Former President Olusegun Obasanjo says Nigeria’s judiciary has been “deeply compromised”, warning that corruption among judges has turned courts into “a court of corruption rather than a court of justice.”
In his new book, Nigeria: Past and Future, published by OOPL under the Olusegun Obasanjo Presidential Library, the former president lamented the “steady decline of the judiciary’s integrity”.
“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 wrote.
He warned that justice had become commodified in Nigeria, with dangerous consequences for the nation’s stability.
“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,” Obasanjo said.