By Mohammed Bello Doka
“And they planned, and Allah planned. And Allah is the Best of planners.”
— Qur’an 8:30
They planned. Oh, how they planned. Whispered plans in back rooms, laughter behind borrowed smiles, champagne optimism poured into tiny cups of spite. They thought the curtain had finally fallen. They thought the headline would write itself. They thought power had finally repaid their ingratitude with spectacle.
But Allah planned too.
And by nightfall, the noise was left arguing with silence as Abubakar Malami, SAN, walked out—unbowed, unbroken, unmistakably present—released the same day, steadier in step, sharper in purpose, and defiantly alive to destiny.
Those celebrating his invitation forgot a small detail history never forgets: truth does not rush, and justice does not need applause.
They are many, these loud celebrants. Men who once swore by God—on video, on record, before witnesses—that no one lifted them like Malami did. They said it themselves when gratitude still had a pulse. He was their ladder, their bridge, their passport. He mentored them when they were raw; sponsored them when they were empty; defended them when they were brittle; introduced them to rooms that had only ever spoken foreign names. He turned doors into corridors and corridors into futures.
Today, those same beneficiaries discovered the temporary thrill of betrayal—the applause of the ungrateful, the currency of ingratitude. They mistook invitation for indictment. They clinked glasses at the idea of a downfall, forgetting an old lesson the philosophers carved into stone: the pupil who mocks the teacher may graduate into shame, not greatness.
Plato warned about this long before our politics learned to shout: “The measure of a man is what he does with power.” Power revealed them. And the mirror was unkind.
Malami’s crime, if one must invent it, was audacity—the audacity to speak, to criticize, to say aloud what millions whisper at night: that insecurity devours futures; that schools close under gunfire; that fear has taken attendance where hope once did. He spoke in Hausa, to ordinary people, without varnish or fear. He committed the unforgivable sin of democratic speech.
And suddenly, drums rolled.
The irony would be hilarious if it weren’t so predictable. A man who, as Attorney-General, did not award contracts, did not control procurement, did not disburse funds—was painted as if he kept the nation’s till under his mattress. A lawyer who saved Nigeria from a $11 billion ambush—the infamous P&ID fraud, dismantled in a British court with evidence, patience, and steel—was treated as though honour were a rumour.
History does not suffer amnesia for long. P&ID was not theatre. It was a legal war in which Nigeria’s neck was already in the noose, and it was Malami’s strategy that cut the rope. Over $11 billion spared. A fraud named for what it was. A nation rescued from the ledger of ruin. That victory alone will outlive the noise of today’s hecklers.
So they rejoiced—prematurely. They mistook a question for a conviction. They forgot that process is not proof. They forgot that courage does not faint at precinct doors. By evening, the celebration curdled. Malami was out. Released. Composed. Publicly calm. And devastatingly clear: “Fabricated allegations,” he said, without theatrics, without bile. He promised only that truth would continue to unfold—no insults, no tantrums, no fear.
That restraint is the most painful rebuke to those who danced too early.
For betrayal, as the sages teach, is a short road with a long memory. Shakespeare put it bluntly: “The ingratitude of a man is sharper than the serpent’s tooth.” And the Qur’an answers with equal clarity: “Allah does not love the treacherous.” (Qur’an 8:58)
Let it be written: betrayal is loud at dawn and empty by dusk.
The mockers would do well to remember another parable: the ladder does not forget the feet that kicked it once it has been climbed. Every video remains. Every vow remains. Every declaration of gratitude—sworn to God—remains. And the internet, unlike opportunism, never sleeps.
They thought today was the end of a chapter. It reads more like a prologue.
For the man they tried to humiliate returned to the square bolder, cleaner, and more resolved—armed not with malice but with method; not with anger but with an address to history. Those who borrowed his hands to rise now discover a law older than politics and sharper than ambition: what you plant in betrayal, you harvest in disappointment.
And disappointment, dear celebrants, has only begun.
Because Allah planned, and He remains the Best of planners.