By Abdulrauf Aliyu
Nigeria has always been a country of remarkable generosity—not in salaries, electricity, or affordable healthcare, but in forgiveness. We forgive potholes for swallowing our cars; we forgive fuel queues for stealing our mornings; we even forgive politicians for stealing our future. Forgiveness, here, is not a virtue; it is an instinct—our most overworked national resource. And now, under the golden light of presidential benevolence, we have discovered a new frontier of generosity: pardoning killers, kidnappers, and arms dealers with the same ease we pardon bad governance.
The latest presidential pardon list arrived with all the subtlety of a carnival float. Over a hundred names were unveiled — a curious blend of pensioners, political loyalists, and individuals convicted of the most serious crimes in the penal code: homicide, armed robbery, kidnapping, and drug trafficking. It reads less like a justice document and more like an alumni list for Nigeria’s School of Infamy. Somewhere between the signatures and the state seals, morality seems to have gone missing.
Among those whispered to have found their names written in mercy’s ink are Maryam Sanda, convicted for the murder of her husband in what remains one of the country’s most infamous domestic homicide cases, and Lina Kusum Wilson, sentenced in 2017 for culpable homicide. Ordinarily, cases like these invite solemn reflection—they touch the core of societal order, family, and the sanctity of life. Yet, in Nigeria’s version of moral arithmetic, even murder can apparently be forgiven before the Supreme Court finishes its homework. It is as though the executive has developed the spiritual gift of preemptive mercy—forgiving crimes before the law has finished confirming them.
Of course, the Constitution grants the President the power to pardon. Section 175 of the 1999 Constitution says so in elegant simplicity: the President may “grant any person convicted of an offence a pardon.” But even constitutional mercy, like all good soup, requires timing. The framers of the law assumed that “convicted” means “finally convicted,” not “still appealing while the ink dries on the presidential letterhead.” Mercy is meant to be the coda to justice, not a remix played before the chorus ends. Yet Nigeria, ever the improvisational artist, has turned pardon into jazz—freestyling the law until rhythm replaces reason.
In saner climes, pardons are the exception, not the weekend ritual. They are reserved for miscarriages of justice, for remorse proven, for wrongs made right by repentance. In the United States, a presidential pardon for murder is so rare that it makes headlines for decades. In the United Kingdom, even the monarch must wait for judicial recommendation before mercy can flow. But in Nigeria, mercy comes early and often — like harmattan dust, it spares no one and settles everywhere.
The problem, of course, isn’t mercy itself but its misplacement. When compassion becomes detached from consequence, it ceases to be virtue and becomes vanity. Mercy, used carelessly, is a kind of violence — a wound reopened under the guise of healing. What message does it send to the families of victims or to citizens who still believe (naively) that the law protects them? That life is negotiable? That crime pays—provided it pays enough?
It would have been comic if it weren’t so tragic. Somewhere, in a police archive, there are weary officers who risked their lives to arrest the very people now smiling under the umbrella of presidential forgiveness. One imagines their faces as the news breaks—that look of professional heartbreak when effort meets irony. It must feel like chasing armed robbers for years only to find them waving from the motorcade of presidential mercy.
But the list does not stop at murderers. It descends further into farce, embracing arms traffickers and kidnappers. Major S. A. Akubo, reportedly tied to the trafficking of seven thousand weapons—enough to start a small rebellion — is rumoured to have found grace. At a time when Nigerians sleep to the soundtrack of distant gunfire and pray before every highway journey, releasing such individuals feels less like forgiveness and more like volunteering for chaos. It is the bureaucratic equivalent of lighting a candle in a room full of petrol.
The inclusion of convicted kidnappers only deepens the absurdity. Kidnapping has become Nigeria’s cruel national enterprise — a business model where fear is currency and citizens are collateral. To pardon kidnappers in this climate is to pardon terror itself. It is like a government in the middle of a malaria epidemic deciding to pardon mosquitoes — noble in tone, suicidal in practice.
Of course, we joke about these things, because that’s what Nigerians do best when the pain gets too heavy. Twitter fills with mock prayers: “May your enemies be pardoned like a Nigerian convict.” Memes circulate of prisoners checking their phones for presidential texts. It’s funny, until it’s not — until you remember that behind every name on that pardon list lies a wound that never healed, a family that never found closure, a justice that never found its full voice.
Across history, misplaced mercy has always carried a curse. Julius Caesar learned it when he pardoned his enemies, who later stabbed him beneath Pompey’s statue. England’s Charles II offered his “Act of Indemnity and Oblivion” — and ended up forgiving some while executing others, proving that selective mercy is merely politics with perfume. Even the Ottomans, masters of imperial grace, learned to fear the unpredictable generosity of their sultans. Every empire that turned mercy into theatre eventually drowned in applause.
And yet here we are, repeating the same drama, convinced that our version will end differently. Nigeria, that eternal optimist, believes it can pardon its way to peace. We forgive bandits, negotiate with terrorists, and now, apparently, absolve murderers. We have turned compassion into policy and justice into suggestion. And the people, weary from survival, have learned not to be surprised.
When asked why such pardons occur, defenders often invoke “national healing.” But healing without accountability is infection, not progress. Mercy should remind us of our humanity, not mock it. Every time the government forgives the unforgivable, it whispers to the citizens: “Don’t bother doing right — just wait for your turn.” The danger is not only in the act itself but in the precedent it sets — that law can be rewritten by sentiment, that consequences can be deferred by connection.
Perhaps that is why history keeps chuckling at us — that soft, sad laughter of an old teacher marking the same wrong answer for the hundredth time. We are a nation forever rehearsing the same moral mistake, expecting a different applause. Each time we forgive too easily, we forget too quickly. Each time we move on without closure, we move closer to collapse.
It is tempting to call it irony, but it feels more like prophecy. The empire of forgiven violence grows stronger each year, nourished by misplaced compassion and bureaucratic amnesia. The victims are forgotten; the guilty are rehabilitated; the citizens are told to keep calm and carry on. And somewhere, beneath all the noise, justice whispers softly — not dead, but suffocating.
When the fanfare fades and the microphones are switched off, it won’t be the pardoned who clean up the mess. It will be the ordinary Nigerians — those who double-lock their doors, who fear night travel, who still pay for protection from a state that has forgiven its predators. The pardoned will walk free; the people will carry the burden. And history, ever the patient witness, will record the moment with its familiar sigh: Nigeria, merciful to a fault — and punished by its own kindness.
