Justice in Nigeria is no longer blind. It squints, winks, and bows to power. Terrorist leaders stroll into government offices to negotiate in daylight, while a man who stole a goat rots in squalid detention. Speak as a commoner online, and the state strikes with “big grammar” legalese wielded like a cudgel to silence dissent. The scales of law, once imagined impartial, now gleam only for the influential, leaving the ordinary citizen to stumble in shadow.
The contradictions are grotesque. Presidential pardons bypass merit and morality. Celebrities openly confess illicit drug use, yet the law enforcers and even courts look the other way. Meanwhile, a poor farmer languishes in prison for smoking Indian hemp. Here, law is not a shield, but a cudgel. Privilege is protected; poverty is punished. Justice has become a theatre where the powerful perform, and the weak are mere props.
Corruption has burrowed into the judiciary like termites in a rotting beam, invisible until the structure collapses. Clerks and registrars traffic in bribery and judgment manipulation, converting justice into a marketable commodity. Half of Nigerians who enter courtrooms report paying “under-the-table” fees; over 60 % perceive corruption as rampant. Impartiality has become a myth; fairness is a hollow echo. The courts no longer arbitrate truth. Instead, they broker convenience, favour, and profit.
Physical decay mirrors moral rot. Courtrooms leak. Magistrates convene under trees. Judges sift through mountains of neglected files with broken pens and flickering lights like gardeners attempting to coax roses from a desert. Overworked, underpaid, demoralized, the judiciary bleeds talent as lawyers flee to private practice. The machinery groans; the system staggers; ordinary citizens drown in bureaucratic rot.
Justice is desecrated, not delayed. Forty-eight thousand detainees linger in limbo, stripped of time and dignity. Poverty itself is criminalized. Political meddling, selective enforcement, and deliberate inefficiency transform law into a weapon of fear, humiliation, and stratification. The ordinary Nigerian navigates not a justice system, but a labyrinth designed to crush hope.
Unless accountability is demanded, reforms enforced, and the judiciary’s moral spine rebuilt, Nigeria will remain a land where law shelters the powerful and punishes the powerless. The temples of justice crumble, not under external assault, but under the weight of contradictions, corruption, and cowardice. It is time to ask, not rhetorically: Are we serving justice or merely sustaining convenience, corruption, and collapse?
– Inah Boniface Ocholi writes from Ayah – Igalamela/Odolu LGA, Kogi state.
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