WEAPONISING DEREGISTRATION: TINUBU’S JUDICIAL GUILLOTINE AGAINST DEMOCRACY MUST BE RESISTED BY NIGERIA’S SUFFERING MASSES AND EVERY STAKEHOLDER IN THE NIGERIA PROJECT
By Aare Amerijoye DOT.B,
There comes a moment in the life of every dying regime when it stops contesting elections and starts abolishing them. Nigeria reached that moment on the fifteenth of June twenty twenty six, when Justice Peter Lifu of the Federal High Court in Abuja signed an order designed to erase the African Democratic Congress and four other parties from existence before a single vote could be cast in 2027. Let nobody dress this in the language of law. This was an execution. A bench masquerading as a court was handed the rope, and it hanged due process in broad daylight.
Examine the architecture of the crime and the conspiracy reveals itself with embarrassing clarity. The suit did not come from aggrieved voters. It came from the Incorporated Trustees of the National Forum of Former Legislators, a body that appeared from nowhere with the timing of a contract killer, precisely as the ADC was assembling the most formidable opposition coalition Nigeria has seen since 1999 around Atiku Abubakar and Rotimi Amaechi. INEC itself, the institution constitutionally vested with this responsibility, stood in that courtroom and rejected the application, tendering certificates of return as proof that these parties held seats in state houses of assembly and the National Assembly. The plaintiffs lost on every fact placed before the court and still won the judgment. That is not jurisprudence. That is procurement.
THE ATTORNEY GENERAL WHO PROSECUTED DEMOCRACY ITSELF
It must be recorded in permanent ink that Prince Lateef Fagbemi, Attorney General of the Federation and chief law officer of this nation, personally filed processes demanding that INEC be compelled to do precisely what the judgment achieved. When the government’s own chief lawyer argues in open court for the legal extinction of his principal’s most dangerous challenger, the pretence of an independent electoral umpire collapses entirely. Fagbemi did not defend the Constitution that day. He prosecuted democracy on behalf of a frightened incumbency. History will not forgive him quietly, and neither will the Nigerian people.
A JUDICIARY THAT HAS LEARNED TO TAKE INSTRUCTION
The Court of Appeal itself, in staying that judgment within twenty four hours, used words it almost never directs at a sitting judge, branding Justice Lifu’s conduct as judicial impertinence and judicial rascality, conduct the Supreme Court has previously said renders a judge unfit for the bench. A judge so reckless that his own appellate superiors call him unfit does not stumble into such a ruling by accident. He is despatched. The bench has been infiltrated, and INEC, the supposed umpire, has shown itself either too weak to resist capture or too complicit to bother resisting.
THE WORLDLY GRAVEYARD OF NATIONS THAT TRIED THIS
Nigeria is not the first nation whose rulers discovered that tanks are unnecessary when judges are obedient. Robert Mugabe did not need to ban the opposition outright in Zimbabwe. He simply let captured commissions disqualify it piece by piece until the contest became a funeral procession with a predetermined corpse. Viktor Orban in Hungary did not storm parliament. He starved his opposition of legal oxygen through compliant courts until democracy became decoration. Alexander Lukashenko in Belarus perfected the art of deregistering inconvenient parties years before jailing what remained of them. Every one of these regimes called it law. History calls it the prelude to dictatorship. Tinubu’s enablers are not writing a new chapter. They are plagiarising the oldest tyranny in the textbook and gambling that Nigerians cannot read.
THE MASSES PAY FOR THIS THEFT IN BLOOD AND HUNGER
This is not an argument between men in expensive agbada. The trader in Onitsha watching her capital evaporate to inflation, the okada rider in Lagos rationing fuel he cannot afford, the widow in Zamfara burying a husband the state failed to protect, all of them are being told through this judgment that their vote is now negotiable, that power in Nigeria may be retained not by performance but by litigation against the very existence of one’s rivals. A government that fears the ballot box enough to outlaw its challengers through a judge’s pen has already confessed, in open court, that it cannot win honestly.
JULY THE SEVENTH AND THE RECKONING NIGERIA CANNOT POSTPONE
The appeal returns on the seventh of July, and that date must now summon every conscience left in this Republic, lawyers who still believe in their oath, civil society that has not been bought, traditional rulers, the clergy, and the ordinary citizen who still believes a ballot paper outweighs a judge’s signature. Atiku Abubakar’s coalition has already proven its mandate through the staggering numbers recorded at the ADC presidential primary. No Federal High Court, however thoroughly captured, possesses the moral or constitutional authority to overturn that verdict through the back door of a deregistration suit engineered for one purpose alone, to deliver Bola Tinubu an uncontested coronation dressed as an election.
Nigeria did not bury its heroes of June twelve to watch the judiciary bury its democracy in their place. This conspiracy must be named, resisted and defeated in open daylight. The masses must rise. The courts must be watched without blinking. And the world must witness the seventh of July, because what stands trial that day is not five political parties. It is whether Nigeria still belongs to Nigerians, or whether it now belongs to whoever can buy a judgment.
29 June 2026
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
Director General
The Narrative Force.
