Nigeria: The Rise of Judicial Verdict Without Judgment
Over 18 years ago, The Economist described Nigeria as a 'democracy by court order,' a prophetic observation that has since become a stark reality. In the intervening years, partisan politicians have grown accustomed to deferring to judges, many of whom have emerged as aggressive combatants in Nigeria's political battles. This trend of political harlotry in the name of courts is increasingly international. In a recent article for the Journal of Democracy, Andrew O'Donohue of the Harvard Radcliffe Institute outlined five ways courts frequently undermine democracy: enabling authoritarianism, undermining credible elections, restricting civic rights, empowering non-elected elites, or indulging in a jurisprudence of excess jurisdiction. Many of these patterns are recognizable in Nigeria.
When the Sultan of Sokoto addressed the Nigerian Bar Association conference in August 2025, he complained that judicial verdicts had become a 'purchasable commodity.' In a rigged judicial market, the winners are almost always the most powerful—in Nigeria, that means politicians. However, the commodification of court orders is not the worst form of political prostitution of courts. The methods by which a judge can procure judicial complicity in partisan projects have become far simpler.
The Court of Appeal's infamous judgment in the appeal by David Mark, interim Chair of the African Democratic Congress (ADC), against an order of the Federal High Court, focused on determining primacy between the enrolled order of a court and the text of its ruling. The court ruled that the text must prevail in case of contradiction. Yet, it failed to acknowledge that such contradictions are anomalous and occur with disquieting regularity. This can be partly explained as human error under the febrile atmosphere judges work in, but much of the stress is self-inflicted. Replicating a practice akin to sex work, some judges seem eager to crawl the political kerb, displaying their judicial wares for grasping partisan customers. They habitually grant politicians implausible shunts on the queue, create exceptional jurisprudence without precedent, and assume jurisdiction where it is explicitly excluded. A not insignificant number of judges appear to believe that prostitution is too important to be left to sex workers alone.
These practices are designed to cause maximum benefit to one side in high-profile partisan disputes or maximum damage to another. For instance, when the Supreme Court assumed appellate jurisdiction to decide a case still pending in the Federal High Court in Port Harcourt, it did not pretend to be doing law. It simply chose a side in a partisan dispute, inflicting maximum damage on the other side while weaponizing its constitutional standing. Even this tendency could be managed if it stopped there, but it does not. The phenomenon of mutually contradictory orders by courts of equal jurisdiction, as Africa Report cautioned, 'threatens to lead Africa's largest democracy into chaos.' On April 22, 2026, the Supreme Court decided it lacked appellate jurisdiction over a decision of the Court of Appeal sitting as the final instance in appeals from the National Industrial Court of Nigeria (NICN). Two weeks later, on April 8, the same court inexplicably claimed jurisdiction to overturn a Court of Appeal decision in an appeal originating from the NICN involving a former Deputy Governor of Kogi State. The same Supreme Court cannot later claim it is overworked.
One trick in the toolbox of judicial duplicity is the indecipherable court order, often written in mangled syntax or Latin. Nigerians are now fed a diet of judicial orders requiring a return to 'status quo ante-bellum' by judges too lazy to specify when the 'bellum' began. The result is that instead of bringing finality to disputes, court decisions generate fresh controversies as different parties interpret the same judgment to suit their political interests. This is deliberate or at least foreseeable. One writer has described Nigeria's courts as 'authors of confusion.' Olusegun Adeniyi calls it the 'judicial route to anarchy.'
Another practice is the judicial verdict without judgment. More than a fortnight after the Supreme Court handed down judgments in party-political disputes involving the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and the ADC, the judgments remain unpublished. Similarly, nearly a week after a judge of the High Court of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) reportedly issued a judgment in defamation requiring SERAP to pay N100 million to two SSS officers, the judgment is still an item of judicial oral tradition. Despite best efforts, no one has seen it. This phenomenon of verdict without judgment creates damage and confusion. In the Kano Emirate dispute two years ago, Federal High Court judge Abdullahi Liman infamously ruled that an ex-parte ruling did not have to be seen by or served upon a party before it was binding. The audacity of requiring a party to inhale an order issued without a hearing was of no bother to a judge comfortable trading impunity for deliberation. He foisted on Kano the reality of two Emirs asserting judicially backed claims over one stool and got promoted to the Court of Appeal.
In politically tense situations, judicial verdict without judgment is often patented for irreversible harm. In the 2024 Ebonyi South Senate by-election, Federal High Court judge Hyeladzira Nganjiwa waited until two days before the ballot to disqualify the PDP candidate, Silas Onu, from the contest. It did not matter that he lacked jurisdiction because the claimants lacked standing. The design was to weaponize judicial power in favor of the ruling party candidate and crater the opposition's support without publishing any judgment. Over six months later, the Court of Appeal vacated the crooked order, but the judge had procured his design. Litigants in party political cases have long been used to judgment without justice. The phenomenon of verdict without judgment is new, however, because the absence of judgment is itself injustice, and the vacuum until it is produced can cause foreseeable and unpredictable damage. The scary thing is that it is impossible to say this is not deliberate, as evidence shows judgments can be available on the day they are issued. Some Nigerian judges do that as a matter of habit. Why many peers choose not to should bother the Chief Justice of Nigeria.
