24/12/2025
PRESS BRIEFING.
Date:24th December 2025.
20 November 2025: The Day Evidence Ceased To Matter in Nigerian Courts, Judicial Silence, Selective Justice, and Media Complicity
The most dangerous aspect of the judgment delivered by Justice James K. Omotosho, is not merely that it reached a foreordained conclusion, but that it did so by deliberately suppressing evidence he already admitted on record in his own court, thereby converting adjudication into a procedural façade. This was not an error of law or an oversight of fact; it was a calculated refusal to engage with material evidence whose evaluation would have fatally undermined the prosecution’s narrative.
Once evidence is admitted, it binds the judge absolutely. The conduct, protest, silence, or alleged boycott of the defendant (Mazi Nnamdi Kanu) is legally irrelevant to that obligation. Judgment writing is not a negotiation with the accused; it is a solitary judicial duty anchored exclusively to the evidentiary record. A judge may reject defence evidence, but he must first confront it, evaluate it, and explain why it is rejected. Silence is not neutrality. Silence is suppression.
Had Justice Omotosho evaluated the admitted video exhibit of Theophilus (TY) Danjuma, he would have been confronted with the inescapable reality that public calls for communities to arm themselves in self-defence against murderous violence were not unique to Nnamdi Kanu, nor criminalised when made by powerful establishment figures. Proper evaluation would have compelled the court to accept that Kanu’s calls for guns and bullets in Los Angeles USA or during broadcasts were framed as community self-defence against the ravages of armed Fulani killer-herders, not incitement to lawless violence.
Had Justice Omotosho evaluated the admitted video evidence of Governor Hope Uzodinma, he would have known—because Uzodinma stated it publicly—that neither Nnamdi Kanu nor the IPOB had any hand in the killing of Ahmed Gulak. That single evaluation would have punctured one of the most politically weaponised allegations surrounding this case.
Had Justice Omotosho listened to his fellow Yoruba kinsman and Nigeria’s intelligence chief, Adeola Oluwatosin Ajayi, whose statements were also admitted in evidence, he would have been forced to acknowledge that the formation of armed vigilante groups for community defence was openly endorsed at the highest levels of Nigeria’s security establishment. That acknowledgement would have led inexorably to the conclusion that Kanu was right to form the to defend Igboland when the state failed to do so.
Had Justice Omotosho evaluated the evidence surrounding Lagos State Judicial Panel of Inquiry Report on EndSARS violence, he would have seen the documentary trail showing that Nnamdi Kanu repeatedly wrote to and consulted South-East governors, urging them to establish a regional security outfit similar to Amotekun. Their refusal—not Kanu’s ambition—precipitated the formation of ESN. Proper judicial evaluation would have made clear that ESN was conceptually and functionally analogous to Amotekun, differing only in political acceptance, not in purpose.
Had Justice Omotosho reviewed and evaluated the admitted Report on EndSARS violence, he would have been confronted with authoritative findings that squarely blamed killings and violence on the army and police—not on Nnamdi Kanu. That report decisively dismantles the lazy and dishonest attribution of nationwide violence to IPOB broadcasts and would have stripped the prosecution’s claims of moral and evidentiary legitimacy.
Had Justice Omotosho paid even minimal attention to chronology, he would have known that attributing post–June 2021 insecurity in the South-East to Nnamdi Kanu is factually and logically impossible. From June 2021 onward, Kanu was held in underground DSS detention, incommunicado, without access to telephones, visitors, counsel, or even his wife. A man locked in solitary confinement, denied all external communication, cannot simultaneously be directing events outside detention walls. Time itself disproves the allegation. The failure to reconcile alleged acts with undisputed detention timelines is not a minor evidentiary lapse; it is a collapse of basic judicial reasoning. Courts that ignore timelines abandon causation, and once causation is abandoned, conviction becomes a matter of narrative convenience rather than proof.
These were not speculative arguments. They were admitted exhibits. Their collective evaluation would have collapsed the architecture of the conviction. That is precisely why they were ignored.
The refusal to evaluate this evidence was not accidental. It was not procedural. It was outcome-driven. Justice Omotosho ignored them because he was operating under an overriding imperative to convict by all means, regardless of the evidentiary record. This is the gravest danger such a judgment poses: it signals to the judiciary that evidence may be admitted, buried, and erased at the judgment stage without consequence.
Even more disturbing is the silence of major international media organisations, none of which asked the most basic question any law student would pose: why did the court ignore defence evidence it had itself admitted? By reproducing the conclusions of the judgment without interrogating its evidentiary omissions, these media houses became unwitting accomplices in the laundering of judicial misconduct.
This case is no longer about one man. It is about whether courts may openly disregard admitted evidence and still be treated as legitimate, and whether the media will continue to mask such conduct through silence. A judiciary that can ignore evidence without explanation has ceased to function as a court of law. A media that refuses to question that silence has abdicated its public duty. Together, they place the rule of law itself in existential peril.
Signed:
Njoku Jude Njoku, Esq.
