By Toba Owojaiye
In the quiet shadows of the Okaka Custodial Centre in Bayelsa, the Nigerian justice system has committed one of its loudest silences, six years of pre-trial detention for a group of former domestic staff of ex-First Lady, Patience Jonathan.
Their names are many, Williams Alami, Vincent Olabiyi, Ebuka Cosmos, and a dozen more, but their fate has been one: indefinite incarceration without judgment.
Forty times.
That is how many occasions the courts have promised justice, only to abandon it. In April, Punch reported the staggering number of adjournment, forty. Since then, two more were added, most recently on June 25 and 26, this time due to the abduction of the trial judge, Justice Ebiyerin Omukoro. Yes, even the bench is now prey to a lawless tide sweeping the very institution meant to uphold order.
The charges against the detainees range from theft of gold bangles and Samsung appliances allegedly worth ₦200 million, to the graves, conspiracy to commit murder, armed robbery, and felony. Yet for six long years, Nigeria’s courts have offered no verdict. No conviction. No acquittal. Just delay.
In any country governed by conscience, this would spark outrage. In Nigeria, it has become just another headline. Another case of forgotten citizens, crushed beneath the weight of a justice system that works only when it pleases the powerful.
Funmi Adedoyin, the lead counsel for the accused, has cried out repeatedly. “These men and women have families. They have names. They have been locked away for six years without a single ruling. How long will they wait?” she asked, in a tone fraught with fatigue and fury.
The Nigerian Constitution guarantees the right to fair hearing and speedy trial. The Administration of Criminal Justice Act (ACJA), passed to curb endless adjournments, is being mocked openly in Bayelsa. When courts adjourn endlessly and defendants are buried alive in cells, what is left of our democracy?
It must be said: The court has become the crime.
If these defendants are guilty, prove it and sentence them. If not, let them go. But do not pretend justice is being served when the process has become the punishment.
This is a call not just to the judiciary, but to the soul of this republic. Our silence, our indifference, makes us complicit. The Executive, the National Judicial Council, the Nigerian Bar Association, everyone who still claims to believe in justice must act.
The courts are not battlefields for vendettas. They are sanctuaries of fairness. When they are abused, the society bleeds. And today, Nigeria bleeds deeply, not from the stolen jewellery of a former First Lady, but from the stolen liberty of forgotten citizens.
It is time to end this cruel theatre. Either try them or free them.
Six years is not justice.
It is injustice with a name. And we all know it.