Showing posts with label Ogbonnaya Ukeje. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ogbonnaya Ukeje. Show all posts

Monday, September 25, 2023

How Nigeria’s Courts Became ‘The Lost Hope Of The Common Man’

 By Chidi Odinkalu

When Ogbonnaya Ukeje died in Lagos two days after Christmas Day in 1981, Bode Rhodes-Vivour was a 30-year-old lawyer making his way up the rungs of public service in the Ministry of Justice in Lagos State. Mr. Rhodes-Vivour had been called to the Nigerian Bar a mere six years earlier, in 1975. 

In 1989, when Mr. Rhode-Vivour succeeded Nureini Abiodun Kessington as the Director of Public Prosecutions in Lagos State, the case concerning the estate of Ogbonnaya Ukeje was already in its sixth year in the High Court of Lagos. Mr. Ukeje’s daughter, Gladys, had filed the case in 1983 to challenge her exclusion from a share in her father’s estate merely on the ground that she was female.