By Okechukwu Nwanguma
I’m provoked to pen down this piece after reading a Facebook post on June 9, 2025, by Igbonekwu Ogazimorah, where he exposed and lamented what he aptly described as ‘spiralling callousness in Nigeria these days’.
This was about the cruel ordeal that some officials of the Nigeria Police Force in Enugu subjected a nursing mother, with two-year-old and seven-month-old babies, to. This is yet another case that highlights the willingness of the police to dabble in civil disputes, in their typical predilection to offer themselves as tools for hire by anyone who wants to settle personal scores. The case also highlights not only the complicity of some unscrupulous judicial officers in aiding injustice and oppression but also, and ironically, the corruption in the Correctional Centres.
In a nation not lacking in daily horrors, this one reported by Igbonekwu Ogazimora, a public affairs analyst and former Commissioner for Information, Enugu State, is hard to erase.
A nursing mother — barely recovered from childbirth, tending to her two-year-old and her seven-month-old baby — was alone at home, doing laundry, when hell broke loose. Policemen, accompanied by a man entangled in a land dispute with her husband, stormed the residence in the middle of the day. Brandishing an Ex Parte detention order issued by a magistrate, they demanded she follow them immediately.
She begged to be allowed to collect her babies. They refused.
One of the officers ran inside and seized her phones. The babies, too young to understand, too fragile to survive without care, were left alone in a seven-room duplex in a secluded area, their cries echoing into the emptiness. The officers dumped the mother in prison on the strength of that same Ex Parte order. Her crime? She refused to hand over some documents to the police, insisting, correctly, that her husband instructed her to pass them only to their lawyer. A civil matter.
At midnight, prison warders accepted a N100,000 bribe to let her use her phone. She called her husband overseas, who ,in turn, reached the lawyer. By the time the lawyer arrived at the house — 1:37 a.m. — the sight was unimaginable: the toddler asleep on a stairway, the baby upstairs, having vomited multiple times, hanging weakly from a cushion, both on the brink of death.
Let us pause here. What nation abandons its children like this? What system empowers law enforcement to become instruments of vengeance for civil disputes? What judicial authorities, without hearing from all parties, authorise the incarceration of a breastfeeding mother over paperwork?
This is not an isolated incident. In the South East, the abuse of Ex Parte detention orders has become a dangerous trend — police, often in collusion with adversaries in civil conflicts, weaponise the court system. Arrests are made without notice. People are hauled across state lines — from Enugu to Abuja, or through a torturous path like Port Harcourt to Uyo — before their families even know where they are. Days or weeks incommunicado. Rights trampled. Dignity discarded.
And when lawyers dare to question this abuse, when they point out that land disputes are not criminal matters, police dismiss them with scorn. They snap their fingers, intoxicated with unchecked power.
It is no surprise, the,n that professionals, fed up with such lawlessness, pack up and leave. We mock doctors who dig snow in Canada or bankers who pump gas abroad. But really, who wouldn’t choose to be a messenger in paradise rather than a boss in hellfire?
This woman and her children survived — just barely. But what about the next victim? The next abandoned child? The next mother jailed for obeying her conscience?
The time has come for a reckoning. The abuse of Ex Parte orders must end. The Nigeria Police must stop acting as private enforcers in civil disputes. And the judiciary — especially magistrates — must wake up to their sacred duty: to uphold justice, not enable oppression.
We arspirallingng into a state where human life and dignity mean nothing — unless someone, somewhere, decides to stand up and say, Enough.
Who will de-escalate our spiralling callousness?
Mr Okechukwu Nwanguma is the Executive Director of RULAAC, a human rights activist in Nigeria
