MEANING no disrespect to the rank and file of the formation that used to advertise itself as the largest political party in Africa and to its legal team, I was not surprised that the Presidential Election Court dismissed their challenge to President Muhammadu Buhari’s victory in the March 2019 election for lack of merit, or that all five justices of the court concurred in the ruling.
I anticipated this outcome not from lack of confidence in the judiciary as a whole or in that branch of the institution, although evidence abounds there of perversity, a not infrequent flight from justice, timidity, and high susceptibility to unwholesome influences.
Rather, I came to the expectation from the case laid out before the Tribunal by the combined legal team of the PDP’s candidate, Alhaji Abubakar Atiku, and the PDP, as reported contemporaneously in various media outlets. There was a great deal to complain about and even challenge in the election, but the case made by for the petitioners did not rise to proof of the skullduggery alleged in their depositions.
Here, I must enter several caveats. The Court is yet to furnish a transcript of the proceedings, against which the accuracy of media reports can be measured. The reporting, it has to be said, was far from comprehensive and was generally marked by a scatter-shot approach. However, to the extent that none of the parties nor the Tribunal has questioned its fidelity, the reporting must be judged substantially accurate.
Atiku’s case rested crucially, first, on the existence of a server controlled by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), to which the authentic election returns from the field were posted directly.
A senior INEC official in one of the states had disclosed this arrangement at a news conference ahead of the election, according to testimony by a witness for Atiku. Any documentation of election returns that differed in any material particular from those retrievable from INEC’s master server must therefore be presumed to be a forgery.
Now, several such documents had turned up, crediting Atiku with far fewer votes than he had actually scored as entered on INEC’s private server by field operatives. If INEC had not knowingly collated Atiku’s votes downwards to rob him of his hard-earned victory, it must at the very least have somehow connived in that act.
INEC rejoined that it hosted no private server. It produced documentary evidence to the effect that its chair, Professor Mahmood Yakubu, had stated for the record that electronic transmission of election returns was not allowed under the electoral law, and that INEC had hosted no server for that purpose.
While the PEC was grappling with claim and counterclaim, Atiku filed a lawsuit at the Supreme Court seeking to compel INEC to produce the alleged server. The Supreme Court held that the existence or otherwise of the server was a substantive issue before another court, and that asking INEC to produce it would be prejudicial to the outcome of that other case.
Nothing daunted, Atiku’s claim produced a field worker for INEC who said he had, as instructed, personally used some device furnished by INEC to transmit election returns to INEC’s server. His testimony did not hold up during cross-examination. More dramatic was the testimony of a computer specialist from Kenya, who said that certain characteristics of a document under review showed that the document could only have come from a server hosted by INEC. His testimony shed no light on the controversy.
The controversial server will go down as the dodgiest piece of electronic hardware in the annals of polling. If it actually existed, was it kept in proper custody? Was INEC the only entity that had access to it? If not, who else? Is it inconceivable that another party, a rogue element, could have posted on it material that did not originate from INEC, or corrupted material obtained from it?
In whatever case, its existence was not proven.
The server certainly was not the trump card, the “Joker” (shades of Richard Akinjide and the 1979 presidential election) that was supposed to be the clincher. But the very prospect of bringing the existence of the dodgy server to light was enough to send PDP functionaries rhapsodizing about the certainty of the election being voided, and of the party’s imminent return to power and the good old days.
By the way, where is Akinjide today, in these contentious times, when his hugely inventive forensic skills would have helped clarify and resolve many a mystery? But I digress.
Atiku’s case also rested, secondly, on proving that Muhammadu Buhari did not possess the minimum educational qualification for the office of president. He should not have been allowed to run as a candidate in the first place. Too bad he was allowed to run, but the lapse could be remedied by disqualifying Buhari after the fact, Atiku’s team contended.
If INEC’s server was dodgy, Buhari’s West African School Certificate has been dodgier. At one time, it was said to be in the custody of the military authorities. Not so, the military authorities replied severely. Perhaps the certificate did not exist, in which case Buhari must have been smuggled into the Nigeria Defence Academy, his determined adversaries said.
Then the certificate was reported missing, not lost irretrievably. Thereafter, it was said to have been replaced with a copy authenticated by the West African Examinations Council, and presented to Buhari by WAEC Registrar Dr Uyi Uwadiae, at a well-publicized ceremony, the issuance of an original back in 1961 having been ascertained.
Still the controversy deepened.
They challenged the name on the certificate. They disputed the subjects Buhari offered and passed at the examination. They said the school through which Buhari earned the certificate did not exist at the time he took the examination. They said anyone seeking evidence that the document was a forgery need not look beyond its shape and design.
In vain was it pointed out that WAEC is an examining body comprising five member-nations, all of whom would have had to conspire to manufacture and award a certificate that was never earned, even if it was to a presidential candidate in one member-country. That scenario seemed inconceivable.
Still, they kept stoking the manufactured controversy.
“Facts are stubborn things,” a learned man once said. “They never go away.”
The truth is that lies are even more stubborn. They never go away. They just grow and spread and ramify, as the controversy over Buhari’s School Certificate for his office has shown. They defy commonsense and the rules of evidence.
The Presidential Election Court saw through the subterfuge and held that Buhari was in terms of academic achievement, more than qualified to be president of Nigeria.
Even so, I am not sure that its pronouncement will lay the matter to rest. I will not be surprised if the matter is raked up before the Supreme Court on appeal, or continues to be litigated in the court of public opinion in the unlikely event that the Supreme Court finds for Buhari.
Nor, switching gears, will I be surprised, if Buhari’s team continues to press the ludicrous claim that Atiku is a foreigner, to wit a citizen of Cameroun who had in all his adult life falsely paraded himself as a Nigerian citizen, and in the process risen to the second highest office in the land and amassed riches beyond the dreams of the most avaricious, especially since the Presidential Election Court declined to consider the question.
The penalty, the more desperate among them might even insist, is to strip him of his wealth and fortune and every distinction Nigeria ever conferred on him, and send him back to Cameroun.
The silly season never ends here, remember.