By Kehinde Nubi
The federal government’s recent pardon of Herbert Macaulay, Nigeria’s pioneering nationalist and father of Nigerian nationalism is a sentimental gesture that misunderstands history. It seeks to absolve a man who needed no forgiveness and revives a colonial injustice best forgotten. A pardon implies guilt; Macaulay’s life was, in truth, the moral indictment of the very empire that condemned him.
Every generation rediscovers its heroes, but not every rediscovery honours them. To pardon Macaulay in 2025 is to exhume a colonial farce that history itself has long dismissed. At best, such an act should have been a commemorative honour — in my view, a posthumous Grand Commander of the Order of the Niger (GCON) — conferred as a gesture of national gratitude. Instead, the pardon reopens a case that never deserved to exist.
By granting it, the government has unwittingly breathed life into the colonial narrative that sought to reduce Macaulay’s nationalist fervour and defiance to criminality. It has thus turned a nationalist’s badge of courage into a bureaucratic blot erased by official mercy. Can this be branded rehabilitation? No! Methinks it is misremembrance.
To understand this fully in context, one must recall who Macaulay was, and what he stood for and against. Born in 1864, trained in England as a surveyor, he returned home armed not just with technical skill but with the conviction that Africans could govern themselves. He soon became a thorn in the side of the colonial establishment, challenging its land seizures, exposing its corruption, and rallying Lagosians to the cause of self-rule and seeming opposition to authority. In other words, his articulate and outspoken nature turned him into a constant irritant who left those in power uneasy and resentful.
The colonial government found all of this inconvenient. As far as they were concerned, he was a dangerous radical who had to be sorted out. To make matters worse, the Lagos Daily News and the Nigerian National Democratic Party (NNDP), which he founded in 1923, became platforms for relentless criticism of British excesses. What this meant was that he was already a “convicted” felon in the political sense; it was only a matter of time before the trial regularised the conviction.
Herbert Macaulay was convicted in 1913 for misappropriating trust funds belonging to Mrs. F. B. Pearse, a Lagos widow whose estate he managed. Just the job — the colonial court saw embezzlement; the political climate saw a targeted silencing of ‘wahala,’ as Herbert Macaulay had already earned ‘notoriety’ as a critic of imperial power.
He insisted he had acted lawfully and that the charge was politically motivated, aimed at silencing his criticism of colonial rule. The colonial court sentenced him to two years in prison, though he served about one year before release in 1914.
Historians such as J.F. Ade Ajayi and Tekena Tamuno described the case as a political prosecution disguised as a criminal trial. If there were doubts, his second imprisonment stripped away even that disguise. In 1918, Herbert Macaulay was convicted of sedition under the colonial Seditious Offences Ordinance for statements he made in London defending the Eleko of Lagos and criticising British injustice in Nigeria. The colonial government claimed his words could “bring the government into hatred or contempt.” The colonial government had weaponised the machinery of criminal law to silence nationalist dissent — in the classic pattern of colonial ‘lawfare’: the deliberate use of legal processes to suppress emerging African political consciousness and resistance.
So, while it could be argued that he was not blameless in the narrow, administrative sense, nonetheless, he was not a criminal in that sense either. To pardon such a man a century later is to confuse moral categories. In granting Macaulay a pardon, the state effectively validates the colonial judgment against him, implying that the empire was right to convict him, and that Nigeria is now magnanimous enough to forgive. On the contrary, it is Britain, not Nigeria, that owed Macaulay a debt of contrition and apology. His imprisonment was not the shame of a man but the disgrace of a system that feared his ideas.
If the nation truly wished to honour its founding agitator, it should have done so through recognition, not absolution. A posthumous GCON (the country’s second-highest honour) would have been apt. It would have celebrated Macaulay’s pioneering role as the architect of modern political organisation in Nigeria, the defender of traditional chiefs, the relentless voice for accountability, and the bridge between the old Lagos elite and the new nationalist awakening.
Such an award would have turned his story into inspiration, not pity. It would have reminded Nigerians that independence was not a colonial concession but the result of defiance — often punished, sometimes mocked, but never extinguished. A pardon, by contrast, shrinks that defiance into a footnote of repentance.
Read Also: Turkiye pledges to deepen ties, trade with Nigeria at 102nd Independence Anniversary
The symbolic pardon, though well-meaning, was not thought through, as it could corrode historical understanding. It makes mockery of resistance and puts a veneer of humanity on an otherwise brutal colonial rule. Worse still, it makes nonsense of the courage it took to oppose it. Let’s not forget that colonialism did not merely occupy territory; it degraded our humanity and criminalised our dignity.
To be talking of pardoning Herbert Macaulay is, in effect, to forget that truth — and that, unfortunately, converts his imprisonment from political martyrdom into an administrative error. Across postcolonial societies, similar gestures recur: the state forgiving those who once fought to create it. Yet every such act subtly reverses the moral order of history. It casts the rebel as the penitent, and the oppressor as the arbiter of grace.
By the time Macaulay died in 1946, unpardoned and unrepentant, he had already outlived the judgments of his age. His influence shaped the generation that would lead Nigeria to independence 14 years later. To them, his prison years were not shameful. They were veritable proof that liberty demands sacrifice.
In fairness to the government, they meant well. For them, the idea of pardoning Herbert Macaulay was to heal, to reconcile, to close unfinished chapters. But then, we must reconcile ourselves to the fact that Herbert Macaulay was either a hero to us or not. If the colonialists saw a villain, we must understand that it could not have been otherwise. It is for us to be steadfast in not validating that. Nations do not grow by forgiving their heroes; they grow by living up to them.
True honour is not amnesty; it is remembrance. Macaulay’s life should not be edited into the moral vocabulary of forgiveness but preserved as the language of resistance. He was flawed, yes, but his flaws were human; his courage, historical. To pardon him now is to grant the empire a posthumous victory it does not deserve.
Nigeria’s task is not to cleanse his record but to continue his rebellion — against corruption, against subservience, and against neo-colonialism by agents of internal colonisation. For a people still grappling with unfulfilled freedom, Macaulay’s lesson remains the same: that justice, once surrendered to convenience, must forever be reclaimed by conviction.
