The avalanche of election petitions arising from the 2023 general elections entrenches a sad tradition in Nigeria where leadership contests are determined, not by universally accepted poll results, but by the courts.
A compilation by Kimpact Development Initiative, an NGO, that a staggering 1,044 suits had been filed by last week at election tribunals across the country, demonstrates the ugliness of polling and the stunted growth of democracy in the world’s most populous Black country. This places a heavy burden on the judiciary to rise to its billing as the last hope of the people and the ultimate guardian of justice, the rule of law and democracy.
Anxiety pervades the land as judges go to work adjudicating election petitions after the bad behaviour of politicians, failure of the law enforcement agencies to prevent electoral criminality, and the imperfections of the Independent National Electoral Commission.
Corrupt and desperate, the politicians and their unscrupulous lawyers will be invading the courts to replicate their cancerous influence on the judiciary as they have on the party selection process and the elections. Trial judges should be upright and incorruptible. They should impartially deliver justice and shun enslavement to technicalities.
The Chief Justice of Nigeria, Olukayode Ariwoola, and the National Judicial Council should take extraordinary measures to ensure that the judiciary this time fends off corruption, delivers justice and saves Nigeria’s tottering democracy.
The figures are depressing. The KDI’s ‘Election Petition Tribunal Data Dashboard’ claims that of the 1,044 petitions it had so far tracked arising from the elections,470 arose from the House of Representatives poll, 327 from the state legislative races, 180 from the senatorial poll, 62 from the state governorship, and five from the presidential election.
By the first week of April, 10 of the 18 political parties that contested the various seats had filed 431 petitions at the various tribunals across 27 states. Five of the presidential candidates and parties have also gone to court seeking to nullify the declaration of Bola Tinubu as the winner. INEC has reportedly voted N3 billion for its legal defence.
Free, fair, and acceptable elections are the bedrock of democracy. They are, declares the Civil Liberties Union for Europe, “the foundation of democracy that allows for the free and just societies.”Under its Electoral Integrity Initiative, the Kofi Annan Foundation, a non-profit, noted that elections that lack integrity “cannot provide the winners with legitimacy.”
Nigeria’s excessive recourse to judicial intervention in elections is rooted primarily in two broad tendencies: one is the manipulation, violence, and untidy polling that accompanies candidate selection processes in the political parties and in inter-party elections; the other interconnected one is the desperation of most politicians that makes them bad losers. The first prompts the aggrieved to seek refuge in the courts, the second sees desperate operators also seeking to manipulate the courts and gain power at all costs. Both tendencies are playing out today.
A compilation by Dataphyte reveals that in the first five general elections conducted in the Fourth Republic, a total of 3,959 petitions were filed in the courts by candidates and political parties challenging the announced outcomes. The highest number of petitions arose from the 2007 elections when 1,290 were filed, followed by 766 in 2019, 732 in 2011, 611 in 2015 and 560 in 2003.
Corruption has since infiltrated the judiciary, made worse by its bombardment with election cases by the most corrupt and unscrupulous set of politicians in Nigeria’s history. This has created a class of “billionaire judges,” alleged the late jurist, Kayode Eso.
Chidi Odinkalu, lawyer and activist, recalls that of the 1,490 seats contested in the 36 states and federally (excluding the FCT) in 2019, 805 of the contests, representing 54.02 percent, were decided by the courts. In 2015, 45 percent of contests were decided by the courts, and 51 percent in 2011. A staggering 86.35 percent of election outcomes in 2007 were eventually decided by judicial pronouncements.
Some Supreme Court judgements in election cases have eroded confidence in the judiciary. Its enthronement of Hope Uzodinma which INEC results had placed a distant fourth in the election as governor of Imo State, and the endorsement of Ahmad Lawan, the malleable Senate President, as his party’s senatorial candidate for Yobe North have among others, hit the highest court’s image in public perception, justifications on the grounds of legal technicalities notwithstanding.
Observers warn that frustrated by judicial decisions that overturn the popular will, the masses could one day resort to mob rule. The judiciary can avert this.
The ICPC’s Nigeria Corruption Index 2018 and 2020 rated the judiciary as “most corrupt.” The report claimed that about N9.45 billion was offered and paid as bribes by lawyers to judicial officials. It said six female judges reported being offered N3.7billion, and five male judges reported N392.2million offers. ICPC said the bribes demanded or offered were mostly linked to election matters.
Judicial corruption is a global problem. The Geneva-based Centre for the Independence of Judges and Lawyers’ survey of 48 countries 1999 found judicial corruption to be “pervasive” in 30 countries. Nigeria’s situation is far worse than most.
Ariwoola is conscious of public anxiety; inaugurating the 307 judges to serve on election petition tribunals in November, he charged them to be professional, and vowed not to condone “any act of recklessness, abuse of power and public trust.” He and the NJC should walk the talk.
There should be close monitoring of judicial officers to ensure that justice and the choice of the people are paramount. For too long, justice and frustration of the people’s will have been sacrificed on the altar of legal technicalities. But the law, argued the legendary British jurist, Lord Denning, Master of the Rolls, “is not an end in itself,” but an instrument for delivering justice.
Nigeria’s judges should imbibe this dictum. With so much despair among the people who have been traumatised by turbulent elections, as they hear election petitions, judges have a sacred duty to restore confidence in the courts, the rule of law, and democracy, and to redeem the judiciary’s reputation.
