20 November 2025: Omotosho Must Not Plunge Nigeria Into a Judicial Disaster

 20 November 2025: Omotosho Must Not Plunge Nigeria Into a Judicial Disaster Nigeria stands at the edge of a decision that could define its ...

 20 November 2025: Omotosho Must Not Plunge Nigeria Into a Judicial Disaster

Nigeria stands at the edge of a decision that could define its justice system for decades. On that day, a Federal High Court will pronounce judgment in the case of Mazi Nnamdi Kanu, a man who is being tried under a law that no longer exists in Nigeria’s legal books.

If a conviction is entered under such circumstances, it will not merely be a legal mistake. It will mark Nigeria’s entry into the global hall of shame; a hall filled with nations that once allowed emotion, politics, and pressure to override the most basic principles of justice.

History has recorded what happens when courts fail to uphold the law. The stories span continents, cultures, and decades, but they carry the same chilling lesson: wrongful convictions destroy lives and destroy nations’ credibility.

Across the world, some of the most disturbing miscarriages of justice began with judges ignoring clear legal foundations  just as Nigeria risks doing now.

Consider the Central Park Five in the United States five teenagers dragged through national humiliation, convicted on false confessions, and imprisoned for crimes they never committed. Years later, the truth emerged, but the damage had already been done: broken families, ruined childhoods, and a justice system disgraced before the world.

Look at the Birmingham Six in the United Kingdom men sentenced to life for bombings they did not commit. Their convictions were later exposed as the result of forged evidence and suppressed truth. It took 16 long years, but the British courts eventually could not burry that they mistaked.

Across Africa too, the scars are fresh. Men in South Africa spent over a decade behind bars before their convictions were overturned. In Nigeria, cases have surfaced of citizens locked away for twenty years or more before finally being declared innocent. These human tragedies continue to echo across courtrooms and communities as a constant reminder that when justice fail once, it fails loudly.

These histories matter today because Nigeria is on the verge of repeating them.

Mazi Nnamdi Kanu is being tried on a non-existent law –a law that has been overtaken and replaced. No functioning democracy convicts a citizen under a dead statute. No credible court sentences a man for an offence that does not exist in a valid written law. Yet that is exactly the precipice Nigeria now stands upon.

If the court delivers a conviction on November 20, it will not be Kanu alone who faces judgment.

The Nigerian judiciary itself will stand condemned.

A wrongful conviction under a repealed law will become a textbook global example of judicial failure taught in universities, cited by human-rights groups, and remembered by history as the moment Nigeria abandoned its own constitution.

Beyond the courtroom, the consequences will be deep and lasting.

Public trust in the judiciary that is already fragile will collapse further. Communities will conclude that the courts serve power, not justice. International observers will  further question whether Nigeria respects the rule of law. Investors will read the verdict as a warning that legal certainty cannot be guaranteed. The moral stain of condemning a man under a non-existent law will haunt the country for generations.

The world has shown us repeatedly that wrongful convictions do not end in the courtroom. They continue in the silent years that follow in broken spirits, shattered families and reputations, and the heavy shame carried by nations that failed to act when it mattered most.

On 20 November 2025, Nigeria must choose:

Will it learn from the world’s painful history of injustice or repeat it?

Will it stand with the rule of law or tear its own constitution in public view?

Will it protect its judiciary or allow it to convict itself?

If Nigeria convicts Mazi Nnamdi Kanu under a non-existing law, the verdict will not merely imprison a man.

It will imprison the credibility of the Nigerian justice system. And history will remember the day not as a trial of one citizen 

but as the day Nigeria put its own justice on trial.

Family Writers Press International