Guest columnist By Chidi AnselmE Odinkalu
The year 1993 changed Nigeria’s judiciary. Over a period of a mere five months, the military that year contrived to overthrow the government twice. First, in June, Ibrahim Babangida, the army General who was Nigeria’s military ruler at the time, nullified an election his regime reorganised to determine who would succeed him. Five months later, in November of the same year, Sani Abacha, another General and then Defence Minister, overthrew the Interim National Government (ING), which Babangida had installed following his shameful abdication from power. On both occasions, the judiciary authored the overthrow.
At the end of his interminable transition, the Babangida regime had scheduled a vote to elect his civilian successor on 12 June 1993. But two days before the election, on 10 June, the regime procured a group known as the Association for Better Nigeria (ABN) to secure a court order prohibiting the National Electoral Commission (NEC) from undertaking the election.
The defendants in that suit included the NEC and its chairman, Humphrey Nwosu, a professor of political science, as well as Babangida and his federal Attorney-General, Clement Akpamgbo, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN). Rather unusually, both Babangida and Akpamgbo failed to enter an appearance or contest the case. Lawyers from the Federal Ministry of Justice, who usually represented their government in such cases, were strangely missing in action. Prof Omo Omoruyi, a close adviser to Ibrahim Babangida at the time, recalled that “this ambivalent position of the President and the Attorney-General has never been explained.”
