A Story About Dele Farotimi And Why I Cannot Stand The Nigerian Law Expert

Nigerian lawyers and judges are the absolute worst thing ever. And we should all be very, very worried about that.

The date was May 15, 2023, and the venue was the ILEC Conference Centre in West London. I was preparing to deliver my keynote address at a press conference organised by the Coalition of Nigerians Living in the United Kingdom. Nigeria’s 2023 ‘elections’ had allegedly taken place a few weeks prior, and amid the flurry of post-election legal actions and intense diplomatic back-and-forth happening at the time, I had accepted the invitation to speak at this event.

I saw it as a strategic opportunity to add my strength to the coalition of strong opposition voices present, and to increase pressure on the watching international community, so I bought a Kenya Airways ticket and landed at Heathrow a few days before the event.

The press conference had been initially billed to hold in Westminster at the Royal Institute of International Affairs - Chatham House as it is more commonly known - but apparently, once the organisers shared the speakers list, which read like The Avengers of Nigeria’s so-called ‘Obidient’ movement, Chatham House had developed cold feet. No explanation was offered. Similarly, after initially agreeing to cover the press conference, ITV, BBC, and all of Fleet Street’s press establishment suddenly pulled out a day to the event within a few hours of each other. All of this was certainly not due to orders from above, because as we all know, the UK has a fReE pReSs™.

Of all the invited media houses, only Ben TV would end up showing up at the press conference - with a solitary camera and a (Nigerian) reporter who made absolutely no attempt to hide his pro-APC sympathies. After trying unsuccessfully to trip me up in an interview afterward and having subsequently exchanged numbers with me, I later saw one of those “Igbo people should go back to Anambra and stop trying to take over our Lagos!” videos on his WhatsApp status. Apparently, you could take the semi-literate Nigerian man out of Okemesi and even give him a job in London, but all the snow in the Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham could not smother the volcanic foolishness that lived inside his head.

I blocked him and deleted his number, but I completely digress.

That day was when I met Dele Farotimi for the first time, and I immediately learned 2 important things about him. The first was that his on-screen persona and his off-screen persona were exactly the same - what you saw was exactly what you got with this man. While I had spent £250 at H&M on what I thought was a befitting suit to wear to the event, D.F. showed up wearing a green variation of the same basic kaftan I had seen him wear dozens of times since 2020. He clearly was not there to appeal to anybody’s delicate sensibilities.

This was further emphasised by the second thing I learned about him when he addressed the press conference - D.F. was willing to look any audience in the eye and speak the truth the way he saw it. This man genuinely did not care who received his message or how they received it. He said what he said, he meant what he said, and how you felt about it was entirely your business.

Don’t believe me? Here’s the video of his address below.

Speaking to me privately afterward, D.F. told me plainly, “I like what you are doing, but what we are fighting against is bigger than just criminals who steal elections. We are fighting an entire system. To do this, your face has to show. You have to come out of hiding. You have to challenge them in the open like me. I am not in hiding. These people need to see that you are not scared of them.”

While I did not end up taking this particular piece of advice immediately, what I ended up taking away from our encounter that spring afternoon in West London was that unlike most Nigerians of his professional background, D.F. operated by a very clear moral, ethical and professional code. The person he was in front of the cameras was the same person he was when the cameras stopped rolling. Whatever message he put out into the world was genuinely geared toward helping Nigerians to live good lives and have nice things.

In the course of my career, I had come across many, many Nigerian legal professionals across many professional and personal situations. I had butted heads with some in court. I had publicly battled with some who had made uncharitable comments about my work. I had argued fruitlessly with many, trying to get them to see why 2+2 can only ever be 4. Over time, I came to understand that the Nigerian legal profession - in and of itself - was one of the very worst things about Nigeria.

If you were looking for a professional space that simultaneously wielded real influence in Nigeria while failing to conduct itself more competently than the National Union of Road Transport Workers, it was the Nigerian legal fraternity. If you wanted an example of a highly skilled professional who behaved as though they had a severe self-esteem deficit, it was the Nigerian Lawyer.

If you wanted a successful professional whom you could watch deliver one professional opinion one day, and a directly contradictory one the next, it was his cousin the Nigerian Judge. If you thrived in a chaotic, unstructured, recklessly subjective environment where nothing was true, nothing was false, and material facts where whatever somebody decided they were, you were probably meant to become a Nigerian lawyer.

For a Nigerian legal professional, D.F. was in footballing terms, a left-footed, 6-foot centre-forward who could also play on both wings, drop deep, go in goal, oversee training sessions, mentor his teammates, sign up new kit sponsors, and help the club file its taxes. “Rarity” and “unicorn” were 2 words that came to mind.

Unfortunately, Nigeria has a nasty, regular habit of attacking its best things while at the same time peacefully tolerating the very worst of itself without protest. So here we are, a year and half since that press conference in London, and D.F. now sits in Ado Ekiti prison, courtesy of a kangaroo police action ordered by a kangaroo court puppeted by the S.I. unit of the Nigerian Kangaroo Lawyer - a Senior Advocate of Nigeria.

The Nigerian Legal Profession - A Stupid Snake That Eats Itself

According to Greek mythology, ‘Ouroboros,’ the mythical snake that eats its own tail is a symbol of simultaneous creation and destruction, denoting the continuous cycle of birth and death. The snake’s tail, which is destroyed in the belly of the snake, simultaneously helps to grow its body by the exact length that is lost to its mouth. Thus, while an ordinary snake eating its own tail would normally lead to its death, the magical Ouroboros gets to live eternally at the junction of death and regeneration.

The Nigerian legal profession is not the Ouroboros.

I mean it’s a snake, and it eats its own tail, but the similarities end there. It hungrily devours its own tail, having mistaken it for food. Instead of regenerating like the mythical creature however, the Nigerian legal snake ends up eating itself, losing blood, and getting smaller until it eventually digests itself and dies. No magic there.

Just a small, stupid snake, with more appetite than brains.

Think about it: what false, stupid, asinine, ridiculous, ludicrous, absurd, idiotic, mindless, cretinous, unintelligent, puerile, fatuous, nonsensical position or argument have you not heard from the Nigerian Lawyer and his cousin the Nigerian Judge? How many mind-numbingly daft arguments and judgments have you heard over the past 4 years? I didn’t say over the past 10, 20 or 50 years - just the past 4 years alone?

Was it the person who came 4th in a state governorship election being declared winner by the Supreme Court of Nigeria, which arrived at this on the sole basis of forged results provided by the 4th place finisher - where the number of votes cast exceeded the total number of accredited votes in the election? Check. Or was it the Chief Justice of Nigeria - head of one of the country’s 3 independent arms of government - being removed from office by a goddamn ex-parte order? Check.

Source: Law.com

If we go further back a bit, how about a Nigerian lawyer arguing in court that his client is not the same person as an ex-convict of the same name and birthday, because while the “other” person of the same name and birth date also coincidentally committed the same offense as his client and was “sentenced” for it, there was no record of the “conviction,” ergo they were not the same person? Yes, this actually happened, and the argument that James Onanefe Ibori, ex-convict born August 4, was not the same person as James Onanefe Ibori, ex-convict born August 4, was accepted by Nigeria’s judiciary, up to and including the Supreme Court.

How about a Senior Advocate of Nigeria making the argument that his client’s involvement in drug trafficking in the USA was not a matter for an election tribunal in Nigeria (even though his client was running for president in Nigeria) because the American court decision was not “registered” in Nigeria? How about the same SAN arguing that the forfeiture judgment (seizure of $460,000 being proceeds of heroin trafficking) meant that it was his client’s bank accounts that were guilty, so his client was innocent of the offense? Check.

How about the same legal luminary arguing in the same court that his client did not have citizenship of another country without disclosing it (something that would be expressly forbidden under Nigerian electoral law), because even though he did in fact have another country’s passport, the passport had expired, and apparently the citizenship expired along with it? Yes, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria made that argument in court.

How about a random lawyer on Twitter - who wasn’t even getting paid for it - arguing that an election candidate’s prior involvement in drug trafficking did not preclude him from running in the election because more than 10 years had passed since the sentencing? What type of mind thinks this up and decides, “I’m going to put this out there because it will show that I know the law, unlike those civilians on Twitter”?

How about another Senior Advocate of Nigeria going on live national television to claim that a comprehensive 49-page US federal forfeiture order for proceeds of heroin trafficking was “speculative” and that the $460,000 seized - clearly explained in the forfeiture order as “proceeds of heroin distribution activity” - was for “back taxes on investments”? Of course.

How about the legal definition of the word “AND” going all the way to the Supreme Court, which then effectively rewrote the existing law by interpreting it in a way it had never been interpreted in the history of Nigeria before? And this incredible, unprecedented ruling coincidentally happened to be in the favour of the incumbent government which still cannot prove how it supposedly won the election? Check.

Think about a scenario where a political candidate is accused of submitting a forged certificate with his declaration form and his opponent puts this issue to the court. What if the Nigerian Judge then issued a judgment saying that whether the candidate in fact submitted a forged certificate did not matter, because his interpretation of the law was that the candidate was not required to attach his certificate to his declaration? This happened too.

Or think about the most open-and-shut case you can imagine. Say a political candidate is accused of breaking a law that prohibits any candidates from running if they have sworn an oath of allegiance to another country. Let’s say there were cast-iron evidence in front of the judge showing that not only did the candidate swear allegiance to another country, but here is a video of what that oath looked like, and this was the exact wording of the oath.

The judge saw the incontrovertible paperwork and evidence showing that this violation of clearly-written electoral law took place.

And the judgment was…

Wait, I’m not done yet.

Remember the 4th-place-to-winner Supreme Court shenanigans from earlier? What if there was a fresh action filed at the Supreme Court showing incontrovertible evidence that the 4th placed guy submitted fudged evidence that was so badly skewed that the number of votes cast exceeded the total accredited votes - which should automatically void the election - and he thus misled the court into passing a travesty of a judgment? What would you imagine the Nigerian Bench Snake would do? Perhaps admit error and correct the erroneous decision? Maybe issue an apology?

No, of course not. It just gobbles some more of its own tail instead.

Source: The Vanguard

According to the self-eating Nigerian Bench Snake, the Supreme Court’s decisions - even if clearly mistaken or horrendously stupid - are final and beyond any sort of appeal. Barely 2 years later however, when a powerful and well-connected banker approached the same court to set aside its earlier ruling on a matter involving his bank, this happened:

This infuriating lack of consistency is the key, fundamental, recurring theme that you cannot fail to notice within the Nigerian legal arena, and it is something I identified as far back as 2020 when I used to write reviews of Nigerian legislation from a layperson’s viewpoint. Even as a layperson, it was crystal clear to me that the absence of a solid, detailed, and well-defined set of standards was setting everyone up for disaster, and I made the point multiple times.

I believe that this total absence of solid ground in Nigeria’s legal space is why Nigerian lawyers seem pathologically incapable of telling the truth to anyone including themselves. Or perhaps, especially themselves. My theory is that when you spend enough time operating within a system where the guy in 4th place is the winner of an election, and the head of an “independent” arm of government can be removed with only an ex-parte order obtained by another arm of government, and judges are free to tell all kinds of lies in their judgments with no consequence whatsoever, and senior lawyers face no penalties for telling blatant lies in court, and nothing written in the law actually means anything because a judge is free to legally define a cow as a bicycle today, then as a Starlink satellite tomorrow; it eventually interferes with your basic understanding of facts and reality.

I believe that this is why even in mundane everyday Nigerian discourse where he stands to benefit nothing, you cannot fail to see the Nigerian Lawyer lying his ass off for absolutely no reason at all. In the example below, this lawyer attacked me following last year’s expose on Nigeria Air. The story was - as usual - completely factual. In fact not only was the Nigeria Air project binned altogether, with Hadi Sirika getting arrested by the EFCC earlier this year, but I even won the Special Investigative Reporting award category at the 2023 PwC Media Excellence Awards for it, and it made me a finalist at the 2023 AIJC African Investigative Journalist of the Year award. So why was this lawyer so incensed by the truth?

No benefit to him. Just pure love of the game.

I think that in his case as with so many others, his basic sense of reality has been royally tampered with after years of existing in a field where everyone is a pathological liar, nothing is true, nothing is false, everything is transient, and facts are whatever the Nigerian Bench Snake decides they are, depending on what side of the bed he woke up on that day. This absence of a functional handle on reality and lack of appreciation for the long-term consequences of their misanthropic behaviour, is what I believe is behind the alarming and visible degeneration of the Nigerian Lawyer and his cousin the Nigerian Judge into daft, bumbling parodies of themselves.

Think about a silly talking point - any dumb playground argument that you would expect to hear from 7 year-olds who haven’t learned their times table yet - and visualise it in the mouth of a Nigerian lawyer or judge that comes to your mind: “The newly repainted swing in the school playground is made of chocolate.” “India once beat Nigeria 99-1 in a football game where the ball turned into a fiery tiger that killed Sam Okwaraji and pushed Peter Rufai into the goal.”

Compared to the absurdities you have read above, do these things still sound like they would be out of place in a Nigerian courtroom?

The Abduction And Kangaroo Trial Of Dele Farotimi - A Nigerian Legal Disasterclass

When I saw the news of D.F.’s abduction (it was an abduction) and subsequent rendition across state lines to stand trial in Afe Babalola’s home court/stomping ground over an alleged defamation claim, it irritated me enough to bring me out of my self-imposed Twitter exile from conversations about Nigerian public affairs. Not just because I can relate with the experience of being harassed with remote SLAPP litigation by disingenuous actors using home court advantage for judgment shopping, but more importantly, because I am convinced that this is all bullshit.

Afe Babalola is not the person behind what D.F. is going through.

Don’t get me wrong, he is certainly the vessel being used to get to D.F. - a man whose path is so straight that you normally cannot arm-twist him into shutting up. The legalised brigandage involved in “extraditing” someone from Lagos to Ekiti over what my dead grandma can clearly see should be treated as a civil lawsuit, has Chief Afe Babalola’s imprint all over it.

He is the litigation variant of the classic Nigerian Lawyer who has done with his life what Arjen Robben did with football - perfected one trick and built an entire successful career out of it. However, he is likely only acting as a tool. He is probably not the ultimate mastermind, and I think I can prove it.

Here is an excerpt from his filing at the court in Ekiti concerning D.F.’s supposed defamation of his character:

Sometime on 2/11/2024, one of our lawyers while travelling through Murtala Muhammed Airport bought a book by Dele Farotimi titled ‘NIGERIA AND ITS CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM’ published by Dele Farotimi publishers. He read the said book and immediately brought it to my attention. Many of my lawyers also bought the said book and read same. We received several calls from professional colleagues, friends and family members who watched a program on Channel’s TV wherein Dele Farotimi was interviewed with respect to the said book where he made several defamatory statements against myself, my law firm Afe Babalola & Co (Emmanuel Chambers), Olu Daramola SAN and Ola Faro Esq. We also received several calls from persons who saw excerpts of the book and interview on several social media platforms.

First of all, D.F.’s book came out in June. I remember this distinctly because we exchanged messages a few days after it was released, and he later did an interview about the book on Upgrade TV’s WAYS Show on July 3. This is an important point, so keep it in mind.

According to Afe Babalola’s statement, colleagues, friends, and family members watched a D.F. interview on “Channels TV” where he spoke about the book and purportedly defamed him. This, together with the purchase of the book on November 2 is what supposedly brought the issue to his attention. I found that claim interesting and revealing for a number of reasons.

First of all, there was in fact, no Channels TV interview involving D.F. over the past 5 months since the book was released. I know this because I double-checked and I went to the extent of personally confirming this from his assistant. The interview that Afe Babalola was most likely referring to, was the interview below, on Seun Okinbaloye’s Mic On Podcast, 4 whole months ago in August. Seun Okinbaloye is of course, a very familiar face on Channels TV, but his personal podcast has nothing to do with Channels TV. This is also a very important point to note.

If Chief Afe Babalola genuinely felt defamed by D.F.’s book, why did he - by his own admission - wait until November to take action over a book that came out in June? D.F.’s book was and remains widely available at multiple online and offline retailers locally and internationally, including Roving Heights and Amazon. There is no way that a lawyer of Afe Babalola’s profile would not have been aware of the contents of a book released by a high profile legal personality like D.F. within a week of the book’s release. Both TV interviews about the book were done in July and August. So why wait till November?

Even more interestingly, for a supposed defamation claim, there was very little effort to even verify the material facts of the claim. I am not a Senior Advocate of Nigeria, but it took me all of about 5 minutes of basic Google research to find out that Dele Farotimi never at any point appeared on Channels TV to discuss his book. A regular non-lawyer like me was able to immediately recognise the obvious difference between Seun Okinbaloye’s Mic On Podcast, and John Momoh’s 16-time TV Station of the Year, Channels Television.

If this were a serious libel case painstakingly put together by a Senior Advocate of Nigeria with a reputation to protect, why would there be such gaping, obvious errors and mistakes in basic establishment of the claim? He didn’t even spell “Channels TV” correctly (scroll back up to see what he filed). Is it the habit of Afe Babalola’s legal chambers to wait for a whole quarter before filing a defamation claim over something that fundamentally threatens the old man’s reputation - and then to make all manner of inexplicable mistakes in the statement of claim when doing so?

Was this thing really what he wanted to do, or did he in fact, merely throw a suit together hurriedly, and then activate the dark arts of his home court in Ekiti in conjunction with the Nigerian police, on the prompting of a bigger masquerade?

A masquerade such as this one perhaps?

I’m raising this question because the timing of D.F.’s arrest concides very conveniently with that of a political project he has been working on to force the Nigerian state to commit to electoral reform. Just over a week after the date that Afe Babalola claims to have become aware of D.F.’s book, D.F. invited a number of people from Nigeria’s media, law, and civil society spaces to take part in a meeting where the peaceful civil resistance actions were disccused for the purpose of forcing the government to amend the Electoral Amendment Act 2022.

What is more, this was not even a secret. D.F. spoke publicly about the proposed December 3 date for a nationwide sit-at-home protest to demand for those 2 electoral reforms items. By the way, while I agreed with him in principle, as I often do, where I disagreed with him was the involvement of conventional civil society actors in any such plans.

My understanding is that US-funded civil society actors - whether they accept it or not - are primarily US foreign policy extensions, who cannot be trusted to choose their country over their funder. Which is why when I attended the first Google Meet session and I saw names like “Aisha Yesufu” there, I clicked the “x” button on my browser, shut down my laptop, and went to play FC 24 instead.

But I digress.

The point is, it was on December 2 that he became aware of the plot to abduct him from Lagos and spirit him away to a gulag somewhere in the middle of nowhere, which is why he held this press conference that day.

The very next day - December 3, the proposed day of peaceful civil disobedience - he was abducted by phone-stealing GI Joes wielding AK-47s, and taken to the gulag in Ekiti where he remains as I type this. As you would expect of the Nigerian Bench Snake in charge of the case, bail was denied, even though defamation of every kind in Nigeria is a bailable offense.

Is all of this happening because Afe Babalola is pissed off about a book that “opened his yansh”? After decades of legal practise in Nigeria, Afe Babalola SAN of all people, would know that the last thing the generality of Nigerians would normally do is spend their own money to read a book recreationally. He of all people, would have been aware of what the book said right from the moment it became available, and he would have known that - as with most other potential PR crises in Nigeria - the best thing to do is nothing. The book had been out for 5 months without making any especially large impact on public discourse in Nigeria.

Did this worldly-wise, nonagenarian Senior Advocate of Nigeria decide to pull a Tomato Hitler, creating the mother of all Streisand Effects, or is he in fact, being put up to this by a bigger masquerade that wants to teach any political opposition a “lesson?”

Well, that’s a question for whoever is interested. My concern in this case however, goes beyond my personal rapport with D.F. and my concern for his well-being. It is about the continued existence of Nigeria as a country that is perceived to exist under some type of law.

Think of the law as a basketball rim. FIBA regulations state that the rim must be exactly 3 metres high with a diameter of exactly 45cm. These are the dimensions required to maintain the competitive sanctity of the game. If the rim were any wider, people could just spam 3-pointers from all over the court and the game would lose meaning. If it were any higher, only South Sudanese would be able to play the game. If it were any lower, it would be too easy to block or dunk, also making the game lose meaning.

In Nigeria, instead of keeping the rim at regulation dimensions, the rim has rather been mounted on a moving backboard that can be 2 metres or 5 metres high, depending on what side of the bed the Bench Snake woke up on. The Bench Snake also has the ability to expand the rim diameter to 70cm, or reduce it to 35cm, depending on which team he wants to win. Effectively, there is no sanctity of the law in Nigeria because there is in fact, no law.

Laws in Nigeria are deliberately written in an infuriatingly ambiguous, awkwardly-worded way, so that they can be interpreted as generously or as fastidiously as the authorities deem fit. Nothing is unambiguously legal or illegal in Nigeria. There is nothing that one can do in Nigeria that is 100% guaranteed to result in a specific legal outcome 100% of the time. No standards are fixed, no enforcement is uniform. Everything is subjective and movable.

In D.F.’s case, there is as usual, no shortage of Wig Snakes lining up to inform anyone who wishes to know that Nigerian law has both civil defamation and criminal defamation. What they are all pretending not to notice is that nobody actually knows what the threshhold for either of these categories is, or when it can and should be used. It would seem that “criminal defamation” appears to be a level of defamation law that is economically restricted to whoever can sufficiently motivate a Bench Snake in Ekiti to carry out the amount of judicial malpractice needed to conceal an ongoing lawsuit from its defendant.

For that matter, there is even significant controversy over whether Ekiti State even has criminal defamation in its laws anymore. If as some insist, it does not in fact have such a law anymore, that would mean that a man currently sits in a gulag in Ado-Ekiti, having been extradited from Lagos to stand trial in Ekiti under a law that doesn’t exist.

If that is the case, then I don’t really think I have anything left to say.

But this will never end well.