Now that all the petitions and the resultant appeals arising from the 2019 presidential and gubernatorial elections have been decided, we think it is time to take a deep breath and reflect on the past, the present and the future of both our elections and how regularly they wind up in our courts. There can be no doubt that Nigerians want the decisions on our leadership positions to be made at the ballot box, not in the courts. And most democratic countries in the world choose their leaders at the polls. But we have found, to our chagrin in the last 20 years, that more and more of our leadership contests are being determined in the courts.
There can be no doubt that this is an indication that something is wrong with our electoral system. We already know of a pervasive unwillingness to accept electoral losses. We have refused to learn from other parts of the world where electoral contests are akin to sports where we expect magnanimity in victory and gallantry in defeat.
The Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), Prof. Mahmood Yakubu, confirmed in January 2016 that a total of 81 elections, including senatorial, House and governorship elections, were nullified by different courts in the 2015 election cycle. The 2019 election has come and gone. We are left with its pieces, its warnings and its lessons. From all appearances, the court-determined results are going to be considerably higher than the 2015 cycle. This is going to raise numerous questions about the credibility of our future elections which began right at the eve of the presidential election in February last year when the electoral umpire, the INEC, postponed a long scheduled election a few hours before polling was to start.
In every democracy, it is always considered imperative that the integrity of the electoral process and its outcome be unimpeachable, an exercise beyond suspicion, something the citizen can be proud of not only in the present but also to serve as a future guide and a confidence-booster in the democratic experiment. Yet in recent memory, no election petition has been as contentious as what we have experienced since the 2019 elections, and especially so, in the governorship contests. Through a series of verdicts in the Supreme Court, winners and losers have emerged. Some of the decisions of the apex court have attracted considerable reactions more than in the previous cycles. And the Supreme Court, as the saying goes, is infallible because it is the final. Yet we all know that as an institution run by human beings, it is liable to the usual weaknesses, shortcomings, and the temptations that we associate with all human institutions.
We think the Supreme Court should take notice of the failings in its verdicts, so it can retain the faith of Nigerians as the last bastion of the hope for justice in the minds of the common man. There are millions of Nigerians who fervently believe in the Supreme Court, who swear that if and when everything else fails, the Supreme Court would not fail.
The phenomenal outpouring of anger over the recent decision on the Imo State governorship appeal was not merely a matter of factions. Many Nigerians believe that their Lordships in the rush to beat statutory deadlines for verdicts probably did not have enough time to scrutinise the origins of those decisive 388 polling units results which INEC had ridiculed as being of dubious integrity. His Lordships had little time to re-examine the policeman who tendered those results and, perhaps, more questions should have been asked on how he came about them.
We also think that when the 388 results were added and the overall total overshot the number of accredited voters, a red flag for a re-run was raised. Awarding victory in the light of those tell-tales looked like a leap into the dark. We believe in miracles but how the All Progressives Congress (APC) could win a governorship ticket yet was unable to win a single House of Assembly seat looks magical. A cursory look into the 388 results out of which only 28 sheets were tendered revealed that those 28 were described as “mutilated, distorted, or wrongly and incompletely filled. No result sheet showed the number of ballot papers issued to the respective polling units (PU), the number of used and unused ballot papers, as it ordinarily should. Most of the 28 didn’t have the name and signature of the presiding officer or the date of issuance…Only 28 out the alleged 388 result sheets were brought out, the rest were kept in bags.”
We urge the Federal Government to take a long view of our electoral laws and to set in motion the mechanism to reform the system. The deterioration of our performance in elections since 2015 is a major setback on our march to stable and transparent democracy. The number of Nigerians voting has dwindled in the last three election cycles. Every single election petition is an indication that something went awry in the last election. President Muhammadu Buhari could start with giving assent to those on the president’s desk, the Electoral Amendment Bill and those other bills designed to improve our performance during elections and let our eaders be chosen not in courts but through the ballot box