When Merit Becomes a Stranger in the Temple of Justice
John Onyeukwu
When Merit Becomes a Stranger in the Temple of Justice
Afam Osigwe’s call for reform and the urgent need to rebuild integrity in judicial appointments.
By John Onyeukwu (Published in Policy & Reform Column of Business am Newspaper on Monday October 20, 2025). Page 6 in the attached.
Every nation reveals its moral condition through the way it appoints its judges. At the recent swearing-in of new Senior Advocates of Nigeria (SANs), the President of the Nigerian Bar Association, Mazi Afam Osigwe, SAN, broke through the ritual niceties to speak a truth long whispered within the legal profession. He lamented the erosion of merit and integrity in judicial appointments. “Poor quality of appointments in any judiciary,” he warned, “will be the bane of that judiciary.” It was not a passing comment; it was a challenge, a reminder that the rot in Nigeria’s justice system often begins not with the judgment, but with who gets to wear the robe.
Across Nigeria, the appointment of judges has drifted far from the ideals of competence and independence. What should be a process of rigorous selection has become a contest of influence. Governors dictate preferences, judicial commissions bend to political pressure, and merit takes the back seat.
This is not merely administrative malpractice; it is the moral undoing of justice. When the robe is awarded through lobbying rather than learning, the gavel becomes an instrument of gratitude, not fairness. Afam Osigwe’s warning was clear: a judiciary politicised at the point of appointment will remain compromised at the point of decision. A bench built on patronage cannot deliver justice without fear or favour. The consequences are already visible, declining public confidence, contradictory judgments, and an eroding sense of judicial authority. When appointments favour loyalty over learning, integrity becomes an inconvenience, and justice is reduced to performance rather than principle. The call for reform is not just procedural; it is existential for the soul of justice in Nigeria.
A colleague recently captured this decay more vividly in a private chat that echoed Osigwe’s alarm:
“It has always been the age-long practice. Pick the old law reports; they were replete with the names of practising lawyers who eventually went to the bench. But today, which one of the Supreme Court or Court of Appeal Justices can you point out as having argued a case before their elevation? Virtually all of them start their judicial lives as magistrates or registrars.”
That lament; cuts deep. In the past, Nigeria’s appellate courts were enriched by lawyers who had tested their intellect and courage in the open arena of advocacy. They brought to the bench the practical experience of navigating justice from the perspective of both client and counsel.
Today, that tradition is dying. The doors to the bench are closing against active practitioners, replaced by a conveyor belt of career magistrates and registry officials. While many of them are competent, the exclusion of seasoned practising lawyers weakens the intellectual diversity and moral ballast of the judiciary. A judiciary that grows inwardly, feeding only from its own bureaucracy, becomes detached from the realities of justice in the streets and the barrooms of law. It loses empathy, creativity, and the courage to confront power.
The voices of Chidi Odinkalu and Jibrin Okutepa, SAN, have long warned that judicial appointments in Nigeria suffer from what Odinkalu calls "network corruption", where friendship, kinship, and political affiliation determine elevation. Okutepa has decried the rise of "lawless judges and lawless lawyers" sustained by a system that rewards proximity, not principle.
The UNODC’s corruption and integrity reports only confirm what the Bar has whispered for years: public confidence in the judiciary is collapsing. Citizens no longer believe that justice is impartial; they see it as purchasable or politically influenced. Courtrooms, once temples of truth, now appear to many as theatres of convenience, where outcomes are shaped less by law and more by leverage. It is no coincidence that this decline in trust mirrors the decline in the quality and independence of judicial appointments. When the path to the bench is paved by patronage, integrity becomes optional. The judiciary, once the moral compass of governance, now risks becoming its weakest link, eroded from within by compromises that begin long before judgment is delivered.
Osigwe’s remarks, and the private lament they have inspired among lawyers, must not dissolve into another round of professional murmuring. Every weak or compromised appointment translates into an injured citizen. The litigant whose case drags for ten years, the victim whose right is trampled, the businessman whose investment collapses due to judicial uncertainty, all are casualties of our silence.
Corruption in the judiciary does not begin with a bribe; it begins with a bad appointment. Once the wrong person ascends the bench, the system itself becomes hostage. The judge appointed through godfatherism knows who to please and who not to offend. In such a system, justice is not blind; it is selectively sighted. Silence, therefore, is not neutrality, it is participation. When the Bar retreats from speaking truth to power, it concedes the moral high ground, and the very oath that binds the profession to uphold justice becomes hollow ritual, not ethical conviction.
If Nigeria must reclaim its judiciary, reform must begin at the point of entry. We cannot expect moral excellence from a process rooted in compromise. Judicial appointments must be transparent and subject to public scrutiny, with published shortlists, interview records, and selection criteria that demonstrate fairness and merit. The reintegration of practising lawyers into the bench is equally urgent; the law must not become an echo chamber of career bureaucrats disconnected from the courtroom realities they are meant to adjudicate.
Merit, not patronage, must guide elevation. Learning, integrity, and temperament, not lineage or political proximity, should determine who wears the robe. To achieve this, the National Judicial Council must be insulated from executive pressure. Periodic ethics audits and verifiable asset declarations should become the norm, reaffirming that judges are not beyond accountability. These are not radical ideas; they are the minimum conditions for restoring faith in justice and preserving the moral centre of the nation’s legal order.
In the end, this is not about the Bar versus the Bench. It is about Nigeria’s moral architecture. Every society rises or falls by the integrity of its justice system. When the robe becomes a costume of convenience rather than a covenant of conscience, the law becomes theatre, impressive in ceremony, hollow in substance.
Afam Osigwe has dared to say what many think but few voices: our judiciary will never be better than the honesty of its appointments. The Bar must now echo that courage, not in whispers, but in sustained advocacy. The time for polite silence is over; lawyers must insist that the quality of justice begins with the quality of those who dispense it. To reclaim the robe is to reclaim the nation’s conscience, to restore dignity where power has corrupted, and purpose where politics has intruded. History will remember not those who wore the robe, but those who defended its sanctity.
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-- James D. Wolfensohn
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Cornelius Hamelberg
Dear John Onyeukwu,
Still small voice , growing, not shrilly, from strength to strength, and hopefully, pricking those who are sensitive and responsive enough to be pricked by each and every conscience of the nation.
When Merit Becomes a Stranger in the Temple of Justice makes for painful reading because everything that you’ve said here is of course particularly about Nigeria and at the same time symptomatic of some, if not all of the other Independent African states aspiring to attaining what's generally referred to as “The Rule Of Law” which can only be guaranteed wherever we have an independent judiciary that is qualified for the job and also has the requisite integrity.
Otherwise we continue sleepwalking on the brink of writing national suicide notes lamenting
“Th'oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of dispriz'd love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of th'unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
A few weeks ago it did not come as a surprise to everybody that Ghana's Chief Justice was sacked because of kalabule… Of course, the stock reaction is always “if that's the chief priest then God save the congregation !”
Goodness knows how the contested presidential election results in Cameroon will eventually be arbitrated.
Figuratively speaking, some of our modern African presidents believe themselves to be some kind of incarnation of the trinity, as some kind of three-in-one, but all of us, including the miscreants are aware that the only virtuous way forward for us all , is the separation of powers, as a first step to establishing, not “the rule of the criminals” but the rule of law as the sine qua non for the sleeping giant and the dwarf states that would like to follow in the footsteps of the sleeping giant as a role model.
I’m curious as to how might Mazi Afam Osigwe your knight in shining armour weigh in on the upcoming Nnamdi Kanu trial a litmus test event that should see justice on trial, everybody waiting for justice to be done ,this phrase probably ringing in the defendant's and everybody else’s ear “Not only must justice be done; it must also be seen to be done”