THE fireworks over who won or lost the February 2019 presidential election is just beginning in earnest. Dissatisfied with the outcome of the election as declared by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), former vice president Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) has petitioned the election tribunal to overturn the election of President Muhammadu Buhari. Alhaji Atiku claims that his party is in possession of authentic results indicating that INEC was wrong to have declared the All Progressives Congress (APC) candidate victorious. But quoting a provision of the Nigerian constitution, the All Progressives Congress (APC), in its response, is arguing before the Presidential Election Petition Tribunal that the PDP did not have a presidential candidate in the February 2019 presidential election because Alhaji Atiku was actually born in Cameroon, and is a naturalised Nigerian. The APC argues that the constitutional requirement for a presidential contest is that the candidate must be a Nigerian by birth, not by naturalisation.
Apart from suggesting that the authentic result of the presidential poll is different from the one announced by INEC, the PDP and its candidate are also arguing that President Buhari does not possess the minimum educational requirement to run for president. They challenge the APC candidate to produce his WAEC result, the original of which the president had once suggested was in the custody of the Nigerian Army, but can no longer be found. President Buhari has since produced a certified copy from WAEC indicating the number of papers he sat for and how many he passed. It is hard to see these recriminations amounting to a major jurisprudential conundrum. Nigerian courts may have suffered a terrible intellectual and infrastructural decline in recent decades, and no one appears certain that justice can still be served regardless of how brilliantly counsels formulate their arguments, but sorting out the chaff from the grain in the Alhaji Atiku petition may not be as complicated as the welter of materials being presented before the courts suggest.
What is likely to be the major bone of contention may be the traditional issues of votes cast and other electoral irregularities, particularly the matter relating to which results are authentic and which are fake. Alhaji Atiku claims to have procured the authentic results from the INEC computer server; the APC and INEC suggest that because the results were not transmitted electronically, they could thus not be in any server. The courts will try to make sense of these thorny issues. The extent of their success in charting the right path through these complicated legal processes in the age of computers and internet will depend on whether the courts have judicial experts who can adjudicate on the new area of electronic evidence. Information suggests that neither the presidential election tribunal nor the Supreme Court has such experts, not even one. The Nigerian justice system has become so antiquated that it is a miracle anyone still gets justice at all.
Sadly, apart from the natural obstacles the courts must confront, such as poor infrastructure, poor funding, and anti-intellectual, incompetent and corrupt judges, they are unable to also convince the public that their decisions are fair, competent and independent. For decades, the independence of the judiciary had being corroded by meddlesome governments and politicised judges, with the justice system entirely skewed and rendered prejudiced and openly disdainful of truth. The situation is made worse by the unprecedented assault orchestrated by the Buhari presidency against the judiciary in the name of sanitising the third arm of government. In words and in deeds, and by carefully orchestrated attacks on some judicial officers, not to say the prejudiced elevation of judges in some parts of the country in recent years, the Buhari presidency and some state governments have managed to intimidate judges and rendered them incoherent and timid. It is not clear whether many Nigerians still think Nigerian courts are capable of delivering justice, especially in cases involving the government.
The recent sack — for that is what the shenanigans surrounding his retirement amounted to — of the former Chief Justice of Nigeria (CJN) and the elevation of the next in line in obedience to a bewildering tribunal order rather than the constitutionally laid down procedure appeared to be the final nail in the coffin of an independent judiciary. Can they, therefore, be expected to give judgements that anger the government or contradict the presidency’s position? The chances are slim. The courts are finally inoculated against justice and against global best practices. So, no matter how painstakingly the courts handle the Atiku petition, there will always be doubts in the minds of the PDP and their supporters whether justice had been served. After all, when President Buhari lost elections many times, and went from court to court to seek redress, he never thought the courts were capable of giving justice. And he said so repeatedly. After tampering with the judiciary, as he now seems to have done, can his opponents say they have got justice when judgements go against them?
On second thought, it is good that Alhaji Atiku is in court to seek what he believes to be justice. The courts will have the chance, beyond rumours and suppositions, to prove that they are still independent and remain as effective and relevant as they used to be. There are not many Nigerians who can swear by them; nor is it certain that there are even many judges who can swear by their colleagues. But in a matter of months, it will be clear in what state of mental and spiritual health the judiciary has placed itself.
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