A Nigeria medical doctor governed Rivers State and stole N100 billion or $75 million from state funds.
He wasn’t arrested because the wife was a Supreme Court Justice.
He served two terms. 1999 to 2007. Oil-rich state. Theoretically one of the wealthiest in Nigeria.
In January 2007, three months before his tenure ended, the EFCC released an interim report. Fraud. Money laundering. Conversion of public funds. Abuse of oath of office.
The number they put on it was over N100 billion stole from Rivers State.
Odili did not wait for the charges.
He went to a Federal High Court in Port Harcourt.
On March 23, 2007, Justice Ibrahim Buba granted him a perpetual injunction.
The EFCC was barred from investigating him. Arresting him. Prosecuting him.
They could not even look at Rivers State finances during his eight years in power.
Odili walked out of office untouchable.
His wife is Mary Odili. She was appointed to the Supreme Court of Nigeria in 2011. She sat on that bench until she retired in 2022.
For 11 of those years she was one of the most powerful judicial officers in Nigeria.
During the same years the EFCC was trying to appeal her husband’s injunction.
The EFCC filed the appeal in 2008. It went nowhere.
Justice Ibrahim Buba, the judge who signed the original injunction, was later removed from the bench for issuing similar orders shielding other powerful people.
In 2018 the Court of Appeal finally granted the EFCC leave to challenge the 2007 ruling.
Rivers State fought back. The state Attorney General and the Speaker of the House of Assembly took it to the Supreme Court to block the EFCC.
The Supreme Court dismissed their appeal on March 10, 2025.
18 years. That is how long the injunction held.
18 years the EFCC could not ask Peter Odili one question about N100 billion.
He is 77 years old now. He has never been tried. Never been charged. Never spent a day in a cell.
The draft criminal charges prepared by Festus Keyamo in 2007 are still sitting in a file. Nobody has read them in court.
Meanwhile Nuhu Ribadu, the EFCC chairman who first investigated Odili in 2007, is now Nigeria’s National Security Adviser under Tinubu.
The man who tried to prosecute him is now the second most powerful security official in the country.
And Odili is still free.
Opinion by Elliot on X
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