAZANG IN the immediate aftermath of a meeting of the Federal Executive Council, FEC, on Tuesday, May 14, 2024, the Minister of Finance and the Coordinating Minister of the Economy, Wale Edun, announced, with brio, that government had concluded plans to deploy N20 trillion pension funds and others to drive economic growth via investment […]