"I have painstakingly read the affidavit evidence placed before the Court by the Appellants and I cannot find anything wrong or uncanny in the inference made by the lower Court to the effect that the report made to the 2nd Respondent by the Appellants against the Respondent was false and ipso facto malicious inasmuch as the said 2nd Respondent who acted on the complaint/report, filed no counter affidavit to controvert the account surrounding the arrest and detention of the Respondent and which was to the effect that all the Appellants wanted to achieve and used the 2nd Respondent for was to recover the contributions she (2nd Appellant) claimed to have made to the Respondent. Indeed, the very fact that the Appellants admitted the recovery as it were, of the sum of N86,000.00 from the Respondent in circumstances which the Respondent deposed to in her affidavits (which the 2nd Respondent never controverted), and which glaringly went to show that the concocted complaint/report of the commission of a crime (i.e. suspected obtaining by false pretences) by the said Respondent, was designed solely for the purpose of using the 2nd Respondent given his position as a Police Officer, to recover the contributions the 2nd Appellant made to the Respondent, as the said Respondent was not forthcoming with what the 2nd Appellant conceived to have been due to her given the agreement between her (2nd Appellant) and the Respondent. Though the Appellants having regard to their submissions, clearly realise that the law absolves a person who makes a bona fide or genuine criminal complaint/report to the Police, against the consequences of an arrest and detention made by the Police on the basis of the said bona fide or genuine complaint/report, they (Appellants) would appear not to have realised that they were still duty bound to show that the reasonableness of the complaint/report (in that the unreasonableness of a complaint/report of the suspected commission of a crime made by a person against another person) renders the complaint/report to be lacking in bona fide. See in this regard, the recent decision of this Court in the case of ANUFI V. EFCC (2018) LPELR - 43521(CA) wherein my learned brother, Ugo, JCA relying on some previous decisions of this Court, particularly the decision of this Court in Jim-Jaja v. COP (2011) 2 NWLR (Pt. 1231) 375 and that of the Supreme Court in the same case, reiterated the position of the law to the effect that a person who lodges a complaint to law enforcement agencies in respect of a straight forward civil matter, cannot immune himself from the consequences flowing from the violation of the affected person's fundamental right(s). I am of the considered view that as it is undoubtedly inferable from the affidavit evidence of the Appellants that there was no iota of reasonableness in the complaint/report of "suspected obtaining by false pretences" which they made against the Respondent and that all that the purported investigation into the complaint/report by the 2nd Respondent to whom same was made, was the arrest and detention of the Respondent and the recovery of the contributions the 2nd Appellant claimed to have made to the said Respondent, the report/complaint made to the 2nd Respondent, was in the circumstances rightly found by the lower Court to have been "manifestly false and ipso facto malicious". The Appellants having therefore, diabolically made their complaint/report against the Respondent, criminal in nature, against the glaring backdrop that whatever arrangement the 2nd Appellant had with the said Respondent, is glaringly civil in nature, they cannot extricate themselves from the breach of the fundamental rights of the Respondent, as they instigated the same in the knowledge that their complaint/report was false."

Per LOKULO-SODIPE, J.C.A. OBIUKWU & ANOR v. OKWUDIRE & ORS CITATION: (2018) LPELR-45066(CA)