By Sonala Olumhense
Abubakar Malami, Nigeria’s immediate past Attorney-General and Minister of Justice, spent the Christmas and New Year festivities behind bars.
If you are keeping score, this means that by the time his bail application is heard by the Federal High Court in Abuja this Wednesday, Malami would have been without his liberty and swagger for over one month.
Just two years ago, this would have been unimaginable. For eight years, he was effectively Nigeria’s most powerful government official. No, not President Muhammadu Buhari. Not Vice-President Yemi Osinbajo.
Those men were the constitutional leaders, of course, and in addition, Osinbajo was the more accomplished lawyer. But Malami was bound to Buhari by their common religion and Fulani ancestry in an administration in which power was not conducted in English.
But now, Buhari is dead, and Malami is facing money-laundering charges in a country in which he once defined money laundering, and virtually every other charge.
Nigeria has had many Attorneys-General who were political loyalists, and many who were ineffective. What the country has not fully confronted, certainly not in one sustained, evidence-led narrative, is the possibility that Malami’s tenure as AGF represented something more dangerous: the conversion of the Justice Ministry itself into a strategic asset, an office positioned to control investigations, decide which prosecutions lived or died, negotiate (or refuse to negotiate) mega-settlements, supervise the fate of recovered loot, and set the rules by which forfeited assets are managed or disposed of.