The lawyers of the Asabe Waziri Justice Advocacy Initiative met him in June, during one of the routine court visits their Legal Aid and Access to Justice Programme runs through the magistrates' courts and custodial centres around Abuja — Kubwa among them — looking for people held without counsel and without any means to argue their own case.
What they found in Mr. F's file was not a complicated legal question. It was an absence. The nominal complainant — the person whose accusation had put him behind a wall — kept failing to appear. Hearing after hearing, the seat stayed empty, and the prosecution could not move. The state had detained a man and then simply stopped attending to him.
AWJAI's team put that failure in front of the judge. On 27 July 2026 the court struck out the case for want of diligent prosecution and discharged him. He had spent roughly two months inside.
He was not the only one. At the same centre, Mr. M had been held three months over an unresolved theft allegation. On 18 August his case fell on the same procedural ground, and he too went home. Neither man faced a trial. Both were returned to ordinary life by lawyers who read a file carefully and said so out loud.
Nigerian law is not silent on this. The Administration of Criminal Justice Act caps a magistrate's remand order at fourteen days, renewable once, with a final extension only on cause shown — after which the court must discharge the suspect. Chief magistrates are obliged to inspect police stations monthly and may order the release of anyone unlawfully held. The rules exist. Somebody has to invoke them.
And the wages remain unpaid. A claim for withheld salary belongs to the National Industrial Court, not to any criminal courtroom — which means the original wrong done to Mr. F was never the business of the place that locked him up. A strike-out is not an acquittal either; in principle the charge can be refiled. What he has, for now, is the open air, and the knowledge that someone came looking.
He was never tried. He was only kept.