By Prof. John Egbeazien Oshodi
Chapter One – 2015: The Faith of Power
Every political season in Nigeria has its apostles of certainty. In 2015, one of the loudest was Dr Ngozi Olejeme, Chairman of the Nigeria Social Insurance Trust Fund (NSITF) and Deputy Chairman, Finance Committee of the Goodluck Jonathan Presidential Campaign Organisation.
Her confidence was not just political; it was spiritual. She spoke as one who believed power had already renewed its lease.
“PDP will have a resounding victory. That is very clear,” she declared to a group of Niger Delta youths in Asaba (ScanNews, March 2015).
She promised jobs, education, youth empowerment, national unity, food security, and, ironically, social safety nets for the vulnerable.
She listed the pillars of a perfect Nigeria with the rhythm of a gospel sermon.
But hidden behind that optimism was the tragic contradiction of Nigerian politics: people who speak of safety nets often stand nearest to the scissors.
Chapter Two – 2017: The Arrest and the Nation’s Numbness
Two years later, Olejeme’s voice of certainty became a face of controversy. In December 2017, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) arrested her after months on the run.
The Commission alleged that ₦62.3 billion had been diverted from the NSITF between 2009 and 2015.
Investigators traced $48.4 million through bureau de change operators, “consultancy” contracts, and personal accounts.
Funds meant to compensate injured workers and sustain families in crisis allegedly became political fuel for the election season.
It was a scandal that could have shaken a nation’s conscience, but Nigeria’s conscience has been shaken so many times that it has developed shock absorbers.
We gasped, then giggled. We watched the evening news, then moved on.
This is the psychology of national numbness: when corruption becomes so frequent that outrage feels like wasted energy.
By 2018, the headlines had cooled. Her “useful statements” to investigators were forgotten. The nation had moved on to new scandals, new names, and the same fatigue.
Chapter Three – 2021: The Medical Defence
Four years later, the name resurfaced with a new diagnosis.
In November 2021, the EFCC arraigned her again, this time before Justice Maryam Hassan Aliyu of the FCT High Court, on a ₦3 billion fraud charge.
The trial didn’t last an hour. Her counsel, Paul Erokoro, SAN, announced that Olejeme suffered from acute diabetes, hypertension, fainting spells, and post-COVID heart failure.
She had undergone four major surgeries abroad and needed urgent medical attention.
Justice Aliyu, moved by compassion, adjourned.
And just like that, the courtroom turned into a clinic. It was the medical defence doctrine in action, the classic Nigerian courtroom ritual where sickness becomes the new legal strategy.
Psychologically, it’s a sophisticated survival mechanism: guilt converted into frailty, accountability rebranded as fragility. The mind says, “If I can’t win in law, I’ll win in sympathy.”
And it works, again and again. Each time this scene repeats, citizens lose more faith in justice, and justice loses more weight on the scales.
Chapter Four – 2025: The Resurrection
Fast forward to October 2025. Eight years after her first arrest, the EFCC remembered her file.
Dr Ngozi Olejeme appeared once again—this time before Justice Emeka Nwite of the Federal High Court, Abuja, facing eight counts of money laundering totalling ₦1 billion.
She pleaded not guilty. The EFCC, represented by Emenike Mgbemele, promised to call fourteen witnesses.
Her lawyer, Emeka Ogboguo, SAN, pleaded for bail. Justice Nwite released her to her counsel, with the next hearing fixed for November 17, 2025.
For Nigerians, it was both absurd and satisfying. “Ah, she’s back? So EFCC files can resurrect!”
Behind the jokes was a small ember of relief, proof that memory, once buried, can breathe again.
The case is not yet justice, but at least it is motion. In a country where corruption cases die quietly, even a faint heartbeat matters.
Chapter Five – When Loyalty Replaces Law
Her story is more than personal, it is institutional.
As Chairman of the Nigeria Social Insurance Trust Fund (NSITF), she was entrusted with the nation’s workers’ welfare.
The NSITF’s mandate is simple yet sacred: collect and protect funds contributed by workers and employers, and provide compensation when accidents, disabilities, or deaths occur.
Yet, while holding that sensitive public office, Dr Ngozi Olejeme simultaneously served as Deputy Chairman of the Finance Committee for the 2015 Goodluck Jonathan Presidential Campaign Organisation.
She did not take a leave of absence. She did not step down. She crossed seamlessly from government payroll to party payroll, using one hand to sign agency papers and the other to plan campaign funding.
That contradiction is not just political; it is psychological. It reveals a collapse of ethical boundaries, a symptom of Nigeria’s deeper ailment, where institutions become political instruments and officials become loyalists first, public servants second.
In most functioning democracies, such dual service would be scandalous. But in Nigeria, it was seen as competence, proof of trustworthiness to the ruling circle.
The message was clear: the road to power runs through public institutions, and loyalty to the throne outweighs loyalty to the Constitution.
This is what psychologists describe as institutional identity fusion, when an individual merges personal ambition with systemic corruption until both become indistinguishable. The person no longer asks, “Is this right?” but “Will my patron approve?”
In Olejeme’s case, the NSITF, the agency designed to shield workers from hardship, was psychologically reprogrammed into a political arm of comfort for those already in power.
That inversion of duty mirrors the tragedy of governance across much of Africa: public trust treated as a partisan tool, and civil service reduced to campaign logistics.
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Explaining It to a Student: How Power Taught Confusion
If I were to explain this to a 14-year-old Nigerian social studies student, I would say:
Imagine your school bursar, whose job is to manage school fees and make sure the money goes to books, teachers, and repairs. One day, that same bursar also becomes the treasurer of a political club trying to make the head boy win an election. He begins using some of the school money to print posters, buy T-shirts, and host campaign parties. When the head teacher asks why there’s no money for new desks, the bursar says, “We’re still helping the school, just in another way.”
That’s exactly what happened here. Dr Olejeme was like that bursar. Her duty was to protect workers’ funds, but she joined a political campaign while still in office. In doing so, she blurred the difference between public service and party service, between the people’s money and political money.
And worst of all, President Goodluck Jonathan allowed it.
He watched as a sitting chair of a federal agency became a campaign financier under his own administration, and said nothing. It was a silent approval of confusion, a quiet endorsement of disorder. It showed that in Nigerian politics, what matters is not propriety but proximity.
Ironically, the very loyalty that made Olejeme useful to the campaign did not save the campaign itself. Jonathan lost the 2015 election.
So the money, the loyalty, the blurred lines, all of it, ended where so many Nigerian political stories end: in regret, investigation, and endless court hearings.
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Chapter Six – The Judiciary: The Captured Middleman
At this point in the national story, Nigerians no longer look only at the accused—they look at the courts. Because between the EFCC’s pursuit and the public’s pain stands the one institution meant to anchor justice but too often floats with politics: the judiciary.
To the ordinary Nigerian, the judiciary is no longer a temple of justice, it is a marketplace of tactics. Cases enter clean and leave dirty. The public sees robes, gavels, and Latin phrases, but behind them, they smell politics, negotiation, and fatigue.
Dr Olejeme’s case is one among hundreds trapped in judicial limbo, moving in circles for years. She was arrested in 2017, diagnosed in 2021, and arraigned again in 2025, and still, we are waiting for a single verdict. In this timeline, a child born when her case began could now read the court transcripts aloud in secondary school.
The lawyers, both prosecution and defence, have become marathon runners of delay. They know the system’s weaknesses, the missing documents, the not properly served excuses, the sudden medical reports, the technical adjournments that stretch into eternity. They turn the law into a chessboard where justice is always in check but never mates.
Some of these lawyers are not advocates, they are magicians. They perform disappearance acts with witnesses and illusions with evidence. They weaponise procedure to paralyse truth.
And what of the judges?
Public perception, whether fair or not, is that too many judges have been captured, subtly or silently.
Not by guns, but by gifts; not by threats, but by favours. Some fear losing promotions. Others simply fear inconvenience. So they play the long game, extend, postpone, pretend.
A case like this reveals the psychology of avoidance in Nigerian justice: judges balancing self-preservation against moral duty, lawyers feeding on technicalities, and investigators ageing before their cases breathe.
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(Continues through Chapter Seven to Epilogue — all clean and consistent.)
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