The court martial of the men who allegedly plotted to end Nigerian democracy resumes today. Nobody outside will know what happens inside.

The trial of 36 military officers accused of planning a coup resumes today at a military installation in Abuja. It resumed behind closed doors. No media. No public gallery. A spokesman for the Defence Headquarters confirmed as much.

What the officers are accused of is serious. The alleged coup was planned for 1 October 2025, Independence Day, the same day the president was expected to attend a parade. The parade was cancelled at the last minute. The government initially denied anything had happened. By January this year, they had announced court martial proceedings.

Now 36 officers are on trial. Six civilians are separately before a Federal High Court, also in Abuja, having pleaded not guilty.

Nigeria has spent most of its history as an independent country under military rule. The men who ended those juntas, and the men who led them, all understood something about what happens when the armed forces decide a civilian government has run its course. So the prosecution of this alleged plot is real and significant. A democracy trying to protect itself through its own legal institutions is the thing working as it should.

The mechanism here is military justice. Court martial proceedings sit outside the ordinary civilian court system. They are governed by the Armed Forces Act. The judges are military officers sworn in as justices. The rules of evidence and procedure are different from what you'd find in the Federal High Court. The accused are subject to military law, which means a different appeals pathway and a different degree of public accountability.

There is a logic to this. Military officers charged with military offences within a military command structure are often best tried within that structure. The problem is not the existence of the court martial. The problem is that it is happening in complete darkness, with no mechanism for public accountability, in a case whose subject is the attempted removal of a democratically elected government. Those are two different categories of concern that pull in opposite directions.

But a democracy is also accountable. The proceedings are behind closed doors not because they contain sensitive operational detail that might endanger lives. They are behind closed doors because the military decided they would be.

Former Bayelsa governor Timipre Sylva was named in several counts but is not among the defendants. He's reportedly at large.

If the process is sound, the state has nothing to lose by showing its work. The men on trial are entitled to a fair hearing. The public is entitled to know what a fair hearing looks like when the alternative being tried was the end of their right to vote.