The Two-Speed Justice System Nigeria Does Not Want to Talk About

Nasir El-Rufai was arrested at the airport. He was released on bail by the EFCC, then immediately rearrested by operatives who had apparently been waiting outside the commission's headquarters. His supporters, within weeks, had hired a Washington DC lobbying firm to pressure American officials, Congress, and multilateral institutions to monitor what they described as the weaponisation of due process. The ICPC responded by saying it was not moved. The case then moved to a Federal High Court where it was adjourned, as these cases tend to be.

I am not writing about whether El-Rufai is guilty. I do not know, and neither does anyone who has not seen the full evidence. What I am writing about is something the case has made newly visible: a pattern in Nigeria's anti-corruption prosecution system that has nothing to do with any individual defendant, but that shapes almost every case that reaches the courts.

A Dataphyte analysis published earlier this year reviewed 393 corruption cases involving public officials between 2013 and 2026. Sixty percent of those cases remain unresolved. But the more important finding is buried a little deeper. When you separate the cases by the type of official charged, a clear divide appears. Cases involving appointed officials, ministers, agency heads, civil servants, tend to resolve within two to five years. Cases involving elected officials, governors and legislators mostly, take an average of six to fifteen years. Orji Uzor Kalu was arraigned in 2007 and convicted in 2019. Twelve years.

I want to sit with that number.

Twelve years is not a legal process. It is a deterrence strategy in reverse. It tells every Nigerian considering reporting a sitting governor, a senator, or a local government chairman that the law will eventually move, but not before the person they reported has had twelve years to retaliate, relocate assets, change administrations, and exhaust the career of every witness in the case. The law does not protect you from that. It just watches it happen and then, eventually, perhaps, issues a verdict.

The Dataphyte figures also show that of the 393 cases reviewed, only 35 involved former governors. Thirty-five. In fourteen years. There are 36 states in Nigeria. Former governors accumulate at a rate the prosecution system is not even keeping pace with.

This is not primarily a story about judicial corruption, though I am not saying that does not exist. It is a story about structural design. Elected officials in Nigeria have access to legal resources, political networks, and constitutional protections that make their cases genuinely more complex to prosecute than cases involving appointed officials. Senior advocates get briefed. Every procedural option is exercised. Interlocutory applications get filed. Each one takes months. Multiply that by twelve years of hearings and you have a system that functions, but functions at a pace that is effectively indistinguishable from impunity.

Here is what makes the El-Rufai case interesting beyond the individual. His support group's decision to hire an American lobbying firm is a data point about what powerful defendants now understand about how to slow a Nigerian prosecution. You do not just file applications in the Federal High Court. You also go to Washington. You frame the prosecution as political persecution in the language that international observers respond to, rule of law, democratic backsliding, due process, and you get the story outside the domestic legal system where it becomes harder to manage.

I understand why they did it. I also think it is worth being honest about what it means. If the response to a corruption prosecution in Nigeria is to engage a lobbying firm to apply external pressure on the prosecuting government, then what we have is a situation where the wealthier and more connected the defendant, the more tools they have to complicate the legal process. The law has not changed. The tools for using it have multiplied.

What none of this changes is the underlying data. Sixty percent of cases unresolved. Fifteen years for a governor's trial. A prosecution system that moves fastest against the people with the fewest resources to slow it down.

The ICPC chairman's point about time-bound practice directions, which I wrote about last week, becomes even more urgent when you look at these numbers. Without a structural mechanism to force cases toward resolution, the current system does not just tolerate delay. It rewards it. The longer a defendant can keep a case alive, the more witnesses age, memories fade, political contexts shift, and public attention moves elsewhere. Time is a defence strategy. And right now, the people with the most of it are the people who already have the most of everything else.

I keep coming back to the 60% figure. Six in ten cases against Nigerian public officials sitting unresolved in a system that has been running for over a decade. That is not a backlog. That is the system describing itself honestly, if you are willing to read the number for what it is.