Samuel Olumuyiwa Jibowu was the first Nigerian Judge who was also Chief Justice of Lagos and the old Western region successively. Jibowu was born on August 26 1899 at Abeokuta. He attended Abeokuta Grammar School and Oxford University in England. He was called to Bar in 1923 at Middle Temple London. From 1931 he acted as a puisne judge at the High Court in Benin City and became the first Nigerian High Court judge when he was posted to Warri on July 27, 1942.
In 1957 Jibowu was appointed the Chief Justice of the Lagos High Courts and the Southern Cameroon. Jibowu headed the Commission of Inquiry set up to investigate the corruption in the Cocoa purchasing company of Ghana for which nearly 30,000 cocoa farmers had been alienated from the Nkrumah regime. He succeeded the equally talented Adetokunbo Ademola as Chief Justice of Western Nigeria in 1958 and died on the job a year later. He is agreed by many to be a man of high quality and a street in Yaba, Lagos, is named after him.
