By Lasisi Olagunju
Anyone who has watched a hunting party in action will understand what is going on. What we have is a hunting expedition: beaters scour the bush, flushing the political parties—like duikers—towards INEC and the courts, where gunmen are properly positioned to take the killer shots.
The PDP is in Bello Turji’s captivity; the ADC is grappling with Unknown Gunmen; Seriake Dickson’s NDC is being dragged into the àbíkú forest; Accord and the SDP are closely watched by armed, sleeper-cell court cases. Other parties are peaceful because they are well-behaved neutered courtiers in the palace.
In 2026 Nigeria, opposition parties are food for the gods. Like fish in a point-and-kill pond, their days are troubled, nasty, numbered, and short.
“Yesterday, I attended the most high-level caucus meeting with the NWC of the African Democratic Congress (ADC) in Abuja…” This was posted on Facebook on July 11, 2025, by Nafiu Bala. He is the plaintiff in the case that led to last week’s attempted murder of the ADC by INEC.
Attached to Nafiu Bala’s Facebook post are three photographs of several men and women at the party leadership meeting. I easily recognised David Mark seated at the centre. Nafiu Bala and Mark appear in the three photos.
I checked the Facebook post yesterday. It was still there on Bala’s timeline. Check. It should still be there as you read this. So, at what point did Nafiu Bala start dragging the national chairmanship of that party with David Mark? What changed, or what forced the change?
Apart from the ruling party, all other parties with the potential to field a presidential candidate in 2027 are in trouble. The courts have become the weapon—the poisoned arrows doing the killing.
Why are the courts allowing their sacred boots to be set upon the profane ground of this march of shame?
A former INEC top shot declared recently that if Nigeria dies, the blood should be traced to the soiled hands of lawyers – “both the bar and the bench.” I have a friend who also told me two days ago that every crisis in Nigeria today is a creation of either the law or lawyers and judges.
Whether in INEC or in the courts; in the executive or the legislature, my friend asked me to check if the bad rats were not, in fact, lawyers. I warned her to desist from such perfidious thinking. I reminded her that the law is an ass—and apart from its braying, what else does an ass offer?
As we argued back and forth, our conversation drifted, as such conversations often do, to those who die yet refuse to die—men whose voices linger long after their bodies have taken leave.
On Thursday last week in Lagos, the fifth memorial lecture in honour of our departed friend and brother, Yinka Odumakin, was held. Speaker after speaker invoked his spirit, saying what he would have said at a moment like this—when the courts have become weapons of mass destruction in the space allocated to democracy.
It was in that mood, at that event, that Mr. Femi Falana, Senior Advocate of Nigeria, sounded a warning on the coming election which may come without a contest, and the bad imprints of courts and lawyers all over the mess.
He said: “Through the manipulation of Nigerian courts and senior lawyers, you may have only one candidate contesting the presidential election in this country. If that happens, Nigeria may not even need to spend money on a presidential election.”
He listed a plethora of instances where courts and lawyers deploy the law as a jackboot, trampling the canvas of justice in service of masters far removed from the chambers of equity and fairness. The ADC case was the peg of speeches at the event.
Falana said: “The Independent National Electoral Commission, headed by a Senior Advocate of Nigeria, issued a statement yesterday that based on the intervention of the court, ‘ADC, we shall no longer recognise you.’ And if a political party is not recognised, its members are not contesting the election.
“I say that INEC is wrong because the order granted by the court is, status quo ante bellum. You know, they use such terms to deceive us. What that means is, before the dispute, before the state of the war. So, who was in charge before that fellow went to court? It was David Mark. But that ruling has now been misinterpreted to favour the ruling party.
“When Nigerians say that the Tinubu government, the APC is trying to turn Nigeria into a one-party state, our courts and senior lawyers are to blame.
“I go to another political party that you know about. A man was destroying his political party, campaigning for the candidates of another party, asking the candidates of his own party to step down for the candidates of the ruling party. His party now said these activities were anti-party. The Federal High Court said, ‘Thou shall not suspend or expel him; he shall remain a member of that party, and continue to destroy the party.’ The same man has said, ‘Our party has no presidential candidate.’
“We are making these analyses not because APC, PDP, ADC are better (than one another); they are birds of a feather. But the Nigerian people must be allowed to choose among the oppressors who would govern them.
“What Nigeria is doing is a replica of what is going on in other African countries. A presidential election has just taken place in (one country). Opposition presidential candidates have been killed. Those who are lucky to be alive are in jail. In Tanzania, the most popular candidate was charged with treason, so while the election was going on, he was battling for his freedom.
“Our man who has just left here, (Omoyele) Sowore, of AAC, I’m sure you know he is facing many charges. So, instead of campaigning, Sowore would be making efforts not to be jailed. Even the other leader of the PDP has also been charged with contempt of court. In fact, the court made an order for his arrest, dead or alive, anywhere. They have temporarily suspended that, but he is going to be arraigned for contempt. So, at the end of the day, through the manipulation of Nigerian courts and senior lawyers, you may have only one candidate contesting the presidential election next year.
“My wife has assured me that with what is going on, Nigeria may have to save the money for the presidential election next year, because the way our courts are going, there will be no other candidate to challenge the candidate of the ruling party…”
Falana ended his speech with a call for a struggle against the one-man democracy covering our field of play.
A few years ago, when the US Supreme Court was “on the rampage, rolling back progressive gains,” historian David Renton wrote that “rights are won through struggle, (they are) not handed down by the courts.” Indeed, the courts cannot give what they do not have.
As we interrogate the roles being played by lawyers and judges in our politics, and in shaping opposition politics, I think I should draw attention to the danger that a particular book and its author pose to the stability of our nation and the development of its democracy.
Exactly 300 years ago, Jonathan Swift’s ‘Gulliver’s Travels’ was published. It is a book of contempt that should never have been published. Indeed, I cannot understand how it has escaped lawyers’ punishment since 1726, when it was inflicted on humanity.
Like the popular hymn book, Songs of Praise (SoP), a good book should only sing and praise; it should see no evil and speak none. But this one, and its author, lack such wisdom. I read the book thoroughly in secondary school, so I know what I am talking about.
I am more concerned about the book straying into the subversive hands of politicians in Nigeria. Unless our courts do something about it very urgently, politicians whose parties have died, or committed suicide, will start quoting from it to attack the courts and the My Lords who man them.
Now, consider this passage in that book of insults: “Judges… are picked out from the most dexterous lawyers, who are grown old or lazy, and having been biased all their lives against truth or equity, are under such a fatal necessity of favouring fraud, perjury and oppression, that I have known several of them to refuse a large bribe from the side where justice lay, rather than injure the faculty by doing anything unbecoming their nature in office” (Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, p. 232).
Imagine that! To Jonathan Swift, judges would naturally refuse generous bribes from the innocent, since their professional disposition inclines them toward the discharge of the guilty.
If that is not contempt, then nothing is.
There is also this, again against lawyers and judges: “I said there was a society of men among us, bred up from their youth in the art of proving by words multiplied for the purpose, that white is black, and black is white, according as they are paid. To this society, all the rest of the people are slaves” (p. 231).
All lawyers know what stare decisis is. It is a legal doctrine that requires courts to follow established precedents. The aim is to ensure consistency, stability, and predictability in the interpretation of law.
The Romans expressed it fully as stare decisis et non quieta movere. Black’s Law Dictionary renders it in English as: “To adhere to precedents, and not to unsettle things which are established.” If you ask the lawyer next to your bedroom, he will tell you that the doctrine is the foundation of common law systems.
Now, imagine one audacious writer saying this of that noble doctrine: “It is a maxim among these lawyers, that whatever hath been done before may legally be done again: and therefore they take special care to record all the decisions formerly made against common justice and the general reason of mankind. These, under the name of precedents, they produce as authorities, to justify the most iniquitous opinions; and the judges never fail of decreeing accordingly” (p. 232).
And then this: “That laws are best explained, interpreted, and applied by those whose interests and abilities lie in perverting, confounding, and eluding them.”
We all know those who explain, interpret, and apply the law.
Even the law itself, as powerful as it is, has not escaped the insult of the irreverent writer. The author says in a 1707 essay, that “laws are like cobwebs, which may catch small flies but let wasps and hornets break through.”
Talking about lawyers and jargons. The reigning phrase at this moment in Nigeria is “status quo ante bellum.” Literally, it means “the state of affairs existing before the war.” There is a huge fire as we speak over what the speakers of Latin mean by the status quo ‘jargon’. The meaning is not hidden, but because INEC is headed by a Senior Advocate of Nigeria, the commission has its own unique definition of what it means.
“You know they use such terms to deceive us. What that means is ‘before the state of the war.’ So who was in charge before that fellow went to court? David Mark. Do you understand me? But that ruling has now been misinterpreted to favour the ruling party,” Mr Femi Falana said on Thursday while weighing in on the ADC vs INEC war over “status quo ante bellum.”
Jonathan Swift saw this coming 300 years ago. So he wrote that lawyers take special care to multiply their jargon and, through that, “they have wholly confounded the very essence of truth and falsehood, of right and wrong, so that it will take thirty years to decide whether the field left me by my ancestors for six generations belongs to me or to a stranger three hundred miles off” (p. 233).
To think that all lawyers read Literature in secondary school and were required to pass it with credit at O’Level. If this book escaped their sword when they were in school, why have they not thought of doing something about it since they left school and are now big and powerful?
It is also Swift’s idea that humanity is plagued by a disease: “the nobles seek power, the people seek liberty, the kings seek absolute rule—and civil wars result.” A frightening diagnosis that sounds too close to home.
So, if the ruling party, its president, his INEC, and the courts want to continue enjoying the ransoms they exact from Nigerians, the time to ban that writer, his book and similar ones is now. The government can start the process today; the courts will complete the ban with a midnight judgment and a closed-door ratification. Today.
