Former President Olusegun Obasanjo on Friday lamented that Nigeria’s judiciary has become “deeply compromised”.
According to him, corruption among judges has turned Nigerian courts into “court of corruption rather than courts of justice”.
Obasanjo expressed this assertion in his new book, ‘Nigeria: Past and Future’, published by the Olusegun Obasanjo Presidential Library.
The former president lamented what he described as the “steady decline of the judiciary’s integrity”.
Obasanjo wrote, “The reputation of the Nigerian judiciary has steadily gone down from the four eras up till today. The rapidity of the precipitous fall, particularly in the Fourth Republic, is lamentable.”
He equally stated that justice had become commodified in Nigeria, with dangerous consequences for the nation’s stability.
He further wrote, “The great fear of most well-meaning Nigerians and good friends of Nigeria is that where ‘justice’ is only available to the highest bidder, despair, anarchy, and violence would substitute justice, order, and hope.
“I went to a state in the North about ten years after I left public office. Next to the government guest house was a line of six duplex buildings.
“The governor pointed to the buildings and stated that they belonged to a judge who put them up from the money he made from being the chairman of election tribunals.”
Obasanjo however accused the Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission, Prof Mahmood Yakubu, of undermining the country’s electoral process since 2015.
“No wonder politicians do not put much confidence in an election which the INEC of Professor Mahmood Yakubu polluted and grossly undermined to make a charade,” he added.
