A Nigerian court recently upheld the result of the disputed presidential election in February won by Bola Tinubu. In response, a popular singer claimed a video he shared showed a Nigerian lawyer burning his bench wig after the court gave its verdict. But the claim is false; the video is old and is unrelated to Nigeria and its presidential election.
“How Pathetic. A lawyer burnt his wig to say good bye to practice. Nigeria Judiciary has slaughtered justice (sic),” reads a post shared on X (formerly Twitter) on September 6, 2023.
Reposted more than 3,100 times, the post was shared by Nigerian singer Charles Oputa, popularly known as Charly Boy. It features a 38-second clip showing wigs worn in legal circles burning in a trash can.
Oputa has been the subject of previous AFP Fact Check debunks, including here, here and here.
Election tribunal judgement
Oputa supported Labour Party opposition leader Peter Obi, who challenged the outcome of the elections earlier this year after the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) declared Tinubu of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) as the winner.
Obi and Peoples Democratic Party’s Atiku Abubakar argued that widespread irregularities and rigging marred the election.
The two opposition leaders petitioned an election tribunal, with each claiming to have won the ballot.
But the tribunal ruled in Tinubu’s favour on September 6, 2023 (archived here).
Obi and Abubakar have, however, appealled the ruling at the Supreme Court.
Their supporters, including Oputa, protested the verdict.
But the claim that the video showed a lawyer burning his wigs in protest against the tribunal’s ruling is false.
Old video from Jamaica
Using the InVID-WeVerify video verification tool, AFP Fact Check found that the footage has been online since March 2022.
A Jamaican news outlet, Jamaica Gleaner, published a longer version of the video on Facebook on March 12, 2022 (archived here).
The caption explained that the clip showed Jamaican attorney Hugh Small burning three judicial wigs in protest against the country’s use of the “United Kingdom-based Privy Council as its final appellate court.”
Jamaica Gleaner said on its website (archived here) that Small was pushing for Jamaica to adopt the “Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ) as its final appellate court.”
Inaugurated in 2005 (archived here), the CCJ serves as the final appellate court for at least four members of the Caribbean Community (Caricom) (archived here) — including Barbados, Belize, Dominica and Guyana — in civil and criminal litigations.
The government agency Jamaica Information Service said the country was taking steps to also make CCJ its final appellate court.
Anti-monarchy sentiments
Hugh Small’s protest against the Privy Council is part of the growing anti-monarchy sentiments in some of the former British colonies in the Caribbean (archived here), with many pushing for the derecognition of the head of the British monarch as their head of state.
In 2021, Barbados stopped recognising Queen Elizabeth II, who was then the Queen of England, as its head of state (archived here).
“I can’t stand the thought that the head of state of Jamaica is King Charles III,” Small told The Guardian in May 2023 (archived here). “We tolerated it long enough, and now the public conscience has raised to a boiling point, I’m very anxious to see it go.”
