Abubakar Malami: Chief law officer as law breaker by Chido Onumah - Commentary@ITREALMS

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Abubakar Malami, SAN, was the Honourable Attorney General and Minister of Justice of Nigeria for eight years under late President Muhammadu Buhari. As Minister of Justice, and one of the youngest minsters in the Buhari cabinet, when he was appointed on November 8, 2015, he prided himself on being the chief law officer of the country. I shall return to this. As the chief law officer, his responsibilities included providing legal advice to the government and ensuring compliance with the law.

In a June 28, 2020, essay “Malami: Portrait of a ‘Barrier-in-Chief’” published on the whistleblowing platform, Corruption Anonymous (CORA), my colleague, Godwin Onyeacholem, wrote, “Malami is one in the privileged club of distinguished lawyers who tag their names with that smug title of SAN (Senior Advocate of Nigeria), a legal title keenly coveted by the typical Nigerian lawyer. But he also comes across as one who is essentially unfaithful to the law. As in a number of other appointments, Buhari’s choice of Malami for the pivotal office had, from the outset, been viewed by the more discerning segment of the populace as a dreadful miscue.”