On 20 November 2025, Justice James Omotosho of the Federal High Court, Abuja, convicted Mazi Nnamdi Kanu on seven terrorism-related counts and imposed concurrent sentences of life imprisonment on several, twenty years on another, and five years on a further count.
The judgment closed a decade-long prosecution that had already survived extraordinary rendition, an earlier appellate discharge, Supreme Court remittal, and multiple judicial hands.
Yet the conviction now sits under a cloud that is not merely political but foundational: the trial court appears to have defied the mandatory transition machinery of the Terrorism (Prevention and Prohibition) Act 2022 (TPPA) and anchored its ratio and sentencing order on a repealed statute, leaving the result suspended in what critics correctly describe as a constitutional vacuum.
Section 36(12) of the 1999 Constitution is unambiguous. A person shall not be convicted of a criminal offence unless that offence is defined and the penalty therefor prescribed in a written law. “Written law” means a law in force at the relevant time—the date of conviction and sentence—not a law that once existed. The Terrorism (Prevention) Act 2011 (as amended in 2013) was repealed by the TPPA 2022. Sections 97 and 98 of the new Act contain the ordinary savings and transitional provisions.
Ongoing proceedings, orders, and things done under the repealed law may continue, but they are to take effect as if made under the corresponding provisions of the extant Act. Section 98(2) and related clauses supply the bridge; they do not licence a court to treat the repealed statute as still alive for the purpose of creating offences or imposing penalties on judgment day.
The defence record shows that Kanu, appearing at critical stages without counsel, expressly directed the court to these transition commands. Justice Omotosho is said to have acknowledged the constitutional maxim—“no written law, no conviction”—only to proceed, days later, to convict and sentence under the repealed provisions while declining to apply or identify the living written law required by Section 36(12). Reliance on a savings clause such as Section 98(3), which preserves certain pending proceedings “as if this Act had not been made,” cannot resurrect a dead statute or convert a transitional administrative bridge into an offence-creating enactment. Nigerian jurisprudence has long treated a conviction rendered directly under a repealed law as incurably defective unless the extant statute supplies the foundation. “Substantive equivalence” of conduct under old and new law may satisfy moral intuition; it does not satisfy the Constitution.
Compounding the defect are further irregularities long flagged by defence counsel and family: a count framed under a non-existent or mis-cited Criminal Code designation that was never properly amended under the Administration of Criminal Justice Act; sentencing under the Customs and Excise Management Act on a basis never pleaded or put to the defendant for fresh plea; selective application of Section 122 of the Evidence Act (judicial notice taken of a proscription order when convenient, withheld when it would expose the repeal); and the failure to resolve jurisdictional objections as a threshold matter.
The result, in the language of one commentator, is a judgment born of “Lazarus syndrome”—the judicial delusion that dead laws can be commanded to rise.
The implications reach beyond one defendant. If a trial court may ignore mandatory transition provisions, convict under an extinct statute, and leave the sentence without a subsisting written law, Section 36(12) becomes hortatory and the principle of *nullum crimen sine lege* a myth.
Appellate courts have historically papered over charge-sheet technicalities by treating them as clerical; they have not, so far as the public record shows, upheld a conviction whose ratio decidendi and penal authority were expressly drawn from a repealed Act while the replacement statute sat unapplied.
To affirm here would set a precedent of judicial discretion over legislative repeal. It would also place the Court of Appeal in an awkward position: it cannot, on appeal, perform the statutory transition duty the trial judge refused when the point was raised in open court without risking fresh fair-hearing violations under Sections 36(1) and 36(6)(a).
Nor can it simply invent an “analogous” provision from the TPPA that was never the law under which the accused was called upon to defend.
What is expected next is therefore not routine appellate housekeeping but a confrontation with the Constitution.
Kanu filed a multi-ground notice of appeal in early February 2026 seeking to quash the conviction and sentences.
As of mid-October 2026 the appeal remains unlisted; the prosecution’s substantive response has been delayed or absent; and the Federal Government has withdrawn its cross-appeal seeking the death penalty.
IPOB and the family have sought diplomatic pressure from the United Kingdom (Kanu holds British nationality) and have threatened electoral consequences in the South-East if the listing continues to be deferred.
The National Judicial Council has been asked to examine the trial judge’s conduct. Parallel questions linger about the earlier Court of Appeal discharge of 13 October 2022 and the Supreme Court’s subsequent remittal.
The Court of Appeal’s options are limited and consequential. It may quash for want of a valid statutory foundation and jurisdictional error, potentially ordering a retrial under the TPPA with proper amendment and plea—an outcome that would still confront the history of rendition, fair-hearing complaints, and the political temperature of the South-East. It may uphold, thereby testing whether Nigerian courts will treat Section 36(12) as capable of being displaced by transitional savings clauses in politically sensitive terrorism prosecutions.
Or the matter may continue to languish, deepening the perception that the judiciary can be used to manage rather than adjudicate the most contested cases of national cohesion.
A conviction floating free of any living written law is not a technicality. It is a structural failure of the rule of law.
The Court of Appeal now holds the opportunity—and the burden—to decide whether that vacuum will be filled by constitutional principle or left empty by institutional caution. The answer will travel far beyond the walls of the Sokoto Correctional Centre.
Pamela O.
-Daily Buzzwire
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