Still On The Hijab Controversy

 By Malcolm Omirhobo

In a majority decision of five to two, the apex court of Nigeria recently affirmed the rights of Muslim female students in Lagos state public primary and secondary schools to wear hijab.

The Supreme Court erroneously held that wearing the hijab was an Islamic injunction and an act of worship required of Muslims and consequently, the banning of female Muslim students from wearing hijab to school is a violation of their fundamental rights to freedom of thought, conscience, religion, dignity of human persons and freedom from discrimination.

The Supreme Court heavily relied on section 38 of the 1999 constitution, which guarantees every Nigerian citizen the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion. The justices failed to see the rights contained in section 38 of the constitution as private rights that must be exercised privately in our homes, place of worship, community, religious schools and not in the public or public schools for that matter funded with taxpayers’ money.

Is The Judiciary Beyond Redemption?

 By Sonnie Ekwowusi

To affirm that the judiciary is corrupt is an understatement. The judiciary is not just corrupt; the men and women entrusted with the affairs of the judiciary are suffering from a huge character deficit. It is painful that our judiciary has been constituted into an object of derision by the very people who should labour to maintain its prestige.

The level of official corruption and moral degeneracy at both the Bar and the Bench is alarming. It seems as if the judiciary is beyond redemption. 

While the Bench sickens for lack of moral renaissance, the Bar fairs no better. Regrettably, many members of the Bar lack the lowest common denominator of acceptable character. 

As regards the judiciary workers often loosely referred to as the judicial personnel-court bailiffs, Chief Registrars, Assistant Chief Registrars (ACR), court clerks, court messengers, court cashiers, court stenographers and so forth- their lives are ruled and governed by the civil service bureaucratic extortion.  

Supreme Court Judgments Are Clearly Reversible

By Chuks Iloegbunam

Nigerians must with one voice put this critical question to the seven-member Supreme Court panel of judges that sacked Governor Ihedioha of Imo State and planted Senator Hope Uzodinma as his replacement: Distinguished as you all are, would you have dared to pronounce this same perversity if other than the All Progressives Congress (APC) is currently in control of the Federal Government of Nigeria?

*Justice Tanko Muhammad

The controversial Supreme Court verdict was read by Justice Kudirat Motonmori Olatokunbo Kekere-Ekun. Mrs. Kekere-Ekun was born in 1958. She earned her first Law degree from the University of Lagos, and the second from the London School of Economics and Political Science, not from backyard or quota colleges that routinely grant admissions to laggards confirmed incapable of passing basic School Certificate subjects like English and Mathematics. Called to the Bar in 1981, she was appointed to the Supreme Court 32 years later.

Notable lawyers hailed her appointment to the apex court, two of whose informed opinions are here: “I have read a few of her judgments; she is very sound in law. In other words, she suppresses technicality and allows substance to prevail. She has that equitable spirit of trying to do justice,” said Professor Itse Sagay, SAN.

Nigeria: The Last Chance For PDP

By Fred Onyeoziri

A Political party is an association of interest organizations competing for the power to govern in a national society. And the major strategy for that competition is elections. It is winning the election that gives the party the power to govern.

In the context of a free and fair election, commitment to the interest of the party is the condition for winning success for a party.

PDP’s failure to enforce respect for the party’s interest was the major reason it lost power in 2015. It allowed all manner of private interests – impurity, imposition, factionalism, god-fatherism, and money politics – to distract it from enforcing respect for the true interest of the party. 

Persistent Rape Of Justice In Nigeria

By Emmanuel Onwubiko
The universal symbol of justice is the statue of a very beautiful but blindfolded beauty queen wielding a sharp sword with which justice is dispensed to all irrespective of class, status or race.

There is also a universal unanimity that justice must be dispensed with timeliness since justice delayed is said to be justice denied.

In Nigeria however criminal and civil justice is slower than a typical snail because of a number of reasons ranging from prosecutorial bureaucratic bottlenecks created by professional incompetence of the police which coordinates much of the prosecution of criminal cases and several other extenuating factors including but certainly unlimited to outright corruption and compromise on the part of the presiding judges.

Judicial corruption is therefore a hydra-headed monster that has unleashed unwarranted delay in the dispensation of justice especially to the poor and disadvantaged litigants.

Miss Cynthia Osokogu and the four undergraduates of University of Port Harcourt (ALUU4) murdered by the villagers in Aluu ikwerre in Rivers State on trumped up charges of theft have come to symbolize the most abominable kind of delayed justice because these two cases have lingered for almost four years without the killers being punished for these gruesome acts of criminal depravity.

Miss Cynthia’s case is pathetic because she was lured into her untimely but primitive death by her would-be business associates whom she encountered via the social media of Facebook.