Election petitions should be disposed of before swearing in; once a winner has been declared and sworn in, a petitioner faces a near-impossible task of over-turning the result
FORMER vice president and presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, Atiku Abubakar, said on Monday that Nigeria was the bigger loser in last week’s decision by the Supreme Court to uphold the election of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu. That was a convenient exaggeration to hide his misery. But it was unnecessary.
Its non-compliance undermined the integrity of the system and opened the door to self-help, a point acknowledged in the judgment of the Supreme Court. Another obvious source of distress for Abubakar and Obi, particularly Abubakar, was that the court refused to admit and consider the pleading that Tinubu’s certificate from the Chicago State University, CSU, purportedly filed as part of his documents to INEC, was forged.
Heart of the matter But that was only a part of the coup de grace. Two, the case lost its way even before it reached the tribunal, which in the presidential election, is the court of appeal. The whole point of the contest was not whether a forgery had been committed, though it may have been material at an earlier stage. The point was whether Abubakar’s lawyers could prove that the presidential election on February 25 had been so significantly rigged that Tinubu could not have won it.
In a presidential election, however, the petitioner is faced with a different, higher level of tyranny. He will have to prove in court, within 180 days, that elections in a substantial number of the 176,846 polling units scattered in some of the country’s remotest villages and involving an estimated 187 million odd ballots had been rigged. And this would happen in a court barely equipped or prepared for such a grind.
In fact, the whole point of the Electoral College is to equalise the states. Nigerian courts have also made this point repeatedly. But obviously, the election petition industry will stop at nothing to reinvent its growth, expansion and prosperity. Some have used the scathing valedictory address by retired Supreme Court judge, Musa Dattijo Muhammad, delivered the day after the court’s judgement as evidence of lost hope in the judiciary.
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