A former Nigerian Ambassador to Namibia and Jamaica, Lilian Onoh, has condemned the ruling of an Abuja High Court Judge, Justice Keziah Ogbonnaya, in the defamation suit against her by Ex-Minister of Foreign Affairs, Geoffrey Onyeama, calling it “irrational”.

On June 4, 2025, Justice Ogbonnaya ruled that Onoh defamed Onyeama by the following sentence, “The Ministry of Foreign Affairs is only trying to continue its corrupt practices which have brought Nigeria into great disrepute”.

Onoh challenges this, stating that Geoffrey Onyeama is not the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In a June 18 petition to the Chief Judge of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), Honourable Justice Husseini Baba-Yusuf, she wondered how the judge also granted Onyeama “a gender reassignment from male to neuter (it) without a medical certificate.”

She said she wrote the petition because the judge was withholding the CTC of her judgment in order to foreclose her from appealing the judgment and she copied several diplomatic missions in hopes that they ban Justice Ogbonnaya from travelling to their countries, including the USA, UK, China and European Union.

Amb. Onoh alleged that Justice Ogbonnaya refused to hear the pre-trial motion challenging Onyeama’s competency to sue as the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, arguing that, that does not explain why the judge would rule that Onyeama is the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

She asked the Chief Judge of the FCT to suspend Justice Ogbonnaya’s ruling and conduct a thorough investigation into what she described as “a clearly absurd but highly dangerous judgment” which she also said would make Nigeria a global laughing stock for many years to come.

In a related development, Amb. Onoh has petitioned the Inspector General of Police (IGP) Kayode Egbetokun, demanding that he should arrest Justice Ogbonnaya for “threat to life” during the defamation case between her and Onyeama.

In a widely reported incident, Justice Ogbonnaya had said, “anybody who writes what is not true about me will die”, after Onoh petitioned about alleged bias and abuse of process by the judge.

The former Nigerian envoy also accused the judge of forcing her to pay for the right to defend herself by making her pay millions of naira for the electronic hearing for her to testify as well as thousands of naira in cash for diesel with no treasury receipt and hundreds of thousands of “arbitrary fines” in court with no receipt, which the ex-envoy described as corruption and abuse of office.

The petition was copied to several embassies in Nigeria, among them those of USA, UK, China, EU delegation and Switzerland as well as the Chief Judge of the FCT, National Assembly and the Attorney General of the Federation.

Onoh said she was sharing the petition with embassies in the hope that they would impose a travel ban on Justice Ogbonnaya because Nigerian authorities appeared unwilling to take action against the judge.