In January 1993, Ibrahim Babangida was the military ruler of Nigeria. He was supposedly in the last year of an interminable transition at the end of which he promised to hand over power to an elected civilian administration. Moshood Abiola was actively canvassing to inherit that mantle.

As Chief Justice of Nigeria (CJN), Mohammed Bello was in his fourth year at the apex of the judicial system, resolving disputes between Abiola and Babangida during the transition from military to civil rule. He had been CJN since 1987.

At the time, Abiola was also Nigeria’s most influential newspaper publisher under the Concord Group. One of the titles published by the Concord Group was a weekly magazine called African Concord. Its editor was Bayo Onanuga (current President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s spokesman).

Former Chairman of Nigeria’s National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), Prof. Chidi Anselm Odinkalu

The previous month, in December 1992, Bayo Onanuga’s African Concord ran a cover under the title: ‘‘Justice Mohammed Bello: Kick him out now! Lawyers demand.”

Essentially, the story alleged that military ruler, Ibrahim Babangida, had bribed the Justices of the Supreme Court, led by CJN, Mohammed Bello, with gifts of exotic Mercedes-Benz cars. At the time, Mercedes-Benz was the most famous luxury brand in Nigeria.

This story would not have amounted to much but for what followed. Shortly after the New Year in 1993, nine of the Justices of the Supreme Court instructed Frederick Rotimi Alade (FRA) Williams, the doyen of Senior Advocates of Nigeria (SAN), to file a case before the High Court of Lagos State against the Concord Group, African Concord, and its editor, Bayo Onanuga, claiming that the story had defamed them.

The Concord Group instructed Stormy Petrel, Gani Fawehinmi, to represent them. At the Ikeja Division of the High Court of Lagos, where the case was tried, Samuel Omotunde Ilori, who would later rise to become the ninth Chief Judge of Lagos, presided.

This case had many subplots. It turned out, for instance, that Chief Williams’s youngest son, Tokunbo, who was shortly thereafter to become a SAN himself, was married to the daughter of the presiding judge, Olusola. When Gani Fawehinmi asked the judge to disqualify himself from the case, he declined, describing the request as “unprecedented” and an invitation to “an abdication of his sacred duty as a judicial officer.”

The then-Secretary to the Government of the Federation (SGF), Alhaji Aliyu Mohammed, the Wazirin Jema’a, was a witness in the case. In cross-examining him, Gani Fawehinmi asked for his qualifications.

Reluctantly, the SGF ventured that he was the proud holder of a Teacher’s Grade 2 Certificate, in response to which Gani spat out (to predictable courtroom mirth) “Teacher’s Grade Two certificate, and he rose through the ranks to become the SGF!”

Ultimately, the case was settled when Abiola elected to apologise to the Supreme Court Justices, who then instructed Chief Williams to withdraw it. In response, Bayo Onanuga resigned as editor of Chief Abiola’s African Concord.

The underlying issue in that case, however, was judicial independence and integrity. 32 years ago, it was an affront to the independence and integrity of judges to suggest that they could be impressed with gifts of cars or imply that they were on the payroll of political office holders.

Today, it is different. Senior judicial figures flaunt their propinquity to politicians and rely on that to subvert established rungs of authority among judges and between courts in the judicial hierarchy. It is now de rigeur for politicians to ply judges with cars.

Divining how the country got to this point is not that difficult, although it is not nearly as necessary as understanding when we did so.

When Mohammed Bello retired as CJN in 1995, Mohammed Lawal Uwais succeeded him. Justice Uwais was one of the justices confronted by the claims about collecting a car from the soldiers in 1992.

Although Uwais well understood that “military rule had a corrosive effect” on the judiciary and had not made much of an effort to disguise their campaign to reduce the heads of the judiciary to the status of beggars before the soldiers, he was nevertheless not prepared to cede much ground to them on questions of personal and institutional integrity.

Until his retirement in June 2006, the spectacle of politicians publicly gifting cars to judicial officers was not much part of Nigerian public life. All that was to change under his successors.

In effect, this business of the judges being reduced to beggars for Sub-Urban Utility Vehicles (SUVs) has all eventuated in less than two decades. It is difficult now to trace exactly when this change began.

It seemed likely, however, that the index case was –  as with many things in Nigeria – Lagos State. There are suggestions, at the time of writing, difficult to verify, that the practice of lacing judicial office with gifts of political housing and transport was quietly in place before 2007.

However, a significant moment for policy purposes occurred in the first week of October 2007 when freshly minted Governor of Lagos State, Babatunde Raji Fashola, SAN, presented 18 cars to magistrates in the state.

Daily Champion reported the presentation the day after it occurred under the caption “Lagos Government Dashes 18 Cars to Magistrates.”

In presenting the cars, Governor Fashola declared: “Our commitment to continuously improve the welfare package and conditions of service of judicial officers in the state places a reciprocal demand on magistrates to display professionalism, integrity and above all, a good work ethic.”

Of course, Magistrates’ Courts are state courts and subordinate ones at that. They are inferior to the High Court. But the significance of this moment was hardly lost on the politicians and the public. At the state level, the Judicial Service Commission (JSC) oversees the work of magistrates.

The Chief Judge of the state heads the JSC. At the federal level, that role belongs to the CJN. The JSC also controls the budget of the magistracy.

The issue was not that the government desired to uplift the well-being of magistrates, but that it chose to do so through a public presentation of cars by the governor for their “welfare”. The same goal could have been achieved if the JSC received the budget to be administered for precisely that objective.

If the governor chose not to do so, it would have been because he desired greater say in the management of the funds or he did not trust the hierarchy of the judiciary to manage it properly. It could, of course, be a matter of cause and effect between these two factors.

Giving credence to this, a former Justice of the Supreme Court, Ejembi Eko, publicly accused heads of courts in 2024 of “vandalisation of the judiciary budget” even though they were in control of heads of courts in Nigeria with “enormous budgetary resources.”

There were many issues related to the Lagos event in 2007 that should have warranted attention. The governor involved was a lawyer and SAN and the state involved was seen as one that sets trends in Nigeria. Yet, when car gifts occurred in 2007, the critical public missed both the event and its significance.

The number of cars purchased by governors for the judiciary at various levels in the 18 years since then has gone off the charts. Hopefully, the judges are in a better state for it because, quite clearly, the courts are not.

It happens that the NJC Guidelines governing the appointment of judges require, as a precondition, that every appointment round should be preceded by “proof of adequate Capital vote provision in the relevant approved Budget for the Superior Court of Record concerned.”

In other words, before judges are appointed, the NJC requires proof from the head of the court system concerned that there are sufficient funds to take care of critical provisions such as cars and housing for them. If politicians thereafter ply the judges with cars and other blandishments while the NJC looks away, it is not difficult to figure out what is happening.

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