When Governance Becomes Justice: How Administrative Power Has Muddled the Architecture of the State
BY: OMOLAJA MAKINEE
The Problem of Substituted Purpose
Across the modern world, administrative regimes have begun exercising powers that once belonged solely to the judiciary. They impose sanctions, levy penalties, restrict liberties, and even detain citizens — all without the formalities, procedures, or safeguards of a criminal trial. What once required a verdict of guilt can now be achieved by bureaucratic decree.
This quiet transformation — where governance adopts the instruments of justice — marks one of the most significant constitutional reversals of our time. It blurs the once-clear boundaries between governing and judging, between enforcing order and administering fairness. In doing so, it has replaced justice with governance — turning what should be the moral conscience of the State into a management tool of political convenience.
Inherited Structures, Forgotten Meanings
To understand this collapse of function, we must recall where politics began. The tripartite division of powers — the Executive, the Judiciary, and the Legislature — was not an arbitrary invention. It was the result of a centuries-long struggle to prevent the concentration of power that had plagued monarchies and empires. Each branch was designed to reflect a distinct human need:
- The Executive governs — it manages the day-to-day machinery of State, executes laws, and maintains security and welfare.
- The Legislature deliberates — it interprets social norms, codifies collective values into law, and ensures those laws evolve with the moral and cultural fabric of society.
- The Judiciary adjudicates — it stands as the moral and rational conscience of the State, interpreting law through fairness, proportionality, and context.
This tripartite model was a covenant of restraint. No branch was to subsume the others. Governance was to guide, not to rule; supervise, not to dominate. The system worked not because the branches were equal in power, but because they were distinct in purpose.
Yet modern governments — inheriting these structures but not their spirit — have begun to dissolve these boundaries.
The Administrative Regime: Governance Wearing the Robe of Justice
Administrative power, in its original conception, was meant to regulate — to handle licenses, taxes, and compliance. But over time, administrative regimes have evolved into quasi-judicial entities capable of punishing without prosecuting. Through regulatory bodies, disciplinary boards, and executive decrees, the State now enforces what are effectively criminal consequences under the guise of administrative necessity.
For example:
- Immigration officers detain individuals indefinitely without criminal charge.
- Employment regulators impose lifetime professional bans for alleged “misconduct” never proven in a court of law.
- Public health authorities issue fines and restrictions with penal weight, justified as civil protection.
Each of these actions bypasses the judiciary while carrying the moral and social effects of a criminal conviction. Governance, once the steward of justice, now impersonates it.
Why the Separation Matters
The tripartite structure exists to preserve moral coherence in public power. The Legislature defines right and wrong through law; the Judiciary interprets that law through fairness; and the Executive enforces it through policy. When the Executive begins to judge, it transforms from an enforcer of laws into a maker of moral verdicts — a role it was never equipped to perform.
Justice demands impartiality, context, and the weighing of evidence. Governance, by contrast, seeks efficiency, compliance, and political continuity. The languages of these two domains are incompatible:
- Governance asks, “What keeps the system running smoothly?”
- Justice asks, “What is fair in this specific case?”
When governance becomes justice, fairness is replaced by function; right is replaced by order. Bureaucracy becomes the arbiter of morality, and punishment becomes a management strategy.
The Myth of Supervisory Substitution
It is true that the Executive oversees the functioning of both lawmaking and justice. But this supervisory role is not a license for substitution. The government of the day may embody a particular ideology — conservative, progressive, or otherwise — but that ideology must remain a guide, not a command, to the institutions beneath it.
When governance starts to dictate judicial outcomes or reframe justice as an administrative category, it collapses the very logic of the tripartite model. The Judiciary ceases to be independent; the Legislature becomes ceremonial; and the citizen becomes a subject of administration rather than a participant in justice.
This confusion of roles leads to what scholars call the bureaucratisation of morality: where State agents, rather than moral principles, determine what counts as right or wrong.
Why This Moment Feels Like a Return to the Past
It is ironic that this crisis arises in an age of unprecedented advancement. Every generation inherits the intellectual gains of the last — in science, technology, and social organisation — and extends them forward. Yet governance appears trapped in a kind of institutional nostalgia, tethered to its past rather than evolving with its people.
The current administrative regime operates as if the moral questions of justice can be answered by the procedural certainty of bureaucracy. But governance was never designed to answer moral questions; it was designed to implement the answers already given by law and refined by justice.
In essence, the modern State has become too managerial to be moral. It can measure efficiency, but not fairness; it can enforce compliance, but not conscience.
Restoring the Balance
If justice is to be reclaimed from governance, we must revisit the purpose of the tripartite model. Governance must once again become the steward — not the substitute — of justice. Legislative institutions must reclaim their moral voice in defining harm and accountability, and judicial institutions must reclaim their independence to interpret those definitions free from executive pressure.
Administrative tribunals with criminal powers should either be constitutionalised (brought under judicial oversight) or demilitarised (restricted to regulatory, non-punitive functions). Justice cannot remain fair if it is administered by those whose primary allegiance is to political continuity rather than moral balance.
Conclusion: The Return of Meaning
Politics, as inherited, gave us three pillars — governance, lawmaking, and justice — because it understood the dangers of conflating them. Yet, modern governance, in its pursuit of control, efficiency, and crisis management, has forgotten that those divisions were not obstacles to order but the very architecture of freedom.
To confuse governance with justice is to replace moral reasoning with administrative convenience. It is to turn citizens into subjects and rights into permissions. Justice was never meant to be efficient; it was meant to be right.
The future of justice depends not on more governance, but on the courage to separate again what history had wisely divided — to ensure that in the name of order, we do not extinguish fairness itself.
Why This Essay Speaks of Justice, Not Lawmaking
It is important to note that this discussion focuses deliberately on the judiciary’s subordination to governance, not on governance’s interference with the legislature. Some may wonder why the latter receives so little attention, but the reason is plain: there is, in truth, very little to discuss.
The judicial branch remains structurally independent because its members are not elected by the people, nor do they owe their tenure to the political fortunes of the executive. Judges do not campaign, promise, or persuade; their mandate is rooted in interpretation, not representation. In contrast, the legislative branch — whether in the form of parliaments, senates, or assemblies — is directly constituted by the people.
The citizenry, in exercising their democratic power to elect members of the executive and legislative branches, have effectively transferred a portion of their law-making rights to those representatives. Presidents, prime ministers, and ministers exist by that transfer. Thus, when governance interferes with legislation, it is not so much an intrusion as it is a reflection of the people’s own delegation of authority.
But the judiciary stands apart. It was never meant to be governed by consent, nor swayed by the ballot. Its moral power derives not from votes but from principle — from the logic that justice must remain ungoverned to remain just.
Hence, while legislative interference by the executive can be seen as an internal friction within a shared democratic mandate, judicial interference represents a constitutional trespass — a usurpation of moral independence.
This is why the focus here is not on the government’s influence over legislation but on its creeping replacement of justice itself. For the people who once gave away their legislative power to be represented may one day wake to find that they have given away their right to fairness as well. And as the old principle goes:
One who has given up his rights has no rights.
It is precisely this surrender of power — what govox-populi seeks to reverse — that this essay calls back to the people.
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