HOW DRU CATCH SEES IT

The Courthouse Has a Bouncer and the Bouncer Takes Referrals

Retired Supreme Court Justice Amina Augie stepped up to a lectern in Abuja and handed a roomful of lawyers what amounted to a consumer-facing product label for Nigerian justice. Per Vanguard News, she told the Nigerian Law School Class of 1986's 40th anniversary gathering that the system reliably serves those who arrive with influence, connections, or cash - and reliably fails everyone else. Courts are swamped, litigation drags on for years, and the price of a remedy keeps climbing. When someone who once sat at the very top of that pyramid describes it as a tiered-access service, the rest of us can stop pretending the queue is first-come, first-served.

The Reform Speech Is a Retirement Tradition, Not a Reform Plan

Here is the particular comedy. Augie offered her audience an elegant formulation linking predictable law to investor confidence - the kind of sentence that belongs on a plaque in a ministry lobby. Then she spent the balance of her address cataloguing every reason that predictability is a fantasy in Nigerian courtrooms. Appellate benches buckling under impossible caseloads. Financial barriers that keep ordinary litigants locked outside. Politicians who treat constitutional boundaries like decorative suggestions. She urged sweeping amendments and institutional overhauls - proposals that have circulated, in nearly identical phrasing, for a generation or more. The institution she served for years is the same one she now narrates as dysfunctional, from a comfortable distance. Calling for structural reform after you have handed in your robes is a bit like reviewing a restaurant after the kitchen has closed: accurate, perhaps, but not exactly actionable.

Honesty Also Has a Velvet Rope

And that is the structural joke nobody on the dais acknowledged. Diagnosing the Supreme Court's ailments apparently requires first vacating your seat on it. Active judges endure crushing dockets and systemic dysfunction in relative silence; retired ones accept anniversary invitations and deliver the autopsy. Augie's critique - that leaders cannot credibly demand citizens obey laws they themselves sidestep - is pointed, well-evidenced, and deeply uncomfortable. Yet the fact that the sharpest public post-mortem of Nigerian justice arrives only once the speaker is safely outside the building says as much about the institution's tolerance for candour as any caseload statistic. The velvet rope does not only guard the courtroom door. It stands between the bench and the microphone.