Lawyers for Nigeria’s chief justice challenged his trial on criminal charges on Monday in a case that has been slammed as judicial intimidation one month before a presidential election in Africa’s most-populous nation.
The trial of the chief justice for allegedly failing to disclose assets and foreign currency bank accounts has been criticised as a political plot by Atiku Abubakar, the main opposition presidential candidate, as well as civil society groups and political analysts.
Walter Onnoghen, the chief justice, is head of Nigeria’s judiciary and would play a key role in adjudicating any legal challenges to the results of the presidential race between Mr Abubakar, a former vice-president, and President Muhammadu Buhari.
In a statement over the weekend, Mr Abubakar, a former vice-president, accused the Buhari administration of attempting to “usurp the role of the judiciary” ahead of a February election it had “shown every intention to manipulate”.
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In the hearing on Monday Mr Onnoghen’s attorneys challenged the jurisdiction of the court hearing the case, Nigeria’s Code of Conduct Tribunal. The judge postponed the trial until January 22.
Nigerian elections have a long history of rigging and vote buying, and foreign diplomats have expressed alarm over a pair of recent state elections that were marred by irregularities and voter intimidation and suppression.
“Those were a dry run for February,” said one senior diplomat, who added that both main parties are likely to attempt to manipulate the vote in the states they govern.
Mr Buhari’s victory in 2015 was the first time an opposition candidate had won power since democracy returned to Nigeria in 1999.
Mr Onnoghen, who did not appear in court in the capital Abuja, has denied wrongdoing while acknowledging that he mistakenly failed to disclose some assets and accounts, according to local media. The charges against Mr Onnoghen stem from allegations filed last week by a former aide to Mr Buhari.
The Nigerian Bar Association, the main trade group for the country’s lawyers, called the six-count indictment “an assault, intimidation and desecration of the judiciary . . . aimed at emasculating that arm of the government and intimidating our judges ahead of the 2019 national elections”.
Idayat Hassan, director of the Abuja-based Centre for Democracy and Development, said the speed at which the case was moving and the “timing this close to the election raises huge suspicions that this was premeditated, that this was not done in the interest of justice”.
She said “the position of the law is very clear” that “a judicial officer cannot be indicted until he has been pronounced guilty by the National Judiciary Council”, which appears not to have happened in this case. As a result, she said, “everybody is construing it . . . [as] an attempt to the get the chief justice of the federation out of the way because of the elections.”
In 2017, the Buhari administration delayed confirming Mr Onnoghen as chief justice for undisclosed reasons following the retirement of his predecessor.
Mr Buhari’s ruling All Progressives Congress defended the trial and described accusations that it was trying to compromise judicial independence as a “baseless conspiracy theory”. It said it was committed to ensuring that 2019 sees “one of the freest, most credible and peaceful elections in the country”.
The president was elected on an anti-corruption platform and is widely seen as personally clean. But those close to him have been accused of graft, and his anti-corruption crusade has been criticised for targeting opposition politicians but rarely members of Mr Buhari’s party.
Neil Munshi
