Bronwen Manby and Solomon Momoh 5.5 Risk of arbitrary denial of citizenship The absence of legislation or regulations to elaborate on the citizenship provisions of the 1999 Constitution means that there is no legal guidance on procedures to determine who is a citizen. There is also no document established by law that provides proof that a person is a citizen, whether issued by a court or other authority.77 While a decision to refuse recognition of citizenship could be subject to judicial review in the Federal High Court or a state high court, founding an application on the Fundamental Rights (Enforcement Procedure) Rules of 2009, this is expensive and out of reach for most people.78 Most of those without documentation of citizenship, or who face challenges in acquiring such documentation in Nigeria, are likely to be Nigerian citizens under the law, but without the means to prove it under current systems. Procedures are needed to confirm citizenship in these cases. In other cases, individuals or groups may not be citizens under the law, but nonetheless have stronger connections to Nigeria than to any other country, and no other country where they could obtain recognition of citizenship. This could apply for example, to some former Liberian or Sierra Leonean refugees, and especially to their descendants. In these cases, efforts should be made to provide facilitated naturalisation, by relaxing the usual procedures. A notorious historical case in which a person previously recognised as a citizen was denied recognition of citizenship was the ‘Shugaba Affair’ of 1980, in which an opposition politician was accused of being a foreigner (see box). However, it is likely that less prominent individuals have been affected by similar actions, for example on applying and being rejected for a passport or national identity card, though they had previously considered themselves to be citizens. The Shugaba Affair In 1980 the government of President Shehu Shagari arrested and expelled to Chad the majority leader of the opposition-controlled state legislature of the North Eastern state of Borno, Shugaba Abdulrahaman Darman. The basis of the deportation was asserted to be that Shugaba was a Chadian national, because his father was born in Chad, and therefore he himself was not a Nigerian (Nigeria did not at that time permit dual citizenship). The Federal High Court, the Appeal Court and the Supreme Court all ruled in favour of Shugaba Darman and revoked the deportation order.79 77 Generally, countries within the Commonwealth do provide for a certificate that is proof of citizenship, but issued by the executive. For example, the Ghana Citizenship Act 2000, provides in its Section 20 that: ‘The Minister may, on an application made by or on behalf of any person with respect to whose citizenship of Ghana a doubt exists under Part I of this Act, certify that the person is a citizen of Ghana and a certificate issued under this section shall be prima facie evidence that the person was such a citizen at the date indicated in the certificate, but without prejudice to any evidence that he was such a citizen at an earlier date.’ There is a similar provision in Section 14 of the Gambia Nationality and Citizenship Act, 1965, and in Section 24 of the Sierra Leone Citizenship Act 1973. Nigeria does not have such a provision. 78 Anukenyi Ogbuabor, ‘Expanding the Frontiers of Judicial Review in Nigeria: The Gathering Storm’, Nigerian Juridical Review, Vol.10 (2011-12), pp.1-21. 79 Shugaba Abdulrahman Darman vs. Federal Minister of Internal Affairs and 3 Others [1981] 2 Nigerian Constitutional Law Reports 459; Samuel Akanmode, The Shugaba Affair (Lagos: Nigerian Council for National Awareness 1980). RSCAS/GLOBALCIT-CR 2020/12 - © 2020 Author(s) 21