Pardons, Clemency, And The Death Of Moral Clarity

 By Ugo Onuoha

Lateef Fagbemi is Nigeria’s Attorney-general and Minister for Justice. He has been at the job since August 2023. He is a Senior Advocate, the equivalent of a King’s [formerly Queen’s] Counsel in the United Kingdom. He might have been a brilliant lawyer but his lawyering skills became more pronounced with his dexterity over election matters. 

My understanding is that he has had quite a few victories in high profile electoral disputes. And the crowning prize of his nose for winning election disputes was in 2023 when he led a team of other senior lawyers and a motley of nondescript attorneys to persuade the Supreme Court to rubber stamp the award of the presidency of Nigeria by the ‘Independent’ National Electoral Commission [INEC] to Alhaji Bola Ahmed Tinubu.

Nigeria: Tainted Presidency For A Broken Country

 By Ugo Onuoha

Elections are combining with other factors to destroy Nigeria’s democracy. And the country itself. The signs are writ large though we play the ostrich. Elsewhere, especially in saner climes, elections help to strengthen the foundations and building blocks of democracy. Not so here. Since the return of civil rule in 1999, which by the way had been dominated by retired army generals, elections have turned out to be poorly planned and even more poorly conducted.

The consequences are that election results have serially failed to reflect the will of the majority of Nigerians, and so more and more of our people are turning their backs on the ballot box as an acceptable mode of choosing their preferred political leaders. The fear is that the outcome of the 2023 presidential election will compound the loss of faith in democracy.