Facing jail, sealed offices and exile: the lawyers who don’t give up.
While law firms elsewhere often crumble and fold under intimidation by the powerful, legal rebels in five African countries routinely risk imprisonment and death threats in their fight for justice. In ZAM’s new transnational investigation, Josephine Chinele, Emmanuel Mutaizibwa, Elizabeth BanyiTabi, Theophilus Abbah, Seth Bokpe, and Edmund Boateng portray those who fight for the proper rule of law in Malawi, Uganda, Cameroon, Nigeria, and Ghana—and who often even cross the limits of what is deemed ‘acceptable’ behaviour for a lawyer in doing so. “They simply leave us no other option.”
Using all the tools
Eron Kiiza was beaten and spent 87 days in a Ugandan jail for resisting a court official’s unlawful instructions. Alexious Kamangila was sued for defamation and receives death threats for exposing corrupt judges in Malawi. Amina Augie was attacked for challenging mafia networks within her Nigerian court. Martin Kpebu lost his position at a prestigious law firm for supporting a forest community against illegal mining. Meanwhile, Akere Muna risked his freedom by calling Cameroonian state oil executives “criminals” in a country where the “presumption of innocence” for the powerful is taken very seriously indeed.
Using all the tools at their disposal—from “naming and shaming” to rallying the public and openly insulting judges who pervert and abuse the law, and, of course, simply using their expertise to defend communities and social justice—lawyers in several African countries resist a corrupted judiciary that has aligned itself with political power. With often a heavy price to pay, particularly in comparison to those colleagues who choose to curry favour with the powers that be, they achieve intermittent victories and have no intention of giving up any time soon. New alliances with civil society are also emerging.
Below are snippets of the investigations per country; all will be published in the coming weeks on this website.
Uganda
“But of course we’ll put your wife on social media,” shouts Agather Atuhaire, lawyer, journalist, and activist, at the policeman she has just recognised as a torturer of dozens of ‘Generation Z’ protesters—those arrested, hurt, and sometimes disappeared by this same man. The policeman, whom she meets during a picket at a Kampala jail that demands the freedom of political prisoners, has just admonished her for circulating his and his spouse’s photographs, but Atuhaire is unfazed. “We’ll put every one of you and yours on social media,” she tells him. “Because you leave us no other avenue.”
To circulate photos of torturers and ‘dox’ even their families may be unorthodox, and in the case of the relatives, generally wrong, but in Uganda, under the increasingly militarised and oppressive regime of autocrat Yoweri Museveni, more and more normally unacceptable tools are being added to the resistance’s array. Even a ‘radical rudeness’ strategy, dating back to the days of the colony, is being deployed to irk those in power—and the judges who are their pals: “This man has both a small penis and a small brain,” a lawyer recently volleyed at a judge who slapped a defamation fine on a fellow lawyer for calling two other (High Court) judges ‘incompetent’ on social media. Yet another judge has been portrayed as a Nazi executioner, with the cartoon circulating widely.
The lawyer said the judge had a small penis and a small brain
And while political prisoners, including renowned struggle veterans from wars against past dictators, continue to languish in jail, some victories are being achieved. Under pressure from the legal profession and civil society, the otherwise often docile Supreme Court recently ruled that civilians may no longer be tried in President Museveni’s infamous Military Court. ‘Habeas corpus’ writs have led to the resurfacing of disappeared citizens, and lawyer Eron Kiiza, who was jailed for shouting and gesticulating in court to express his discomfort with a rigged game against his political prisoner client as well as being denied a proper seat reserved for the defence, has been released again amid cheers and songs of ‘We Shall Overcome.’
Malawi
Like in Uganda, the judiciary in Malawi regularly lets wealthy members of the ruling elite off the hook for corruption and plunder, while jailing the poor on the flimsiest of charges. But, also like in Uganda, growing resistance is brewing, and the tools used by some to shake up the system—where checks and balances on the powerful are seen to be in deep slumber—are sometimes necessarily uncouth.
The Malawi judiciary leaves wealthy ruling elite members off the hook
Alexious Kamangila, for instance, names and shames corrupt judges on Facebook, even if they have not been found guilty by the country’s Judicial Council. “But the Judicial Council only goes through the motions of procedure,” Kamangila writes in the same posts, defending his outing of those who have taken money from big oil, exploitative investors, and corrupt presidents and ministers.
Folk hero
The firebrand is quickly gaining folk hero status. He has 87,000 followers on Facebook, the Malawi Law Society is supporting his defence against a defamation charge brought by one of the judges he has publicly called corrupt, and civil society organisations such as the National Anti-Corruption Alliance (NACA) state that Kamangila’s efforts need to be supported by “as many Malawians as possible.” Kamangila has recently been forced into exile after receiving death threats, and his lawyer was followed and had his briefcase stolen. However, he promises to continue his online action “even for as long as the next ten years.”
Cameroon
Even veteran legal minds Akere Muna (72) and Alice Nkom (82) have recently joined forces with young activists fed up with the country’s 40-year one-party rule under nonagenarian President Paul Biya, he of the lengthy million-dollar stays in the Intercontinental Hotel in Geneva. In the past few months, Muna has privately charged state oil executives who sold the country’s oil to multinational Glencore at a bargain price in exchange for bribes and defended a 23-year-old TikTok activist who was jailed for calling on youths to rise up against the ruling party in the upcoming elections. It was striking to see the venerable elder and lawyer using the hashtag #freeJuniorNgombe, just as the youth do.
The sage elder posted the hashtag #freejuniorNgombe
Similarly feisty, his counterpart Alice Nkom used scissors to cut the seal placed by the government on the door of the civil society organisation she leads, fully aware that this act would soon bring her before a regime-friendly court. Not remotely intimidated, she and other organisations increasingly see government repression, including spurious charges (1) levelled against them, as a sign that their work is having impact.
Cheers
Evidence of this was a press conference on 5 August 2024, where five lawyers and three civil society organisations came together to declare that they had had enough and would henceforth coordinate activities for better governance and justice in Cameroon. Akere Muna was unable to attend, as he was in the capital, Yaoundé, that day to defend the jailed TikTok activist. However, he did phone in that afternoon to inform those assembled, amid cheers, that Junior Ngombe had been freed.
Nigeria
Whoever tries to defend the rule of law in Nigeria is faced with a deeply entangled, almost incestuous, network of politicians and judges. Independent judges in Nigeria have been under pressure for decades, including from past military regimes, but after fifteen judges were arrested on fake charges by the secret service in 2016, many chose the side of safety. A series of reciprocal favours and even marriages followed, where politicians would offer jobs and assets to judges, and judges would respond with favourable rulings, even sanctioning electoral fraud. Meanwhile, politicians also pulled court staff into their networks, acting as godfathers who distributed benefits to those able to navigate the bureaucracy, either cutting through or adding to red tape as needed.
“Where there is injustice, there will be insecurity”
The perverted system has been under attack both from outside and within. While Law Professor Chidi Odinkalu, acting from his university base in the United States, uses whistleblower reports and media access to expose the incestuous network, his colleague Jibrin Okutepa fights from the inside to close legal loopholes and combat judicial fraud, all the way to the Supreme Court. Recently, retired High Court judge Amina Augie joined their efforts by publicly exposing corrupt staff networks in her court.
While some may question the significance of such legal struggles in a country under attack from violent insurgents, urban and rural militias, and pervasive kidnapping-for-ransom, Jibrin Okutepa has this to say: “Where there is injustice, there will be insecurity; we are witnessing insecurity in Africa because of injustice in diverse ways.”
Ghana
In a way, it was lawfare—the use of the law to oppose corruption and oppression—that defeated the government in Ghana. An overwhelming majority of the 17 million voters, fed up with politically connected illegal mining that poisoned landscapes and water, delivered a resounding loss to the politicians who had condoned this in the elections held in December 2024.
Illegal mining by politicians was punished at the elections
At the forefront of the battle against polluting mining and its political exploiters were lawyers Oliver Barker-Vormawor and Martin Kpebu. Barker-Vormawor had taken a permissive new law that enabled the rapacious mining to court, while Kpebu had defended communities in damaged forests through a class lawsuit against the scourge. In alliance with affected citizens, civil society, and independent media, awareness of the exploitative damage had spread so widely that ‘illegal mining’ and its political godfathers became the central issue, driving many voters to deliver a defeat to the ruling party.
Both Kpebu and Barker-Vormawor had to sacrifice for their victories. Kpebu had lost his job at an upper-class law firm, where the boss would claim to be "friends with the (former) president." Barker-Vormawor had been beaten by the police more than once. Their travails are probably also still far from over, as the new government is also made up of the same political elite circles that traditionally rule many African countries and do not necessarily envision radical change.
Disrespectful and queer
But the generation of these lawyers has laid the foundations for more change, inspiring ever more new social-justice-minded colleagues: Elorm Ababio, for example, who did not give up until she was accepted into a Bar that initially thought her too rebellious to admit. Now a lawyer, she is not only ready to take on the "neocolonial puppets who keep the poor in check," but also proudly carries the labels "disrespectful and queer."
The West
Still, it is a long and hard battle, difficult to bring to a good result, especially as long as the rest of the world seems content with corrupt leaders in Africa. Some supportive solidarity from the West would not go amiss, say the legal rebels and their civil society allies, particularly from those countries that often use words like ‘democracy’ and ‘good governance’. In the words of Moses Nkandawire, chair of Malawi’s National Anti-Corruption Alliance: “Why doesn’t the West question these individuals who deposit stolen Malawian funds into their country’s accounts?” Ugandan lawyer Nicholas Opiyo admonishes development partners who “turn a blind eye if it serves their interests,” prioritising “economic and military interests over values.”
In all five countries, activists and their legal allies urged more solidarity from the international community, “instead of paying millions of dollars to those who oppress us and sell out our resources,” as participants at the Yaoundé press conference put it.
- Several civil society organisations in Cameroon have recently been declared 'closed' because of 'unjustified finance,' a blanket term used by the government to criminalise foreign support funding.
See the instalments in this Transnational Investigation here:
Cameroon | New Alliance
Malawi |Naming and shaming
Nigeria | Breaking up the family
Uganda | Radical rudeness
Ghana | Smaller and bigger victories
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