By Mbang Confidence, Esq.
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The Gist
There is a quiet subversion taking place in our criminal justice system, and it wears the respectable garb of procedure. Remand proceedings — originally conceived as a stop-gap measure to hold a suspect lawfully while investigation or arraignment is completed — have, in practice, become a tool for indefinite, unaccountable detention. What was meant to be an exception has become the rule; what was meant to be temporary has become punitive; and what was meant to safeguard the process has become the very instrument that defeats it. It has now become a weapon.
The Original Intent
Under the Administration of Criminal Justice Act 2015 (and its state equivalents), remand proceedings exist to bridge a narrow gap where the police have arrested a suspect for an offence either outside their power to grant bail or an offence still undergoing investigation, and formal arraignment before a court of competent jurisdiction cannot yet proceed; a magistrate may order the suspect remanded in custody for a limited, defined period pending arraignment. The safeguards are explicit — periodic review, a firm outer limit, and an obligation on the prosecuting authority to either arraign the suspect or release them once that limit is reached. See sections 293 – 299 9f the ACJA 2015, dealing with Detention Time Limits. These sections were introduced by the draftsmen to formally cure the negative perception of Holding Charge, which was indeed a necessary evil, same has been weaponized beyond measures. See my vista on this issue at: (https://legalideasforum.com/holding-charge-necessary-evil-buried-in.html).
How the Weapon Is Fashioned
In practice, these safeguards are routinely ignored. Remand orders are obtained ex parte, often on the barest of applications, with little or no scrutiny of the strength of the allegation. Once made, the order becomes a convenient parking bay: investigations stall indefinitely, case files gather dust, and suspects — many of whom are never ultimately charged, let alone convicted — languish in custody for months, sometimes years, without their day in court.
This is not merely inefficiency. It is, in effect, punishment before trial — a direct assault on the presumption of innocence that is the cornerstone of our adversarial system. An accused person is entitled to know the case against them and to meet it before an impartial tribunal, with equality of arms between prosecution and defence. Remand, weaponised in this way, denies that person any arena in which to contest anything at all. There is no adversary to confront, no evidence to test, no adjudication to seek — only the fact of confinement, sustained by the inertia of the state.
In a matter I was privileged assigned to handle by a senior Counsel – Prince Paul Okon Effiong v. IGP & Nigeria Police Force (Unreported) – I witnessed firsthand this pattern of criminal administration. Acting on a frivolous petition, Prince Paul was taken into custody by the IGP Intelligence Response Team (IRT), and upon getting an order for his release, he was surrepstitiously taken to the Kuje correctional facility vide a remand Order for the first 14 days. It is important to note that both orders where gotten from the Magistrate Courts, but the order for his release was first in time. In fact, the remand order was gotten from a different Magistrate Court on the same day the Police department was served with the order for his release. However, he was kept for the first 14 days, after spending about two (2) weeks in the IRT facility. After many legal fireworks, he was only released during the second round of 14 days after making some concessions, which are beyond my knowledge.
Obviously, the remand process was only instituted to teach him a lesson without more. I fear that this might be the fate of many other Nigerians, including Denis Odama, the businessman and commentator recently taken into custody for allegedly cyber-bullying the Governor of Cross River State. This pattern is otiose and inimical to our criminal justice system. It would take nothing to grant a suspect bail with reasonable surety to ensure availability. What do you think?
The Adversarial System Undermined
Our adversarial model presupposes two contending parties before a neutral judge, each testing the other’s case in open court. Remand-as-detention-tool short-circuits that entire architecture. It removes the matter from the adversarial arena and relocates it to an administrative twilight zone where no one is required to prove anything, and no one is positioned to disprove it either. The suspect is neither convicted nor acquitted — merely held, indefinitely, in a limbo, the law never sanctioned. Politicians have – in collaboration with law enforcement agencies – weaponized this machinery to teach their victims lessons. This has painted our criminal justice system in bad light, and impacted our prisons as inmates awaiting trial continue to increase, de die in diem. See my discussion on this issue at: (https://thenigerialawyer.com/the-right-to-liberty-and-prison-decongestion-in-nigeria-the-urgency-required-part-2/; https://books.google.com.ng/books/about/Prison_Decongestion_in_Nigeria.html?id=pdkA0QEACAAJ&redir_esc=y).
The Way Forward
Courts must resist the temptation to treat remand applications as a formality. Magistrates should insist on genuine evidentiary justification, enforce statutory time limits strictly, and demand regular accountability reports from prosecuting agencies. Defence counsel, for their part, must be vigilant — filing for review, challenging unlawful extensions, and where necessary, invoking fundamental rights enforcement procedures to compel either arraignment or release. Prosecutorial agencies must treat the remand period as what it is: a countdown, not a shelf.
Until these correctives are applied with rigour, remand proceedings will continue to function not as a procedural safeguard, but as a weapon — quietly, efficiently, and lawfully dismantling the very adversarial guarantees our criminal justice system was built to protect. This is an issue for discourse by the relevant stakeholders of criminal justice system. After all, “Laws are made for men, and not men for laws’’. Per, Andrews Atutu Obaseki of blessed memories.
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