The President Bola Tinubu’s presidential pardon list, issued under Prerogative of Mercy, was publicly released by the Presidency on October 11, 2025. It included 175 beneficiaries, such as posthumous pardons for Herbert Macaulay and Major General Mamman Vatsa, clemency for inmates like Maryam Sanda (whose inclusion was later removed), and reductions in sentences for others convicted of crimes ranging from drug offenses to capital crimes. Following public backlash over inclusions like serious offenders, a revised list was approved on October 29, 2025, reducing beneficiaries to 86 names and removing controversial figures (e.g., those linked to kidnapping or human trafficking)
However, I think the timing was wrong and most names included in the list for pardon was a national embarrasment even when the government had revised the list, the injury to our national psyche was already done. It was a dilemma that would have provided ammunition for other criminals and potential criminals.
I do not want to recommend the Presidency for listening to the backlash, I wish to condemn the Presidency for such insensitive act in the first place.
I have always said seeing criminals in jail or get punished appropriately is a ‘closure’ for the victims and the people of the victims. However, the list was an assualt on justice, a puncture on bowels of the rule of law and capable of breaking victims of some of these crimes.
I do not believe the Prerogative of Mercy should be lessened to a political instrument, rather, it must be seen as a sacred instrument to temper justice. To pardon some of those wicked criminals of their crimes was a shroud of cruelty, not a coat of empathy.
I lived in Warri when the notorious Kevin Prosper Oniarah reigned supreme by terrorising Delta, Edo, Rivers, Abia and Benue States as a deadly criminal. I can also recall when his gang came to Okere Prison in Warri to rescue him leaving several casualties in the area. What a shame that the said name made the list. How can anyone rationalize such recklessnes which was directly meant to embolden such daredevil acts of criminality? Kevin? Hell no!
I cannot argue about the rights of the president to issue such mercy, but caution must be exercised especially during this era when the country is mired in all sorts of criminalities and needs a moral compass and moral redemption. Why was Donald Trump’s, American the felon and president, threat to the nation accepted widely in Nigeria? This very list was part of it in my opinion.
The prerogative of mercy is not to be used like a matchete in the hands of Rwandan ethnicist, it is a balm that must heal, that must redeem and must not be seen to have put pepper in the eyes of the justice system.
This is not the period to be compassionate toward some of the criminals that made the list – truth be told. Nigeria is grappling with widespread insecurity, moral decadence(Regina versus Ned, drug use, child marriage, bride killers, rape…) economic sabotage and downturn, social disorder and vices. It does not account for compassion to look away from these problems and go on pardoning very dangerous criminals. I cannot see the rationale even I wake from a deep slumber.
As a matter of fact, there are none of the convicts who are harmeless. There are no political prisoners on the list. Close to thirty percent were drug offenders who are complicit in making a nation of zombies and crazies with all these illicit drugs, affecting mostly the youth who are supposed to be leaders of tomorrow. The government was not sensitive enough to guage the barometer of the people before it went out with what I considered an irresponsive list. It is a moral irony I cannot place on scale – it will break in defiance.
Governments can easily commit crimes, and this is one that awed and shocked. It was a list that was written on a piece of paper that was meant to desecrate our collective honour.
When travelling by road, the fear of the possibility of kidnappers taking you off to their wild destination keeps haunting you until you arrive safely. Then imagine the truama of those who have been victims and their relatives, how they will feel hearing the very government who has not been able to protect them is freeing the same convicted kidnappers. Its a horrowing tale.
What the list did indirectly or directly was to trivialize criminality and the unsuspecting population can normalize it. Loosing moral compass has its consequences especially when crime is sermonized in the name of mercy. We need a moral compass, not an immoral mercy. The common man feels criminals are being shielded, they are not concerned about the legality of the action or if it was supposed to be an act of compassion. A vast majority of Nigerians are without protection from the police, and the government seems unmindful of this fact by releasing these deadly convicts to the public.
If the mercy is seen as a handshake with criminals for politics sake, one cannot dispute that subjective opinion that the government acted in abandonment of its responsibilities. Or else when justice is not seen to a conclusive end, clemency is seen as a descration. In this case, justice was embarrased and would have held its face in shame from public scornful gaze.
In recent times, our justice system has come under attack. We can hardly forget the book written by one Mr. Dele Farotimi against the Nigerian justice system. How will the system feel when cases it had ruled upon are shredded into pieces before their very eyes? How will judges feel when they hear their rulings and sentences have been casually dismissed in the name of mercy? What about procecutors who worked days and nights to make their cases against the suspected criminals and secure neccesary convictions?
What is under scrutiny is not the legality of the so called clemency but the moral rectitude of the action under the context of our time in history. The nation is suffocating from the hands of insecurity, the error of mercy will further aggrivate it because I cannot see the immediate profit from it. We must therefore continue our protestations to see that the list is condemned to waste-bins of history, and incinerated.
Like dried fishes, we must not allow our sense of justice to be bended permanently. We must speak truth to power under every specific context and under every issue. The permanence of allowing this kind of corruption that I think was excarvated from the root of evil has its consequences. The people are discouraged while criminals are emboldened. Pardon for a criminal is not only a slap on the faces of justice, on the victims, and the people of the victims, it is an incentive for potential criminals and active criminals. “Afterall, I will be pardoned if arrested and convicted.” Such embrace of crime and arrogation can destroy, it cannot heal. Every Nigerian who has decided to follow the path of honest conduct is menaced, his resolve shamed.
Pardon can act as an act of compassion and as well as one for cynicism. Cynicism preached from immoral pulpit cannot heal, it can only hurt and further the pains of our collective moral diabetics by rupturing holiness.
As a writers, we cannot cease to recognize the fact that this mercy, or whaterver name it is called, is uneccesary and must be discarded as if it never happened. We must erase it from history completely, let no one ever talk about it or invoke it to memory. We must law ambush for its destruction. It is not for nothing we are witness to this immorality. We must bear witness to its total destruction, not as people who wrote out of anger, but as those who are saying, “this is not right.” We must write as those mobilize to charge against those who are given responsibilities to protect lives and properties but are turning to funny gestures of mercy.