Tinubu’s speech was for Omotosho, Lawal Garba, Haruna Tsammani, ‘three men who disfigured Nigerian justice’

By Emma Powerful

If there is any group in Nigeria that should tremble when President Tinubu lectures about the rule of law, it is not politicians. It is not security agencies. It is not even the EFCC. It is three judges — James Omotosho, Lawal Garba, and Haruna Tsammani. Because nobody in recent history has done more to vandalise the Constitution and destroy judicial integrity than these men.

Let us state it accurately and without fear:

1. Consider Justice James Omotosho, the Federal High Court’s ‘Chief Architect of Judicial Lawlessness’. Omotosho has become the emblem of a broken judiciary. He sat on repealed laws knowingly and defiantly. He attempted to revive Criminal Code Act Cap C45 which no longer exists in the FCT. He tried to convict a man under non-existent offences, in defiance of Section 36(12) CFRN. He shut his court at will, blocked applications, and refused to acknowledge Supreme Court pronouncements on rendition. He turned his courtroom into a personal kingdom where the Constitution is optional. If judicial rascality had a flag, Omotosho would be the coat of arms.

2. Justice Lawal Garba (JSC), the man who authored the ‘catastrophic 15 December 2023 Supreme Court judgment in FRN v. Nnamdi Kanu. And this is not exaggeration; it is record.

On 15 December 2023, Justice Lawal Garba: I) Destroyed double jeopardy protections, a non-derogable constitutional right. Despite the prohibition under Section 36(9) CFRN, he remitted Kanu for retrial after a prior judicial discharge, thereby resurrecting a closed chapter.

II) Justice Garba substituted laws like a tailor changing fabrics. (For instance), he replaced CEMA, which had been repealed by the National Assembly, with the also-repelled Criminal Code Act Cap C45, which no longer operates in the FCT, and still claimed offences existed. No judicial panel in Nigeria’s history has ever attempted such alchemy.

III) He undomesticated the African Charter in express defiance of a full constitutional bench. A 7-Justice panel (in Abacha v. Fawehinmi) had already settled the Charter’s binding status. Garba casually overturned it in passing, claiming Nigeria need not obey even domesticated treaties. That is judicial terrorismo.

IV) Garba claimed omniscience. He boasted that the court takes judicial notice of all laws, yet the same judgment was dripping with repealed, dead, and non-existent statutes. It was the most internally contradictory Supreme Court judgment since 1999. And it laid down the legal landmines now exploding under the country.

3. Justice Haruna Tsammani (JCA, 2022), ‘the man who lit the fuse for judicial disaster’

Way before Justices Omotosho and Garba, Tsammani had set off the judicial implosion. Here is the truth history will record: a) He violated the doctrine of functus officio. He sat to review and overturn a valid, subsisting ruling by another panel, something no Court of Appeal justice is permitted to do. It was an existential taboo.

b) He used a civil process to overturn a criminal discharge, a legal impossibility. He became the first judge in Nigerian history to nullify a criminal discharge and acquittal using a civil appeal format. This was the procedural equivalent of performing heart surgery with a broom.

c) He invented a doctrine that “national security” requires presidential approval before a discharge can stand. To justify this absurdity, he cited a case on bail applications, not criminal discharge or acquittal. That was the moment jurisprudence died and improvisation took over.

d) His decision became the toxic seed from which all subsequent judicial distortions grew.
Tsammani did not just err; he authored the judicial virus that infected the system.

The Trinity of Judicial Ruin
Tsammani planted the poison tree, Lawal Garba’s Supreme Court judgment watered it with constitutional heresy (while) Omotosho harvested the rotten fruits and fed them to the nation as “law.” These three judges — not politicians — wrecked Nigeria’s judicial landscape in the last five years. Their names are now engraved in the dark chapter of Nigerian legal history, and no speech from Tinubu will disinfect their legacy.

Comrade Emma Powerful is the spokesperson/media and publicity secretary of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB).