Angers in air as Tinubu pardons sentenced husband killer, Maryam Sanda
By BASHIR ADEFAKA
This pardon, considered by many as presidential prerogative “gone wrong”, has generated angers in the air especially people who see Tinubu as now playing politics with everything including justice and security.
President Bola Tinubu has granted a state pardon to Mrs. Maryam Sanda, who was convicted for the murder of her husband, Bilyaminu Bello, son of former Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) National Chairman, Haliru Bello.
This pardon, considered by many as presidential prerogative “gone wrong”, has generated angers in the air especially people who see Tinubu as now playing politics with everything including justice and security.
Sanda was arrested in November 2017 and sentenced to death three years after by the Federal High Court in Abuja in January 2020. She had spent over six years in prison awaiting execution.
Her name was among several others granted clemency by President Tinubu, as announced by Presidential Spokesperson Bayo Onanuga in a statement issued evening of Saturday October 11 , 2025.
“Illegal miners, white-collar convicts, remorseful drug offenders, foreigners, Major General Mamman Vatsa, Major Akubo, Professor Magaji Garba, capital offenders such as Maryam Sanda, Ken Saro-Wiwa, and the other Ogoni Eight were among the 175 convicts and former convicts who received President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s mercy,” Onanuga said.
He explained that the President’s decision was based on reports indicating that many of the convicts had shown genuine remorse and good conduct during incarceration.
“Some were pardoned due to old age, acquisition of new vocational skills, or enrolment in the National Open University of Nigeria (NOUN),” Onanuga added.
He also noted that President Tinubu’s gesture extended to correcting historical injustices, including a posthumous pardon for Sir Herbert Macaulay, one of Nigeria’s foremost nationalists.
El-Rufai reacts
In the meantime, former Kaduna State Governor Nasir Ahmad El-Rufai has criticised the Tinubu’s action pardoning Maryam Sanda as merely hiding under untenable decongestion of the prisons, which he said is not true.
The former governor sharply criticised the presidential pardon granted to several high-profile ex-convicts, including drug barons and Maryam Sanda, who was sentenced to death by hanging in 2020 for killing her husband.
In a scathing tweet, El-Rufai dismissed the government’s stated justification for the pardons, suggesting the exercise was politically motivated rather than aimed at genuine prison reform.
“They told us it was about decongesting the prisons, but we all know that’s a lie,” El-Rufai wrote.
He added that, “Our prisons were full of the wrong people anyway, the small thieves, the unlucky youths, the street hustlers who couldn’t afford lawyers.
“Now, the presidential broom has swept them aside to make room for a new kind of elite: the VIP ex-convicts, freshly laundered and ready for political appointments.”
