A Federal High Court in Abuja ruled this morning that commercial banks must lift blanket post-#EndSARS restrictions placed on customer accounts without fresh court orders. Some of those accounts have been frozen for five years. The customers were never charged with any offence.

Let that settle for a second. Five years. No charge. No trial. No annual review. Just a security flag that banks could renew without going back to court, attached to accounts belonging to people whose only documented involvement was participating in a 2020 protest.

The judge ruled that financial institutions cannot rely on indefinite security flags without periodic judicial review. That should have been the rule in 2020. It wasn't enforced then. Today's ruling makes it explicit.

But here's what the ruling doesn't do. It doesn't compensate the people who spent five years unable to access their own money. It doesn't identify which bank reviewed which flag and decided it was still valid in 2023, 2024, 2025. It doesn't explain what the threshold is for flagging an account in the first place, or how a customer disputes a flag they may not even know exists.

What the ruling does is confirm that the practice was wrong. Freezing accounts without periodic judicial review isn't a legal grey area. A Federal High Court just said so explicitly. The question is why it required a court ruling in 2026 to stop something that should have had a hard limit in 2020.

You know what kind of person gets their account frozen without charges and can't get it unfrozen for five years? Not a former governor. Not a banker. Not anyone with a lawyer on retainer. The people sitting on the wrong side of that security flag are the ones who already had the least leverage with the system before any of this started.