JUSTICE, POWER, AND THE MORAL COLLAPSE OF SELECTIVE LEADERSHIP
The life sentence delivered against Mazi Nnamdi Kanu by Justice Omotoso stands today as one of the most contested judicial decisions in the history of Nigeria’s Fourth Republic. Not merely for what was decided, but for what it exposes: the hypocrisy of power, the selective vibrations of political morality, and the collapse of leadership where it is most needed.
Philosophers across centuries have warned that justice becomes tyranny the moment it begins to discriminate. Aristotle, in Nicomachean Ethics, defined injustice as “unequal treatment of equals or equal treatment of unequals.” This judgment, filtered through Nigeria’s political landscape, risks committing both sins at once. It punishes one man with a severity never extended to those who openly orchestrated communal cleansing, electoral violence, or state-enabled brutality. It applies Everest-level justice to a man whose charges revolve primarily around speech, while political actors with hands deep in violence remain deified and decorated.
And then the silence—heavy, embarrassing, morally bankrupt.
Where is the Deputy Speaker of the House of Respresentatives – Rt Honourable Benjamin Kalu?
Where is the same man who spends his days stringing together eloquent speeches about peacebuilding, reconciliation, bridge-building, and healing? Where is his overzealous team — a chorus always available to advert justice and God’s mercy in Abia, yet mysteriously absent when equity demands their voices? Their passion evaporates the moment it requires confronting the power that be. Their silence is not diplomacy. It is not strategy. It is abdication. And it is shameful.
John Stuart Mill, in On Liberty, warns that a society that tolerates the suppression of dissenting voices destroys not just liberty but its own moral immune system. Kanu’s penalty, when weighed against the actions of men who have supervised the burning of villages, financed militias, and commanded violence, brings Mill’s caution to life: the state appears harsher on the agitator than on the aggressor.
Hannah Arendt, in On Violence, draws a clear distinction:
“Power and violence are opposites; where one rules absolutely, the other is absent.”
If the state truly possessed unshakeable moral legitimacy, Kanu’s rhetoric would be confronted politically, not imprisoned judicially. His sentencing reads like a system relying more on the instrument of force than the strength of persuasion.
Legally, this case teeters on the edge of jurisprudential contradiction. International law rejects extraordinary rendition as a legitimate pathway to prosecution. Nigerian constitutional law demands proportionality, ensuring that punishment corresponds to actual, demonstrable conduct—not speculation, not political convenience, not emotional exaggeration. The Supreme Court of India, in Shreya Singhal v. Union of India (2015), held that “mere advocacy, even if distasteful, is protected unless it incites imminent violence.” That standard mirrors the Brandenburg Test in U.S. constitutional law — speech is punishable only when it is directed to inciting imminent lawless action and likely to produce such action.
By those global standards, Kanu’s conviction raises a hard legal question:
Has the state proven imminent incitement, or merely punished unpopular dissent?
In contrast, some men—armed commanders of mayhem, architects of mass violence, orchestrators of community burnings—walk free, untouched. This is the crisis of selective enforcement, a legal abomination condemned in A.V. Dicey’s concept of the Rule of Law, which demands:
- Equality before the law,
- Absence of arbitrary power,
- Predictability and fairness of legal consequences.
Nigeria, in this moment, seems to be violating all three.
Yet, beyond philosophy and law lies the human truth: Kanu is not razing villages. He is not torching communities. He is not killing millions of innocent children. He has no records of authoring genocide, supervising mutiny, or directing militias. History knows those who have done such things — and history knows how softly the Nigerian state has treated them.
Which brings us back to Rt. Hon. Benjamin Kalu and his overzealous entourage:
These are the same people who kneel to prosecute manufactured Statistics so to abort mercy in Abia but fall asleep when justice cries out in Abuja. Their devotion is selective. Their conscience is conditional. Their activism is calibrated. They are bold only when boldness requires no courage. Their silence today is not just disappointing; it is a moral scandal.
As Kant warned in The Metaphysics of Morals:
“Injustice in one place is a threat to justice everywhere.”
And so we must ask:
What justice is this that hunts one man with vengeance, while caressing the bloodstained hands of others?
What leadership is this that speaks loudly in comfort but loses its tongue in crisis?
What morality is this that invokes God’s mercy for political capital, yet abandons its own people in their hour of need?
Nigeria stands today at a philosophical, legal, and moral crossroads.
Justice must not only be done—it must be seen to be done, felt to be done, and equally distributed across the powerful and powerless alike. Anything less is not justice; it is political theatre.
History is watching.
And history is taking notes.
AProf Chukwuemeka Ifegwu Eke
