Second Kwara State University (KWASU) Annual Lecture Honouring Prof. Yusuf Olaolu Ali

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REMARKS BY HIS EXCELLENCY, PROF. YEMI OSINBAJO, SAN, GCON, IMMEDIATE PAST VICE PRESIDENT OF THE FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF NIGERIA, AS THE CHAIR OF THE SECOND KWARA STATE UNIVERSITY (KWASU) ANNUAL LECTURE IN ILORIN, KWARA, IN HONOUR OF PROF. YUSUF OLAOLU ALI, ON THE 9^TH OF OCTOBER, 2025

Protocols

I thought I should perhaps mention what the Master of Ceremonies, let me just call you Master rather than Mister, had said about the great University of Ilorin and how it is better by far than its child, the Kwara State University. But I think one of the very important lessons we’ve learned from today’s lecture is that those who claim to be fathers must not continue to insist that they must be better than their children. I think the prayer of fathers is that their children will be better.

It’s a great pleasure to be here, and it’s a double honour to have been asked to chair this lecture. First, because the lecture is in honour of my dear egbon, Prof. Yusuf Ali, Senior Advocate of Nigeria, he is a man for whom I have tremendous respect and admiration, and my admiration for him grew from several interactions that I’ve had with him over the years, very, very many years, especially in the courtroom and in different courts all over the country.

And I think the best place to recognise whether you have a person of integrity, whether you have a man of honour, is where he makes his living and how he makes his living. The courtroom, as you know, is a place where we lawyers make our living. And there, sometimes it’s cutthroat. It is do or die sometimes. But I must say that here is a person for whom it was never victory at all costs. It was never that, or victory by any means. He always demonstrated integrity and the highest values and ethics of our profession. I think that for many of us who have interacted with him, and really, you know, there is no need to flatter him. Those of us who have interacted with him come away with a clear impression that there are still some decent, and I think Chidi had said this so well, that there are still some decent people in our midst. Good people.

Perhaps the most important reason why I’m here is that his name is associated with this. And I felt that there was absolutely no way in the world that I could have excused myself from not being here today.

My second reason, of course, is the guest lecturer, Professor Chidi Anselm-Odikalu, who, as he pointed out, was my student at the University of Lagos.

But just the same way in which I advised the University of Ilorin to accept when your student has become better than you, I so admit that Professor Chidi Anselm-Odikalu is a much better version of his teacher. And I’ve known Chidi forever, and as we all know, he has been a bold and courageous human rights and good governance advocate. And in recent years, he has taken up the most significant single issue, in my view, the judiciary and the administration of justice in Nigeria.

His recent book, which I recommend and hope will be made available in the faculty, is titled The Selectorate, and I’m sure that some of us saw it here, how the judiciary topples the people, and it is along those lines. And I think it’s one of the most pungent and well-researched commentaries on judicial intrusions on electoral outcomes in Nigeria, the sordid reasons for the upsurge in those intrusions, and I must say the declining credibility of our courts and our court system.

But he’s not just a critic; he has long been in this ecosystem, in our administration of justice system. And I think he also recognises, and if you look at a lot of his contributions, there are concrete suggestions as to what to do. And today’s lecture, I think, is an absolutely incredible example of that.

So, we will, as you know, find him an excellent source of fresh and novel ideas. And I think today in particular, he has demonstrated that we need to rethink, we need to rewire our minds, and I think that that is one of the most important things to take away from this lecture. We’re greatly enriched, I must say, by the insights that Professor Odikalu has shared with us today.

I think that when he started by changing the topic, I wasn’t too surprised, because, of course, he’s the sort of person who will never accept anything at its face value. He will always ensure that he interrogates the undercurrents. But I’m sure that none of us, and certainly I did not, expect anything as deep and as intrusive to who we are as a people and as members of the legal profession and as students of law, as he has done today.

I think he’s managed to make even me doubt whether or not I was properly educated in this business of law. As a matter of fact, when he spoke about politicians and said that successful politicians must be criminals, I immediately disclaimed any success in politics.

But one thing that I cannot disclaim is the fact that I’m a lawyer. And I think that we must, as he said, continue in this process of self-examination and rethink the way that we teach law. I think the history and historicity, if you like, of our colonial dependency as a people and as a profession is an important burden that we must continually re-examine.

It has imposed on us what Professor Odikalu describes as our ideational dependence. I think that that is so important because, in thinking through our legal problems and situations, we are almost enslaved by that colonial dependency. It is that precise problem that I think we need to continually interrogate, not just in our writings and publishing as jurists and as teachers, but also as students.

I think an important point that he makes, and I really like the point, is about decluttering our mind from thinking that white jurists and their reasoning, or English jurists and their reasoning, are superior to ours. And he said in particular, don’t model yourself after Lord Denning. Lord Denning, I don’t know whether many here ever, well, I doubt, some of us would have come across Lord Denning.

Those of us who schooled at some point in time in England recognised that Lord Denning was such a mythical figure almost. I recall that when I was at the London School of Economics, we would go and wait for Lord Denning, I think it was at King’s Cross, because he came by train, passed through King’s Cross every Wednesday or so. And we would go and wait there for him. And when he showed up, a lot of us students from the Commonwealth would gather around him, and he would tell us, we’d ask him questions, and he would answer.

So, Lord Denning is in very many ways a person who, those of us who are students of the Commonwealth, and even today, regard as a mythical figure of sorts, or someone to whom we should accord all of the respect and regard. But let me give you an example of one of the reasons why we must be careful not to make the Lord Dennings our models.

If you look at the frequency of jurisdictional challenges that we have today, almost in every case that you have, somebody will come up with a jurisdictional challenge. A lawyer will say that you question jurisdiction. And of course, as you know, this almost obsessive preoccupation with technicality is one of the reasons why cases are delayed forever in our courts, and why sometimes you find that justice is denied, or that justice is not even recognised. Technicality is sometimes regarded as being more important.

To justify the position that jurisdiction is a threshold issue in any case, or is at the heart of litigation, most of us in practice know that our touchstone is the case of UAC and McFoy. As soon as you talk about jurisdiction, ah, well, UAC and McFoy, and the cases following it.

But UAC and McFoy is a case decided by Lord Denning, where he said, you cannot put something on nothing. This, you cannot put something on nothing, is such an important doctrine that we almost don’t even bother to interrogate it. But somebody did, a Nigerian lawyer, Fidelis Odita, who, by the way, was also at the University of Lagos. He pointed out that, he said that, who says that you cannot put something on nothing? He says if a person steals money from you, he has no title to the money, so that is nothing. He says, but if the thief goes to a market and buys beef with it, buys meat, he transfers title to the vendor, because title in currency, title in money, is passed on delivery. The moment you hand over money, the title is passed. You can’t interrogate it any further. So really, you can build something on nothing, because you start from the, I hope I’m not confusing the law students. So, if you steal money, as in this example, obviously, you have no legal title.

So, you should not be able to build anything on it, right? But the moment you hand over the money, the title is delivered upon delivery. So really, you can actually place something, at least a good portion of meat, on nothing.

The sole purpose of a system of justice, as Professor Odikalu pointed out, is to benefit the people. That’s the sole purpose. If a system of justice does not benefit the people, even if it benefits lawyers, it’s really pointless. If laws don’t benefit the people, really, the laws are pointless.

But one of the failings, and I think this is a point that he points out so well, is that the failings of our administration of justice system are largely also a failing of our philosophical approach or the way we think about those problems. So many times, you find that judicial decisions, even at the level of the Supreme Court, and perhaps sometimes it is at that level, that you find the Supreme Court very frequently just prefers for substance technicality over substance. You find, almost, you know, in so many very crucial cases, that the court decides that it will favour the form, it will favour the technicality over the actual justice of the case.

Many of us are familiar with the case of Okafor and Nweke. That case where, you know, the court said that on the question of signing of processes in the name of a law firm instead of counsel. So, if you sign a process in the name of a law firm instead of counsel, that is enough to nullify proceedings. And whatever, and it is at whatever stage the proceedings were. So even if, at the level of the Supreme Court itself, after all appeals, after many years, it is discovered that the signature is wrong, that’s the end of the case. I mean, that is a tragedy because even the English courts, from where we inherited the idea of signing of processes in the name of individuals, have long since changed those rules.

They no longer insist on that technicality at all. As a matter of fact, you can amend at any stage. If there is a problem with the signature, you can amend it at any stage.

So even the English courts that we depend on or rely on for some of these proceedings have long since moved on and are no longer tied down by the technicalities that we still continue to insist on.

If you look at some of the other cases that we find, on the question again, going back to the whole question of jurisdiction, how the constitution of tribunals and all that, there’s a very interesting case, and I’d want you to take a look at it if you could. It’s called Zachary and the Nigerian Army, the Supreme Court case in 2015.

Captain Zachary was the Chairman of a task force assigned to investigate the illegal use of NITEL lines by Yahoo Boys for 419 activities. So Captain Zachary, who was the chairman of this special investigation panel, took a bribe from the Yahoo Boys, a bribe of N40,000, and he released them, let them go. Anyway, he was caught and was taken before a court-martial.

The court found him guilty, the tribunal found him guilty, and he was court-martialled and convicted. He challenged his conviction. The challenge went all the way to the Supreme Court, and he challenged his conviction on one ground. The tribunal was supposed to have three members. All those members should be his seniors in the army.

But in this case, there were four members of the tribunal. Three were his seniors, and the fourth was his junior. The quorum of the tribunal is three members. The three members who formed the quorum were his seniors. The only outstanding one who was his junior was the fourth person.

The Supreme Court held that the tribunal was wrongly constituted, and for that reason, it overturned the conviction and freed the man who had been found guilty of having taken a bribe.

It is this sort of obsessive preoccupation with technicality that I think, again, requires rethinking. What is the purpose of law? What is the purpose of the judex? What is the purpose of this public resource, our court system? Is it to glorify some rule, to glorify some law, or to actually bring justice that makes sense to the vast majority of people? Compare that to a case, and this is an English case, and I compare it to the English case, because again, the English for which we get some of these doctrines have simply moved along.

So, in the case of Aaron Soneji, this is a 2006 case. This was a case where two people had been convicted of drug-related offences. Now, these two people who were convicted of drug-related offences had also made some money from this illegal activity. The law was that if you convict a person of drug-related offences, and there are proceeds of that crime, you must, within six months, that is, the court must, within six months, issue a confiscation order to take those proceeds. In this case, the court did not issue a confiscation order within six months. It issued a confiscation order after 18 months.

It was argued on appeal, on behalf of Soneji, that the requirement of law was a mandatory requirement. You shall issue a confiscation order within six months. The court in England, the House of Lords, said that failure to comply strictly with a time limit was not the intention of the legislature. That was not the intention of Parliament. In making that law, the intention of Parliament was to ensure that the proceeds of crime were seized. And that was the intention of Parliament. That the technicality around it is completely irrelevant. And that is what you should do is concern yourself with the intention of Parliament. The reason why Parliament made the law is to confiscate the proceeds of crime and also not to allow a criminal to escape punishment.

So, for you to come around by technicality and say, oh, you must do, you must not do, mandatory or direct, was considered by the court as completely irrelevant. So, I think that one of the very important things, and you, surprisingly, the case of Soneji has been followed in some cases by the Supreme Court of Nigeria, and in some cases, not.

You find that the Supreme Court has wavered between one; sometimes it is strict, sometimes it’s not, especially in electoral petition cases. And it is, in fact, in electoral petition cases that the courts have applied this Soneji case.

I want to just say, you know, that, and I think the very crucial thing that we must take away today is really the fact that we really need to rethink critical thinking, thinking that is decluttered, thinking that is decolonised, is really going to be crucial to being able to reform our legal profession, the administration of justice system, and also even the way that we teach law in our universities.

I want to thank Professor Odikalu for opening our eyes today, and also for doing such a marvellous job of getting us all to rethink this whole system, and for getting us all to go back to, as it were, the drawing board.

Thank you very much.