History is not lacking in the infamous tradecraft of state propaganda and political spin. They are professional merchants of falsehood, the spin-doctors, who master the art of turning lies into political currency. In the chilling annals of Nazi Germany, Joseph Goebbels, Adolf Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda, earned notoriety for his ruthless doctrine: “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.” An ‘evil genius’ of some sort, Goebbels’ masterful manipulation of mass psychology laid the foundation for what would become modern state spin, a carefully manufactured narrative deployed to sedate or deceive the populace in the service of power.

In the 20th century, totalitarian regimes, including Stalinist Russia and Maoist China, weaponized disinformation as tools of political control. Even in democracies, spin doctors, that is, those behind-the-scenes whisperers, who massage public perception, have assumed pivotal roles, often conflating the lines between strategic communication and outright falsehood. From the Watergate scandal in Nixon’s America to Blair’s “sexed-up” Iraq dossier in Britain, the machinery of state spin has too often been used not to clarify, but to obfuscate. From the propagandists of Nazi Germany to modern political strategists, they shape narratives, flatten dissent, and obscure inconvenient truths. In democratic societies, the spin-doctor assumes a subtler but no less dangerous role, one of twisting facts not necessarily to oppress, but to distract, delay, and deflect. When curators of alternate truth operating from a parallel universe dance to the samba of spin, power abandons conscience and integrity in governance reigns supreme. In Nigeria, this craft is alive and well, with modern-day Goebbels raising spin to a cunning art form, whether distracting from illness, security crises, or governance failure.

Politically, spin presumes truth is malleable. It births a political culture where truth is disposable, and choreographed optical illusion is everything. Psychologically, it pits perception against substance. From this standpoint, spin functions as a coping mechanism, an avoidance behaviour aimed at delaying the confrontation with uncomfortable truths. But in sociological terms, especially in fragile democracies like Nigeria’s, spins are corrosive. They reflect a distrustful relationship between rulers and ruled. Indeed, they delegitimize institutions, foster conspiratorial mindset, and widen the already gaping trust deficit between the rulers and the ruled. Philosophically, it flirts with the idea that deception can serve a higher purpose. Spin raises the perennial dilemma posed by Plato’s Noble Lie: is it ever acceptable to lie for the ‘greater good’? But very rarely does spin invite moral reflection. Yet, every once in a while, conscience breaks through.

Quickly, let’s take a backward leap into history and recall the samba of conscience as a moral parable. In 1984, the legendary Afrobeat musician and social critic, Fela Anikulapo Kuti, was jailed by a military regime under dubious charges. While in prison, something extraordinary happened. The very judge who had sentenced him came to visit, remorseful, confessing that “his hands were tied” by the powers that be. Fela, never one to mince words, erupted: “Judge come beg me for forgiveness!” It was a scene of dramatic reversal—the oppressor undone by his own conscience, the prisoner now the moral authority. In response to the incident, an ace journalist, writing in their column, described the judge as “a lucky man who has a conscience that beats samba in his ears.” It was a poetic turn of phrase—suggesting that the judge’s late awakening, though insufficient, still marked him as one of the rare few in power whose conscience refused to die. Power humbled by remorse, the Justice’s act of contrition remains one of Nigeria’s most vivid moral parables.

Fast-forward to 2017, when the samba of spin drowned the din of conscience as Mallam Garba Shehu, former Special Assistant on Media and Publicity to late former President Muhammadu Buhari clung to the allurements of power to enroll himself into this infamous league of spin-doctors. In his recently launched book, According to the President: Lessons from a Presidential Spokesperson’s Experience, Shehu peeled the mask off his own complicity, recounting how he spun and concocted the now infamous “Rats ate the wires” story, which was purely a calculated lie designed to divert attention from President Buhari’s failing health in 2017. Mr. Shehu now admits in his memoir: “I concocted the rat story to divert attention from Buhari’s sickness…In my view, that spin worked.” There was no admission of wrongdoing. There was no sense of remorse; just a cold, tactical confession. If the judge in Maiduguri was dancing to the rhythmic cadence of his conscience, Shehu turned it into PR choreography.

In Chapter 10 of his book, Shehu recalled how the spin was born. A damaged cable was casually attributed to rats during a conversation in the Chief of Staff’s office. Faced with mounting media inquiries about Buhari’s health and capacity to resume duty, Shehu latched onto the rat theory and ran with it. At that time, the political atmosphere was toxic with speculations. Maazi Nnamdi Kanu, leader of IPOB, had publicly alleged that Buhari had died in the UK and had been replaced with a body double – Jibril from Sudan. The theory, ridiculous on the surface, nevertheless gained traction. An ex British MP for Falkirt West and Falkirt, Eric Stuart lent extra currency to the conspiracy theory when he pronounced then President dead by sending a condolence via his Twitter handle, @EricJoyce to Buhari’s wife.

Buhari’s prolonged absence, his visibly diminished public appearances, and evasive answers from presidential aides fertilized the soil for conspiracy to grow. And then came the rat story, a masterstroke of absurdity designed to shift national conversation from the President’s health to the exotic tastes of Nigerian rodents. The media, in Shehu’s words, “ate it up.” The BBC even ran it as one of the top stories of the day. Nigerians – half disbelieving, half amused – gasped, laughed, and moved on. But what seemed like a clever deflection was, in truth, a brazen betrayal of public trust. Now, years later, Garba Shehu confesses, not with contrition, but with a touch of boastful reflection, as though he were proud of having pulled off a master-class in distraction, not minding the objections of VP Yemi Osinbajo and Minister Lai Mohammed. If only Mr. Shehu appreciated the self-destructive implications of his open admission of guilt, he would have thought twice before yielding to the primitive pressure of spin, all in the name of blind loyalty to his principal.

Was Buhari better or worse for it? Did the rat story save his image or expose his vulnerability? Did it stabilize the Nigerian State or sow deeper distrust? These are questions Garba Shehu must answer. Because for all his bravado and braggadocio, the cost of his spin was not paid by him alone; instead, it was borne by the Nigerian people that for weeks debated the metaphysics of presidential identity. He never did. Mr. Shehu may have written a book, but he has also written himself into a corner—a character, whose conscience wouldn’t let him rest until he confessed, albeit too late. Unfortunately, the confident swagger and revelry with which he swooned all through his rat spin like a WWII hero hardly suggested the disposition of a contrite heart. This is less-surprising in a political culture where truth is disposable, and image or optical illusion is everything; where the capacity to leverage state power to manipulate citizens, gaslight a nation, and bury the truth under convenient fiction suffices as a political capital.

There is a moral injury here. Shehu, by his own account, deliberately misled the nation. He was not merely a loyal aide trying to buy time for his boss; he was a craftsman of deception, peddling bare-faced lies in the guise of official communication. That the story “worked” for a time does not make it any less dishonest; nor does it absolve the institutional complicity of the presidency and those in it who allowed, endorsed, or benefitted from the ruse. Lai Mohammed, Nigeria’s former Information Minister, and Vice President Yemi Osinbajo may have disagreed with the rat decoy as Mr. Shehu openly admitted, but their dissent was quiet and ineffective. This silence, this complicity by omission, is how systems of deception thrive. If truth had more defenders within the Villa than fiction, Shehu’s story might have ended differently. But it did not and the nation paid the price.

What then shall we say of a government that needed rats to explain away its own decay? How many of those wrong-headed policies such as ‘Ways and Means’ financing were curated, concealed, or amplified by Garba Shehu’s media machinery? How much public memory was sculpted by sanitized narratives—from rodents to survival through foreign medicine? Did his spin help fuel decisions that harmed the nation? Did his lies cover the tracks of incompetence, negligence, or worse? Perhaps, the samba beat of his conscience might have been deafening; yet, the pull of hubris would nudge him on to double down.

Perhaps, Mr. Shehu was not a lone ranger in this spin business. In the early years of the Buhari administration, a grotesque tragedy played out in Benue State in January 2017. Scores of farmers were massacred by armed herders in what turned into a humanitarian and security catastrophe. Roughly 71 caskets were laid out in a gory precision awaiting mass burial. It was such a heart-wrenching sight! The visceral grief of bereaved communities prompted national outrage; yet, it also inspired one of the most damning examples of spin-driven cynicism from the seat of power. During an appearance on AIT, the presidential spokesperson, Mr. Femi Adesina, was asked about the violence and the ancestral claims of displaced farmers. His response was chilling in its callousness: “Ancestral attachment? You can only have ancestral attachment when you are alive…; if you are dead, how does the attachment matter?” He went further, urging victims to surrender their land for ranching to preserve their lives. “People should offer land for peace sake…if you have land that you can give, give”. The message to Nigerians was clear. Abandon your heritage or end up dead. You can either freely choose to die defending your land, or parcel out your community, and it is your fault if you cannot let go.
Few days before late former President Buhari was committed to mother earth, Mr. Adesina revved up the spin engine with a self-indicting statement, intended as a defence of his boss’ reliance on UK hospitals as a matter of survival. “He always had his medicals in London…One has to be alive first to get certain things corrected… If he had said, ‘I will do my medicals in Nigeria…’ he could have long been dead because there may not be the expertise needed.” This “survival spin” amounted to a confession that under Buhari, Nigeria failed to invest in healthcare. For over eight years, spanning both military and civilian tenure, Buhari never built a worldclass hospital capable of serving him or Nigerians. That failure wasn’t side-lined; it was crowed about. Adesina’s boast underscores the depth of systemic neglect. Nigeria’s healthcare failed its own president, and its citizens. The irony? Buhari still died in London after billions were spent protecting his life abroad.

All the spins, all the evasions, all the billions wasted; yet, the inevitable caught up. And in death, even the most fortified lies dissolve into dust. It’s now left for Nigerians to learn, reflect, and demand more than rats and rationalizations. Who knows how many modern-day spin-doctors walk the hallowed corridors of power, crafting tales, fabricating narratives, and spinning half-truths to shield powers and principalities from public scrutiny? Let them ask Shehu and Adesina: “How market?” Perhaps, they may be tempted to stay the course of spin and still answer, ‘It is working’. Luckily, no amount of spin can cancel the verdict of conscience or erase the testimony of the oppressed. Let them ‘carry dey go’.

Finally, the Fela–Judge episode reminds us that true accountability can come from the unlikeliest of sources. Conscience, when unavoidable or inescapable, can upend power. The samba of conscience can shake the high and mighty. This explains why Nigeria needs a samba for conscience, not spin. The samba of conscience must become a thunderclap of reform. But Nigeria needs more than samba; it needs change. Words of admission must lead to reform – invest in world-class healthcare; stop using injury and fear as policy excuses; demand honesty, not spin. Let today’s spin-doctors remember the lessons of rats, London hospitals, ancestral land, and public confession. Let the surge of conscience not be ornamental but catalytic because, truth may dance slowly, but eventually, it leads the samba.

The samba of spin-doctors’ conscience may play softly in the background. But the question remains: Will it grow loud enough to awaken others? Or will it fade, drowned by new distractions, new rats, and new deceptions? For Nigeria’s sake, let the din of conscience knock down the ‘Jericho Walls’ of spin and liberate the Nigerian State from the crisis of conscience.

It takes enormous courage, strong will and conviction to share the inner secrets of a personal life, with all the misfortunes, the bad and the ugly, including childhood abuse, a turbulent marriage, cultural taboos, and racial discrimination at work, even when all ends in exceptional successes.

That is exactly what Resilient is about. A 425-page memoir of Christina Kanayo Achebe-Mordi, a Registered Nurse (RN), Legal Nurse Consultant (LNC) with a Doctorate in Professional Studies (DPS), focusing on Bioethics and almost three decades’ professional experience in the US.

Christina took the ‘Ada’ moniker in the memoir, a child from a poor background in a community with cultural, religious and traditional practices among the Igbo of Eastern Nigeria and many other African societies.

Rising from the scars and traumas of child abuse, challenged adulthood, an abusive marriage, involving intermittent separations/estrangement, and being forced to perform traditional rites of reconciliation after the husband absconded, Ada endured a painful motherhood and widowhood. Still, she transformed herself into an advocate and champion of voiceless children and women victims of what she went through.

Resilient is a collection from Ada’s diligently kept diary, partly written in Pittman’s shorthand, translated into four engaging chapters of captivating stories. It sheds light on some undiluted truths rarely spoken aloud, such as incest and other atrocities that linger in the shadows of Igbo/Africa cultures as secrets but shameful realities of many families.

Chapter one begins with the story of Ada’s mother, Mma’s unplanned pregnancy, and how Umeadi, her secret lover responsible for the pregnancy, and who later became her husband and Ada’s father, deserted Mma in Abba village in the present-day Anambra State, South-Eastern Nigeria.

Mma herself, the first daughter among five siblings (three girls and two boys), had experienced hard labour in her village. It was while running errands that she met Umeadi, who escaped to Lagos due to the pregnancy.

Even after giving birth to a baby boy, Uche, Mma still endured the wrath of the powerful Umuada, the women’s group of the community, who must administer the mandatory rites of punishment to any woman who had a child outside wedlock.

“What were you thinking? That nobody will catch you when you are frolicking in sin? Whoever did this (pregnancy) to you? Well, it is not his fault because you… did not close your legs,” the women leader chastised. Absorbing the ridicule in silence, Mma’s tears flowed and dropped on her innocent baby.

The memoir uses Mma’s case to illustrate the plight of millions of Nigerian/African girls saddled with unplanned pregnancies, many resulting in deaths and high maternal mortality rates.

After many months, Umeadi’s kinsmen sent emissaries to him in Lagos about Mma’s status and counselled marriage between them. Umeadi owned up to being the father of Mma’s pregnancy but was unprepared for child’s care.

It took about five years after Ada’s elder brother was born before Umeadi’s family elders went to Lagos to force him home and marry Mma.

When Mma eventually joined Umeadi in Lagos, he had a live-in lover. All the same, he and Mma had a white wedding at St. Dominic’s Catholic Church, Yaba, Lagos, in 1961.

Even so, the arrival of Ada (the first female child in Igbo), and the second child in Umeadi’s family was not what Mma expected. In Igbo land and many African cultures, a woman’s life revolved around the patriarchal man’s world. Umeadi had wanted another male child and openly told Mma: “She (Ada) is a girl and, therefore, another man’s property… of no significance in my home.”

At his dilapidated ghetto home in Abule Ijesha, Lagos, Umeadi thrived as a squatter landlord. He also became notorious for disappearing from home to escape his parental responsibilities.

Chapters two and three capture Mma’s pains, humiliation and difficulties in raising her children in the slum without emotional or financial support from Umeadi. To console herself, she usually sang native songs and told her children teachable life stories, which resonated with little Ada, who enjoyed her mother’s songs more than her lengthy prayers.

In an era of ground latrines and open defecation, Ada fell ill frequently and had ugly encounters with the hooded night-soil men, the “agbepos” in her community that lacked water-system toilets, and where shack dwellers tapped electrical energy to light up their homes and petty business centres.

Ada remembers her father’s gambling, drunkenness and her being rescued from drowning in the shanty flood, an incident that earned her the wrath of her mother, but ignited her Christian faith and closeness to God, through constant prayers.

Umeadi and Mma were blessed with four children: Uche, Ada, Echi, and Friday (three sons and a girl) before the Nigerian Civil War of 1967-70 broke out, when the Igbo of southeastern Nigeria unsuccessfully attempted to secede as independent Republic of Biafra.

Umeadi was drafted into the civil war, while Mma took their four children to Abba village, in eastern Nigeria, like most Igbo people did then. Umeadi had no home in the village, so Mma was given a space in her in-laws’ home with strict instructions to fend for her children.

In the village, Ada could not escape the traditional Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) with unsterilized instruments. The practice is known to have led to excessive bleeding and even death of some female victims.

At six years old and recovering from the painful circumcision, Ada was bartered off as a child labourer to a wealthy farmer who sent food items to Mma in exchange for Ada’s chores as a maid servant, a fancy word for a “slave girl.”

Ada received a message from her mother a few months later that her younger brother, Friday, had died, apparently from “kwashiorkor,” a disease linked to malnutrition.

Part of Ada’s experience during the war was moving with the farmer to a new farmhouse, where residents dodged bullets and witnessed the devastation of bombs, including “ogbunigwe,” the Biafran-made mass killer.

After the 30-month civil war, Ada returned to Mma, and along with her two other siblings, all joined Umeadi in Lagos. The couple had two additional children, all girls and albinos. Umeadi rejected them and insinuated infidelity. His allegation of adultery was untrue, but Mma was helpless. Ada saw her father verbally and physically abuse her mother, who only sang mournful songs in tears.

Mma’s story is one of strength in suffering, rejection, shame and abandonment in an abusive marriage. While Ada sympathised with her mother, she was disappointed that Mma failed to rescue her daughter from being abused by her father.

Umeadi eventually died in a car crash. Curiously, out of six passengers crammed into a vehicle on that fateful journey, he was the only fatality. Before then, Mma had died in 1978 from prolonged ill-health arising from domestic violence.  While Umeadi’s body was taken to Abba for burial, Mma was buried at the Atan Cemetery, Lagos, against Abba culture of “ozu nwada Abba adiato namba.”

With the demise of her mother, Ada took on the responsibility of caring for her albino sisters, who were barely a year old, including soliciting breast milk from a generous woman to feed her younger sister, Tonia.

Ada’s heart-wrenching story, presented in a no-holds-barred style, will resonate with victims and hopefully prick the conscience of society into taking remedial action.

By divine delay, Ada only started menstruation at 15, which prevented a possible ‘in-breeding’ of an offspring from incestuous attacks. She was able to complete elementary education, but could not proceed to secondary school due to a lack of funds.

However, as a private student, Ada did well in the West African Examination Council’s tests and also trained as a Secretary at a Commercial Institute, which enabled her to secure her first job as a Confidential Secretary with a company in Lagos.

Umeadi remarried, and after Mma’s death Ada rented an apartment and moved out of her father’s house with her two sisters. One of them died mysteriously years later in Lagos.

Ada established herself in the media and entertainment industries, working as an award-winning presenter at Radio Nigeria. She also won laurels as an actress, which brought her in contact with Nigeria’s Nobel laureate, Wole Soyinka, after the Ajo Arts Festival in August 1986.

Resilient also featured Ada’s love affairs, including vacations to London and the US.

Back from the American vacation in 1988, she returned to her Radio Nigeria job and landed a more lucrative bank job, which she declined. Ada finally relocated to the US in 1990 on the invitation of the man whom she eventually married. They had their white wedding in 1991.

Despite discovering her husband’s previous arranged marriage and other secrets,  and enduring domestic violence, arrest and detention for trumped-up charges by him, Ada still raised their two children to higher university degree level, and is a grandmother today.

She supported her husband in his decision to relocate to Nigeria, where he passed on in 2023, leaving her a widow. *Resilient* is available on the Amazon platform.

An award-winning Journalist, Paul Ejime is a Media/Communications Specialist and Global Affairs Analyst.

The ritual of the “Call to Bar” is the formal ceremony for the admission of new entrants into Nigeria’s legal profession. The responsibility for administering it resides in the Body of Benchers (BoB), a statutory entity described by law as “a body of legal practitioners of the highest distinction in the legal profession in Nigeria.”

The solemnity of the Call to Bar is guaranteed by the presence of members of the BoB who administer the ceremony resplendent in ceremonial gowns supposed to testify to their high distinction in matters legal. The criteria for the determination of this threshold requirement of “highest distinction” antecedent to membership of the BoB are, however, opaque.

The ceremony itself is usually an occasion for members of the Body of Benchers to remind the new entrants of the obligations that come with their new status. It should go without saying that members of the BoB should themselves embody those values through their own records and examples. It should be no surprise that, in Nigeria, this is not usually the case.

There are three categories of membership of the BoB. Membership can exceptionally be honourific, mostly vacuous conferment reserved for political or diplomatic occasions. Separately, there is ordinary membership attained through high office in public service as judges or Attorneys-General or as leaders or nominees of the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA). Such membership these days also extends to the chairpersons of the judiciary committees of the two chambers of the National Assembly as well as to principal officers of the National Assembly who are lawyers. Members who are conscientious in attending meetings and official dinners of the BoB over a period of four years may be conferred with the status of Life Benchers. That is the stuff of high distinction.

The most recent Call to Bar ceremony occurred in Abuja, the Federal Capital Territory, over three days from 23 to 25 September 2025. Away from the cameras, on 24 September, something happened which speaks to the existential – even terminal – crisis of values, leadership and responsibility that currently afflicts the governance of Nigeria’s legal profession. At the insistence of certain members of the BoB, Chief Mike Ozekhome, one of the members elevated to the status of Life Bencher only in January 2025, was prevailed upon to quietly withdraw from participating in the process of admitting the new entrants into the legal profession.

The reason given by the objecting members of the BoB was a judgment delivered a mere six weeks earlier on 11 September 2025 in his ultimately unsuccessful application for registration of title in real estate before a property registration tribunal in England, in which the presiding judge shredded Ozekhome’s testimony as “an invention and contrivance.” According to Gideon Christian, a law professor at the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada, “this case illustrates how corruption operates (in Nigeria): politicians hide wealth abroad under false identities, while lawyers – sworn to uphold the law – serve as enablers of fraud.”

The most significant aspect of the enforced withdrawal of Chief Ozekhome from the Call to Bar ceremonies last month is not that it occurred. It is that the BoB went out of its way to ensure that it was a well-guarded secret. It is relevant here that in addition to its role in admitting new entrants into the vocation of the law in Nigeria, the BoB also hosts the Legal Practitioners Disciplinary Committee (LPDC), the statutory body charged with enforcing consequences for ethical lapses in Nigeria’s legal profession. When it comes to cases affecting senior lawyers, however, the BoB seems to lapse into a habit of no consequence.

On 10th December 2021, the Supreme Court of Nigeria determined that Michael Aondoakaa, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria, (SAN), and former Attorney-General of the Federation, HAGF “had, by his conduct, undermined and subverted the administration of justice and the independence, authority and integrity of the judiciary” and “ought not to be entrusted with any other public office at all.” In effect, the Supreme Court barred Mr. Aondoakaa from public office again in Nigeria. The antecedents of this decision were staggering.

Ahead of Nigeria’s 2007 general elections, political parties had organized processes in 2006 to select their candidates for various offices to be contested across the country. In Uyo Federal Constituency of Akwa Ibom State, the then ruling party, the Peoples’ Democratic Party (PDP), in primaries conducted in December 2006, selected Bassey Obot as candidate to fly their flag in the contest for a seat in the House of Representatives. In a country where the most consequential things are accomplished by the unknown, some unknown persons contrived to remove Mr. Obot’s name from the records of the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, substituting him with one Mr. Bassey Etim as the PDP candidate.

In December 2007, the Court of Appeal ordered the President of the Court of Appeal to constitute a new tribunal in Uyo to hear Mr. Obot’s case. Mr. Aondoakaa, then newly installed as the HAGF, wrote to the President of the Court of Appeal (PCA) claiming powers to instruct him not to comply with the order of the Court of Appeal. He cited as his reason the fact that he was considering a petition from Mr Etim. Unable to contrive a sensible reason to disobey the order of a court over which he presided, however, the PCA disregarded Mr Aondoakaa’s importuning and obeyed the Court of Appeal.

In April 2008, the Tribunal decided in favour of Mr Obot, ordering INEC to certify him as the winner, so he could be sworn in as such. The Court of Appeal, the final arbiter then in disputes over elections to Parliament, affirmed the judgment of the tribunal. In separate letters thereafter to the INEC Chairman and to the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Mr Aondoakaa again required them to disobey and disregard the final orders of the Court of Appeal. They complied. Allegations that Mr Aondoakaa issued those letters in exchange for value were unverified but not implausible.

On 15th May 2009, Mr Obot, whose judicial victory had been frustrated by the HAGF, returned to the Federal High Court, asking it to declare that Mr Aondoakaa had abused his office and desecrated the independence and authority of the judiciary. On 1st June 2010, the Federal High Court obliged him, lamenting that “the hallowed office of the HAGF has been desecrated and put into disrepute with the likes of (Mr Aondoakaa) being appointed and occupying it. It is meant for learned eminent members of the Bar and not for political charlatans, jobbers or latter-day praise singers/converts….”

On 3rd September 2015, the Court of Appeal affirmed that judgment of the High Court with the hope that “that office (of HAGF) should never again be occupied by individuals of such poor quality as (Mr Aondoakaa).” The Court of Appeal went further and invited the Nigerian Bar Association, NBA, “to subject (Mr Aondoakaa) to its appropriate disciplinary processes.”

In his appeal to the Supreme Court, Mr Aondoakaa did not deny what he did but claimed that he only acted as an adviser in the letters he wrote and that the recipients were at liberty to disregard his opinion. The Supreme Court made short shrift of Aondoakaa’s chicanery. Describing his conduct as “reprehensible,” “reckless” and “unbecoming of the occupant of such an exalted office,” the Court accused him of violating Rule 30 of the Rules of Professional Conduct (RPC) in the Legal Profession which require every lawyer to refrain from doing “any act or conduct….in any manner that may obstruct, delay or adversely affect the administration of justice.”

Before Mr Aondoakaa, there was the case of Kunle Kalejaiye, SAN, involved in corrupting a judge, Thomas Naron, in an election petition. In 2013, Thomas Naron lost his job but the Supreme Court decided in 2019 on a disreputable technicality that Mr. Kalejaiye could keep his. Two years later, the same court similarly decided that there should be no consequences in the case of Dr. Joseph Nwobike, another SAN whose specialty was “inducing court registrars to ensure that his cases were assigned to his preferred judges so he could obtain favourable judgments.”

Chief Mike Ozekhome is rightly described as “one of Nigeria’s most high-profile lawyers.” Few will quibble with his claim to be serenaded in those terms. In addition to being a Life Bencher, Chief Ozekhome is also a SAN. The combination of these two attainments makes him one of the most senior lawyers in Nigeria. His is only the latest in a long line of senior lawyers whose relationships with the rules of professional conduct appears to be governed by a “Teflon rule of no consequence”

A lawyer and a teacher, Odinkalu can be reached at chidi.odinkalu@tufts.edu

I. Introduction

This brief establishes, on legal and evidentiary grounds, that ongoing atrocities committed by Boko Haram, ISWAP, Fulani militant herders, and allied extremist networks constitute genocide under international law, specifically Article II of the Genocide Convention, as domesticated by the Rome Statute to which Nigeria is a signatory.

While the Nigerian government has often dismissed international outcry as exaggerated or politically motivated, the intent, acts, and systematic targeting of identifiable religious and ethnic groups — particularly Christians in the Middle Belt and North-East — meet all the constituent elements of genocide.

This brief focuses not on the language of diplomacy, but on the factual architecture of extermination sustained by state inaction and international indifference.

II. Legal Framework: Definition of Genocide

Under Article II of the Genocide Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, as such:

1. Killing members of the group;

2. Causing serious bodily or mental harm;

3. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

4. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

5. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

III. Element 1 — Killing Members of the Group

Legal Requirement:

The deliberate killing of individuals because of their membership in a protected group.

Factual Correlation in Nigeria:

Boko Haram’s founding declaration under Mohammed Yusuf (2002–2009) called for the elimination of Christians and “Westernized Muslims”, identifying Christianity as the religion of the Book (Ahl al-Kitab) and Western education as haram — sinful and corrupting. The coded expression “Boko Haram” (Book is Forbidden) is thus a religious death warrant against Christians and their institutions.

Documented Attacks:

1. 2011 Christmas Day Bombing of St. Theresa Catholic Church, Madalla — 44 killed, 70 injured.
2. 2014 Chibok School Abduction — over 270 Christian girls targeted from a government secondary school known for Christian studentship.
3. 2018–2023 Plateau and Benue massacres — hundreds killed in Christian-majority communities such as Barkin Ladi, Agatu, and Miango.
4. 2023 Mangu, Plateau State — over 200 villagers, mostly Christians, murdered by Fulani militants in coordinated night raids.

Each of these attacks demonstrates not random violence but targeted elimination of Christians identified as the “people of the Book.”

IV. Element 2 — Causing Serious Bodily or Mental Harm

Legal Requirement:

Torture, mutilation, rape, or psychological trauma aimed at destroying group life or integrity.

Factual Correlation in Nigeria:

Rape and Enslavement: Captured women and girls — including the Chibok, Dapchi, and Leah Sharibu cases — were forcibly married, raped, or converted to Islam, creating generational trauma in affected Christian communities.

Psychological Terror: Villages have been burned, children made to witness parents executed, and pastors beheaded on camera. The public broadcasting of killings is a psychological weapon of terror designed to paralyze the Christian population into silence and displacement.

Trauma-Induced Displacement: Over 3 million internally displaced persons (IDPs) in the North-East are overwhelmingly Christian minorities suffering post-traumatic stress from sustained attacks.

These acts meet the Akayesu standard (ICTR, 1998), where rape, torture, and persecution constituted serious bodily and mental harm within the meaning of Article II(b).

V. Element 3 — Deliberately Inflicting Conditions of Life Calculated to Destroy the Group

Legal Requirement:

Creation of living conditions (starvation, forced displacement, systemic denial of protection) intended to cause the group’s destruction.

Factual Correlation in Nigeria:

Occupation of Ancestral Lands: Fulani militants have taken over thousands of Christian farmlands across Benue, Plateau, Southern Kaduna, and Taraba, ensuring economic strangulation and starvation of survivors.

Destruction of Livelihoods: Villages razed and churches reduced to ashes — with no state resettlement plan or compensation — create deliberate, sustained uninhabitability.

State Complicity: The refusal to arrest perpetrators or rebuild Christian villages reinforces a climate of intended annihilation by abandonment.

Internal Displacement Camps: Conditions in IDP camps — overcrowding, hunger, lack of schools and medical care — mirror the “conditions of life” test applied in Prosecutor v. Karadžić (ICTY), where forced displacement and deprivation of basic needs amounted to genocidal intent.

VI. Element 4 — Imposing Measures Intended to Prevent Births within the Group

Legal Requirement:

Policies or acts (sexual violence, forced marriages, sterilization, or separation of sexes) designed to prevent the group from reproducing.

Factual Correlation in Nigeria:

Systematic Rape of Captive Girls: Boko Haram’s sexual slavery, forced pregnancy, and religious conversion of abducted Christian girls are designed to erase Christian lineage through forced Islamization of offspring.

Gender-Based Violence: Pregnant women murdered or mutilated during raids; hospitals and clinics destroyed in Christian settlements, ensuring maternal deaths and infertility.

Forced Conversions: Children of abducted Christian women raised as Muslims, effectively preventing the continuity of the Christian bloodline within affected communities.

This meets the jurisprudence of Prosecutor v. Akayesu, where sexual violence and forced impregnation were recognized as genocidal acts intended to destroy a group biologically.

VII. Element 5 — Forcibly Transferring Children of the Group to Another Group

Legal Requirement:

The removal of children from their group and placement under the control of another, thereby severing cultural and religious identity.

Factual Correlation in Nigeria:

Abductions in Chibok, Dapchi, and Zamfara: Thousands of children kidnapped and indoctrinated under jihadist control. Many converted, renamed, and assimilated into extremist households.

Reports by UNICEF and Amnesty International confirm that abducted children are taught Arabic, Quranic indoctrination, and trained as child soldiers — an act of forced cultural transfer.

Government Failure to Reclaim or Rehabilitate: The continued disappearance of children and official silence solidify the act’s permanence — satisfying the element of forcible transfer.

VIII. Establishing Intent (“Dolus Specialis”)

Under international law, intent may be inferred from:

• Systematic patterns of killing and targeting;
• The nature of the attacks;
• Public statements and propaganda;
• The scale and repetition of atrocities.

Evidentiary Basis in Nigeria:

Boko Haram’s Manifestos and Sermons: Mohammed Yusuf and Abubakar Shekau both proclaimed a mission to “cleanse Nigeria of Christianity and Westernization.”

Public Statements: Shekau’s 2012 broadcast declared: “We are at war with Christians generally.”

Target Patterns: Repeated massacres during Christian services, Christmas celebrations, and school gatherings demonstrate intent to annihilate the group in part.

Failure of State Intervention: The Nigerian government’s repeated refusal to prosecute attackers or rebuild Christian communities constitutes tacit approval, satisfying the Mens Rea element of “knowledge and acceptance” in genocidal policy under Jelisić v. The Prosecutor (ICTY, 1999).

IX. Juridical Comparison

Precedent Case Conduct Comparable Nigerian Reality

1. Rwanda (ICTR, 1998):
   • Targeted killings of Tutsis by militias with state complicity
   • Targeted killings of Christians by Boko Haram/Fulani militias with state inaction
2. Bosnia (ICTY, 2001):
   • Forced displacement and starvation as genocidal tools
   • Displacement and occupation of Christian communities in Middle Belt
3. Darfur (ICC, 2009):
   • Systematic rape and village destruction
   • Widespread sexual slavery, razing of Christian villages
4. Akayesu (ICTR, 1998):
   • Rape as means of preventing births
   • Forced impregnation and Islamization of abducted Christian girls

X. Conclusion: Beyond Diplomatic Denial

The Nigerian situation, when assessed under Article II of the Genocide Convention, satisfies each element in form and substance:

Article II Clause Documented Incident / Pattern in Nigeria

(a) Killing members: Church bombings, mass executions, community purges
(b) Serious harm: Rape, torture, psychological terror
(c) Conditions of destruction: Land seizures, starvation, displacement
(d) Preventing births: Forced marriages, sexual enslavement
(e) Transfer of children: Kidnapping and indoctrination of minors

It is no longer defensible — legally or morally — to dismiss this as “communal clashes” or “banditry.”

The intent, acts, and pattern establish a continuing genocide against Christians in Northern and Middle Belt Nigeria.

XI. Recommendations

1. International Inquiry: Establish a UN-mandated Commission of Inquiry on Nigeria’s religious violence.

2. Universal Jurisdiction: Encourage prosecution of principal actors under the Rome Statute through ICC mechanisms.

3. Domestic Accountability: Enforce constitutional protection for life and religion under Sections 33 and 38 of the Nigerian Constitution.

4. Protection of Victims: Secure IDPs, rebuild destroyed communities, and end impunity through a National Genocide Remembrance Act.

Prepared by: Citizen Bolaji O. Akinyemi, Apostle and Nation Builder