-By Abdul Mahmud
When the Sultan of Sokoto rose at the just concluded Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) Conference in Enugu to declare that “justice is now purchasable in Nigeria”, his words struck a raw national nerve. It was not merely an observation; it was an indictment. It was the voice of moral authority saying what Nigerians whisper under their breath in court corridors and in the dark alleys of daily life. Justice, once the hallowed preserve of principle, has become a commodity in the open bazaar of our democracy. The Sultan’s lament is not a hyperbole. It reflects a crisis that has eaten deep into the marrow of our legal system. Justice is not blind in Nigeria; it peers closely at the purse of the litigant. Those who command higher purchase power buy it. The poor man, unable to raise the Shekels, is left stranded on the steps of a courthouse that has become hostile to his hope. What should be the last sanctuary of the common man has mutated into a trading post of the powerful. No country progresses this way.
In a previous op-ed, I noted that we now live with “judges who have become kings who sit on imperial thrones where they measure justice by the Shekels”. That is not a metaphor stretched beyond its shape. It is reality. We have enthroned judges as kings in black robes, surrounded by the rites and rituals of power, dispensing justice not by law but by patronage. Richard Joseph’s conceptual coinage, prebendalism, which Oby Ezekwesili deployed at the same conference to rebuke the legal profession, best describes the patronage-clienteleism within the bench. The gavel, that ancient symbol of fairness, no longer falls with the weight of principle but with the heaviness of cash. In this new order, judgments are not delivered; they are purchased.
But how did we get here?
Two forces sustain this decay. The first is the culture of unaccountability. In Nigeria, judges are rarely punished – in the real sense of punishment – for misconduct. A judge who’s found to have fudged his age is merely given a wrap on the wrists. Voila, he is compulsorily retired! The act of forgery, which is a crime, is thus overlooked. No trials. No convictions. Only newspaper reports of the NJC dismissing judges – which are, of course, framed as aberrations, not the failure of a judicial system which provides soft landing for errant judges. The result is a bench that behaves like an untouchable caste, shielded from scrutiny by the black robe. The judicial branch that bends to its obsequious convenience, with unbothered judges sitting as kings above the law. The second force is more pernicious: the politicisation of the judicial process. As I wrote in the same op-ed, “A politicised judicial process invites corruption. When judges are seen as gatekeepers to power, the temptation to influence them becomes overwhelming. The judiciary, once the last hope of the common man, has become a marketplace of elite bargains. Those who command higher purchase power buy justice”. Politics has corrupted justice because every election dispute, every transfer of power, every clash of political titans, ends at the altar of the court. The judge, in such moments, ceases to be an impartial arbiter. He becomes a broker in the grand bazaar of power.
We are left with a tragic irony: the very institution meant to defend the law is now guilty of betraying it. And the consequences are grave. When justice is sold, the poor retreat from the law, and with them retreats faith in the social contract. When justice is sold, the rich grow more arrogant, convinced that the courts are but one more arm of their wealth. And when justice is sold, the very idea of the rule of law collapses. What replaces it is anarchy dressed in the garments of legality.
This is why the Sultan’s words must not be dismissed as mere rhetoric. They are an urgent call to conscience. Nigerians already live with cynicism about every institution. The legislature is seen as self-serving. The executive is viewed as predatory. The only branch that once retained a flicker of reverence was the judiciary. But now that flame is dimming. Once the judiciary becomes an auction house, what remains of our republic? Let us remember that nations do not collapse first through war or famine. They collapse when their institutions lose legitimacy. Rome did not fall merely because of the barbarian invasion; it fell because its institutions rotted from within. Nigeria faces the same danger. A judiciary that sells verdicts undermines the very possibility of citizenship. It tells the ordinary Nigerian: you do not belong here unless you can pay. And a citizen who does not belong ceases to believe in the nation itself. We have seen this rot play out in high-profile cases. Gubernatorial elections decided not by ballots but by dubious rulings. Here is that familiar case in point: a governorship candidate who came fourth in a returned poll was subsequently declared by the judges as the winner! Billionaire politicians escaping accountability with a wave of a judge’s hand. Corruption cases dragging for decades, only to end in acquittals for the wealthy while petty thieves rot in jail. Each of these stories is a needle piercing the fragile fabric of trust between citizens and the state. Each confirms the marketplace that our courts have become.
The question, then, is whether reform is possible. Can Nigeria reclaim its judiciary from this descent? Reform will require courage, courage from within the legal profession, and courage from the society that empowers it. Lawyers must refuse to be agents of manipulation, filing frivolous applications that clog the system and trading influence on behalf of their clients. Judges must be subjected to real accountability: transparent trials, open disciplinary records, and the removal of those who disgrace the robe. And above all, politics must be decoupled from justice. So long as the judiciary remains the final battlefield for political wars, it will remain compromised. But reform also requires something deeper: a cultural shift in how Nigerians think of justice itself. Justice cannot be reduced to transactions. It cannot be a trophy won by the rich. It must be a common good that protects the weak, restrains the strong, and binds society together. Without justice, there is no order; without order, there is no society. As the philosopher Heraclitus once said, “The people should fight for their law as they would for their city wall”. In Nigeria, we must fight for our judiciary as if our very survival depends on it.
Surely, we won’t realise that our lives depend on it, until Nigeria happens to us!
The Sultan’s cry at the NBA Conference is more than a passing lament; it is the cry of a nation wounded in its soul. His words carry the anguish of countless litigants who have knocked at the temple of justice only to be turned away by the gatekeepers of power. It is the voice of citizens who have been betrayed by the very institution meant to defend their dignity. It is the sigh of a democracy steadily hollowed out by corruption and elite bargains. In that moment, the Sultan did not speak for himself alone; he gave voice to the unspoken despair of millions.
We deceive ourselves if we think this is only about the poor. When justice is commodified, it poisons the entire body politic. The wealthy may think they can purchase verdicts, but in doing so they dismantle the very foundations that protect their own power. A court that sells judgments to one bidder today can just as easily sell them to another tomorrow. What begins as the privilege of the powerful ends as the peril of all. A nation that abandons justice abandons stability, for injustice is a fire that consumes indiscriminately.
History teaches us that when the courts fail, society itself unravels.
Rome, in its decay, learned that law without justice is merely violence in disguise. Nations of our own time, scarred by authoritarianism, remind us that when courts become markets, the people cease to believe in the state. Nigeria stands dangerously at that threshold. The gavel, once a symbol of fairness, risks becoming a tool of oppression. If this collapse is allowed to continue, the people will no longer seek redress in the courts; they will seek it in the streets. And when lawless streets replace lawful courts, democracy dies. A nation without justice is not a nation; it is a mere marketplace of power. And in marketplaces, bargains are struck, but no one truly wins. The powerful may strut like victors for a season, but the erosion of justice eventually sweeps them into the same abyss as the weak. The warning of the Sultan, therefore, is not a cry to be ignored. It is a summons to conscience, a call to rescue the judiciary before the ground beneath us gives way. For without justice, we are not citizens bound by law; we are only traders in a soulless bazaar where, in the end, everyone loses.