By Rekpene Bassey
In every functioning democracy, there should be at least one institution that the citizens can trust and believe in. One that can still say ”No” to the powerful.
In the United States, after Watergate, it was the courts. In post-apartheid South Africa, it was the Constitutional Court. In India, despite its contradictions, millions still approach the judiciary believing it may yet deliver justice when politics fails.
Nigeria was once in that situation, too. There was a time when the country’s judiciary occupied a rare moral space in public life. Judges like Kayode Eso and Chukwudifu Oputa were not merely legal luminaries; they were civic symbols. Their judgments carried ethical force.
Politicians feared judicial rebuke. Citizens quoted court decisions in ordinary conversation. The judiciary represented restraint in a culture of excess political rascality, often tempted by intemperance.
But that seems to be no more. Today, many Nigerians speak of the courts with cynicism instead of reverence.
Indeed, courts possess neither armies nor police forces. Their authority depends almost entirely on public belief. Belief that the judge is neutral, that the process is fair, and that outcomes are grounded in law rather than influence.
Once that belief weakens, the consequences ripple through the entire state. Investors hesitate. Elections lose legitimacy.
Citizens turn toward ethnic loyalties, political godfathers, or outright self-help. Contracts become uncertain. Criminal accountability becomes negotiable. And over time, the state itself begins to appear arbitrary.
In Nigeria, this erosion has been gradual but unmistakable. The damage is not merely reputational. It is economic.
Countries with weak judicial credibility struggle to sustain long-term investment because businesses cannot reliably predict legal outcomes. A commercial dispute that takes a decade to resolve is not simply inefficient; it is economically destructive.
No entrepreneur, for instance, expands aggressively in an environment where contract enforcement depends on political proximity. No foreign investor commits billions where courts are perceived as vulnerable to manipulation. In such systems, uncertainty becomes a hidden tax on development.
And yet Nigeria’s judicial crisis is deeper than procedural delay or administrative inefficiency. It is fundamentally a crisis of legitimacy.
Several episodes over the past decade crystallised this perception. The 2016 raids by Nigeria’s Department of State Services on judges’ residences were among the most dramatic moments in the country’s judicial history.
The operation itself was controversial, criticised by many lawyers as executive intimidation. But the public reaction revealed something equally troubling: many Nigerians applauded. Not because they celebrated executive overreach, but because they already believed corruption within the judiciary had become systemic.
That instinctive public scepticism toward the bench would have been unimaginable a generation earlier. Then came the suspension of former Chief Justice Walter Onnoghen in 2019 over charges of non-declaration of assets, shortly before the national elections.
To supporters of the then-President, Muhammadu Buhari, it represented accountability in the fight against corruption. To critics, it appeared as political interference with judicial independence at a sensitive electoral moment. Either way, institutional confidence suffered.
But perhaps no judicial decision in recent memory generated more public disbelief than the 2020 Supreme Court ruling that removed Emeka Ihedioha as governor of Imo State and installed Hope Uzodinma in his place. The court accepted additional polling-unit results that had been previously excluded and recalculated the election outcome, elevating Uzodinma from fourth place to victory.
Legally, the judgment rested on technical reasoning about excluded votes. Politically and socially, however, many Nigerians viewed the decision as implausible.
The controversy exposed an uncomfortable reality about modern judicial legitimacy: legality alone is no longer sufficient. Courts must also persuade the public that outcomes are morally and democratically credible.
That credibility becomes even more fragile in election cases, where judges increasingly appear to determine political power itself. The debates surrounding the 2023 presidential election petitions involving Bola Ahmed Tinubu, Atiku Abubakar, and Peter Obi further intensified national anxieties about judicial independence and evidentiary standards.
For many Nigerians, the question was not merely whether the judgments were technically defensible. It was whether the judiciary still appeared institutionally detached from political power. Fast forward to more recent Court decisions on internal conflicts within some political parties, and it becomes even more obfuscating.
That distinction is crucial.
Courts cannot function effectively if large segments of the population begin to assume that outcomes are predetermined by executive political and other interests rather than by legal merit.
The danger here extends beyond elections and political matters. When citizens lose confidence in formal justice systems, they increasingly resort to informal alternatives such as bribery, violence, patronage, vigilantism, or ethnic arbitration. The result is institutional fragmentation.
History shows that this trajectory is reversible, though rarely quickly. In the 1960s, Singapore struggled with corruption across state institutions, including the judiciary. Under Lee Kuan Yew, the government pursued a blunt strategy: judges were paid competitively, corruption investigations became ruthless, and judicial appointments emphasised elite professional merit over patronage. Most importantly, corrupt officials faced visible consequences. Over time, judicial credibility became one of Singapore’s greatest economic assets.
Colombia confronted an even darker challenge in the 1980s and 1990s when drug cartels infiltrated state institutions through intimidation and bribery. Judicial reform required constitutional restructuring, public transparency in disciplinary proceedings, and security protections for judges handling organised crime cases.
India’s judiciary, despite enormous delays and political tensions, has preserved substantial public legitimacy, partly because its Supreme Court has increasingly positioned itself as a protector of ordinary citizens through expansive public-interest litigation.
The common lesson across these countries is simple: judicial trust is not restored through speeches. It is restored through visible integrity.
Nigeria’s path forward is neither mysterious nor impossible. Judicial appointments must become radically more transparent. Court administration must be modernised technologically. Specialised commercial courts should aggressively reduce case backlogs. Disciplinary processes must become public and credible. Most importantly, the judiciary must rediscover moral clarity in its rulings.
For decades, Nigeria’s courts derived authority not merely from legal procedure but from ethical courage. Judges were respected because citizens believed they were willing to confront power itself.
That moral reputation has weakened. And reputation, ultimately, is the judiciary’s only real currency.
Courts possess no armies. Their rulings are obeyed because society collectively accepts their legitimacy. Once citizens begin viewing judges as negotiators of elite interests rather than guardians of justice, institutional authority deteriorates rapidly.
The paradox of judicial power is that it appears strongest precisely when it is least doubted. Nigeria’s judiciary now confronts a defining choice.
It can continue drifting toward public cynicism, becoming yet another institution viewed through the lens of patronage and political influence. Or it can reclaim the role it once occupied, the nation state’s final moral anchor when other institutions fail.
History suggests that recovery remains possible. But only if integrity becomes visible again.
*Rekpene Bassey is the President of the African Council on Narcotics and a Security Specialist
