Welcome to Nigeria, Where the Law is for Everyone, But Justice is for the Powerful

by Mohammed Bello Doka 

16 July, 2026. 

Ask yourself one question. When last did a serving minister answer to the police? When last did a senior government official face arrest for corruption? When last did anyone close to power in Nigeria pay a real price for anything?

If the answer does not come quickly, it is because the answer is never. That silence is the whole story. In Nigeria, the law is printed for everyone, but justice is delivered to a select few, and the rest of us are left to read about it.

This is not a new complaint. It is an old wound that the Tinubu government has reopened and deepened. In three years, Nigeria has not merely drifted into dysfunction; it has been steered into something closer to an ethnocracy, a system in which office is no longer a public trust but a private inheritance, distributed along lines of tribe and loyalty. Power now travels through one identity and one circle. Everyone outside it, whatever region, whatever tribe, is treated as a guest in their own country.

The evidence sits in plain view, and it forms a pattern once you stop looking at each scandal in isolation.

A young woman is found dead, unclothed, inside the private residence of a sitting minister. Eighteen days pass. No arrest. No formal questioning of the minister. No timeline from the police that the public can trust.

Mary Habila, twenty-six years old, a physiotherapist from Kaduna State, died inside Works Minister David Umahi's residence in Uburu, Ebonyi State, on June 27. Reports that have circulated widely describe her body removed from the property in the dead of night, found without clothing and bearing visible trauma.

The minister has confirmed she died in his home and has called for an autopsy, which her grieving family initially declined. Investigators are reportedly still trying to establish who was present, what happened, and how long it took before anyone called for help. Her family fixed her burial for July 17 with the central questions still unanswered.

Now run the thought experiment honestly: if this had happened in the home of an opposition figure, would the outcome look the same? Would the machinery of the state have moved this slowly, or would there already be an arrest, a press conference, and a rush to judgment?

The double standard is the point. It tells every Nigerian exactly where they stand in the hierarchy of consequence.

Then there is the ghost agency. A fictitious Presidential Foreign Investment Promotion Council secured a ₦1.3 billion line in the 2026 budget, rented space inside the Federal Secretariat, opened bank accounts, and hired staff, all without triggering a single institutional alarm.

Only the self-declared Director-General has been arrested. The Chief of Staff's office, under whose nose this agency operated, faces no comparable scrutiny, and the President has publicly voiced full confidence in his Chief of Staff.

The same office is now tied to a separate ₦54 billion directive involving the Nigeria Upstream Petroleum Regulatory Commission, justified by a provision of the Petroleum Industry Act that does not appear to authorize it. When the Presidency's answer to that discrepancy is simply that the President approved it, the country is being told that one man's signature can substitute for an Act of the National Assembly.

That is not governance. That is a monarchy with extra paperwork.

The money trail widens from there. The World Bank has flagged ₦34.53 trillion, some 41 percent of total revenue, deducted at source and spent as first-line charges that never passed through the Federation Account for appropriation.

The IMF has separately flagged ₦8.83 trillion in spending, roughly 2 percent of GDP, absent from the 2026 budget altogether. Both institutions are pointing at the same wound: money moving outside the structures meant to make it accountable to anyone.

The government's response has been to dispute the framing rather than explain the money. Atiku Abubakar has called it the most consequential act of fiscal impunity in Nigeria's recent democratic history, and it is difficult, looking at the numbers, to argue he is exaggerating.

Meanwhile, the House of Representatives has sounded the alarm on a ₦2.23 trillion ransom economy, laundered through POS agents, BDC operators, hawala networks, crypto platforms, and even livestock markets, effectively bankrolling the same insurgents and bandits terrorizing ordinary Nigerians.

No executive action has followed the warning. Families continue to pay ransoms to see their children again while the financial rails that make kidnapping profitable remain untouched.

Even the country's greatest industrial success story is not immune. Aliko Dangote, Africa's richest man, has been forced to price refinery products in dollars because the government could not reliably supply crude in naira under its own crude-for-naira arrangement, leaving him absorbing exchange-rate losses while buying in dollars and selling in naira.

If wealth alone bought protection in Nigeria, Dangote would not be improvising around his own government's failures. What buys protection here is proximity to power, and Dangote, for all his billions, sits outside that inner circle.

The same hierarchy of concern governs how the state treats kidnapped Nigerians. When schoolchildren were rescued in Oyo State, the government presented it as proof of intelligence-led success.

A former Deputy Director of the Department of State Services has since warned that the tactics used there do not transfer to the North, where abduction has hardened into organized industry. The government has acknowledged the difference without building an equivalent response, which leaves one honest conclusion: northern abductions are being managed as background noise, while southern rescues are packaged as victories.

Geography and tribe are doing work that policy should be doing.

None of this is unprecedented, which is its own indictment. Under the previous administration, public funds were discovered stashed in uncompleted buildings and airport terminals, and no one was prosecuted.

A former ruling-party chairman once told Nigerians that joining the party absolved their sins. That culture did not die with that administration. It matured into the current one, where allegations of graft trail political appointments and public contracts with a regularity that no longer shocks, only exhausts.

Ask why justice bends toward the powerful and the answer is structural, not mysterious. The powerful control the institutions meant to check them.

A National Assembly that should investigate has largely become a rubber stamp. An anti-corruption agency that should prosecute without fear has too often been aimed at opposition figures instead. A judiciary that should be the last line of defense has, in too many high-profile cases, rewarded loyalty over evidence.

When every checkpoint answers to the same authority, accountability stops being a risk for anyone inside the circle.

This government inherited a real chance to prove that the law applies without exception, starting with a transparent, independent investigation into how a twenty-six-year-old woman died inside a federal minister's home.

That chance is being spent on silence, on statements that ask the public to be patient, on a Chief of Staff still at his desk despite two unresolved scandals bearing his office's fingerprints.

Every day without an arrest, without a credible timeline, and without consequence for anyone with a title is itself an answer. It tells Nigerians who the law protects and who it merely applies to.

Welcome to Nigeria, where the law is for everyone, but justice is for the powerful.

The remedy is not another statement from a spokesperson or another promise of an internal review. It is the ballot in 2027, the one instrument ordinary Nigerians still hold that title and connection cannot buy.

Nigeria, the time to take your country back is now.

Mohammed Bello Doka can be reached via [email protected] 

Abuja Network News