‘Posterity beckons on us not to write bad judgements today because somebody paid us money; tomorrow that person will go and your reputation will go down the drain. Your children will never want to accept that they are your children. Is this what we want as judges?’
Acting Chief Justice of Nigeria, Justice Tanko Mohammed, at the inauguration of the late Justice Chukwudifu Oputa High Court Complex in Owerri, Imo State, on May 15, 2019.
The above statement by the Acting Chief Justice of Nigeria, Justice Tanko Mohammed, provides an interesting backdrop against which to assess the three major frauds, which led five of the fifteen judges involved in the 2018 governorship election case in the State of Osun to deliver “bad judgements”.
Two of three members of the Election Tribunal started the trail of bad judgements, by delivering the majority decision in which the voters’ mandate, freely given to the candidate of the All Progressives Congress, Gboyega Oyetola, was set aside and falsely awarded to the candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party, Ademola Adeleke.
Three other judges would shamelessly reinforce the same bad judgement: One of them was the single member of the five-member panel of the Appellate Court, who dissented with the majority judgement of four other members, which duly affirmed Oyetola’s victory. The other two were members of the seven-member panel of the Supreme Court, who dissented with the majority judgement of five other members, which sealed Oyetola’s victory.
The judgements written by five of the fifteen judges involved in the case were bad, not because they went in favour of Adeleke, the PDP candidate, as opposed to Gboyega Oyetola, the APC candidate, who was validly declared the winner of the September 22 and 27 governorship election by the Independent National Electoral Commission. Rather, the judgements were bad because they were fraudulent.
The fraud rests on a tripod of three distinct falsehoods. First, the allegation that INEC omitted the columns for voter accreditation and ballot accounting in the 17 polling units they cancelled was based on falsehood. The truth, as Wole Olanipekun, SAN, holding brief for Oyetola, argued before the judges, is that entries on the carbonated pile of 16 or so forms of EC8A begin to get faint after five or six copies. In other words, INEC did complete the columns but the entries did not appear on the bottom copies.
The allegation of non-compliance on which the bad judgements were partly based rested on this purported omission by INEC. Yet, the electoral law is clear that an allegation of non-compliance must satisfy two key conditions in order to attract judicial sanction: (a) the non-compliance must be “substantial” and (b) it must also “substantially” affect the results of the election.
Neither of the two conditions was met in this case as the PDP polling agents testified that voting, vote sorting, vote counting, vote recording, and open announcement of the results by the relevant presiding officers took place at those polling units. Besides, they also admitted that there were no irregularities during the electoral process and that they willfully signed the result sheets at the end of voting.
In other words, the non-recording of two columns on Form EC8A, assuming it did happen, could not have been grounds for setting aside the results of the election, because it had no effect whatsoever on the process and the results of the election in those polling units. In any case, were the cancellation of the results even warranted, what the law allows is a supplementary election in the affected polling units in order not to disfranchise the affected voters.
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