By assigning priority to “political cases” in a manner that grants swift access to courts for politicians like Ahmad Lawan, but no exit from courts to ordinary citizens like Gladys Ukeje, Nigeria’s judiciary sustains a two-track judicial system by which it puts the interests of politicians above those of the citizens whom they are meant to serve… It is little wonder that some have resorted to describing Nigeria’s courts as the “lost hope of the common man”.
When Ogbonnaya Ukeje died in Lagos two days after Christmas Day in 1981, Bode Rhodes-Vivour was a 30 year-old lawyer making his way up the rungs of public service in the Ministry of Justice in Lagos State. Mr Rhodes-Vivour had been called to the Nigerian Bar a mere six years earlier, in 1975.
In 1989, when Mr Rhode-Vivour succeeded Nureini Abiodun Kessington as the director of Public Prosecutions in Lagos State, the case concerning the estate of Ogbonnaya Ukeje was already in its sixth year in the High…