The believe that Nigerians have towards our democratic process, especially the electoral system, is eroding at very significant rate. This situation forces a serious threat to our future as a country and as a democracy. When citizens lost confidence in the democratic system with the believe that their votes doesn’t decide election outcomes but rather every election is decided by the judiciary i.e. that election outcomes are judicialized.
The aftermath of the 2023 national election just like the previous have left so much legal dispute in which about every contested position in the country including hundreds of state and federal house of assembly seats as well as senate, governorship and presidential elections are been contested at the tribunals and appeal court. While the Presidential election litigations have recently been concluded by the supreme court, hundreds of other election legal battles are ongoing. It could be said that resolving election disputes can be controversial, complex and largely technical. The technicality of electoral dispute is largely due to its strict dependance of the Electoral Act which unfortunately is sometimes made disputable due to shifting judicial attitudes and or interpretation of the electoral act over the years as well politicians exploiting and using every legal loophole they can find.
Similar to previous post-election seasons, currently Nigeria’s political attention has been on the courts as aggrieved candidates and political parties that contested in Nigeria’s 2023 general elections approached the tribunals and appeal courts to challenge the outcome of the polls and seeking to overturn most elected positions. And in these current situations, the court rooms become the new ground for electoral contest. It is on record that 552 election petitions were filed by the aggrieved candidates who participated in the National Assembly elections alone and these ongoing election disputes in our tribunals and appeal courts has so much stretched thin the Nigeria Judiciary. This has severe consequences on the efficiency and performance of the Judiciary. It is clearly evident that some politicians who lost elections would rather go to courts with all sorts of dubious reason, waste the courts time and resources such that at the end of the day if the verdict goes against them, they will have the courts and judges to blame and blackmail. We have seen evidence of these all over the country were politicians and their supporter’s resort to threatening and blackmailing judges. On the other hand, by stretching the judicial system with election disputes, the other legal disputes that has not nothing to do with election suffers a lot set-backs with hearing and rulings on lot of other criminal and civil cases adjourned by several months, this is in no way healthy for our country and our democracy.
Equally demoralizing to most Nigerians is how our Judicial system and democracy is been threatened by how our politicians create loopholes in the electoral systems by planting problems and crisis in primary elections of their opponents or sometimes conniving with corrupts electoral officers, agents etc. during elections to create legal doubts or damage to some of the votes in their opponents’ strongholds. Knowing well that they will not win the popular vote, but they use this tactic to corner the courts into overturning elections in their favor. The result is that with every passing election cycle Nigerians are getting more and more disinterested in the election as a whole, because they see that in many instances their votes is not the final say, rather elections are been judicialized, even when politicians used crook methods to win election disputes against the genuine will of the voters.
It is also worth mentioning that the attitude of some of our judges is really not discouraging. Nigerians are used to experiencing strange and contradictory verdicts from our election tribunal judges as well as sometimes unprofessional behaviors and comments from the tribunal judges. While some of these strange judgements are usually repealed by the appeal or supreme courts, however, some doesn’t get repealed due many other reasons. In a disciplined judicial set-up it is never be an excuse for tribunal judges to interpreted the electoral laws as they see fit and pass contradictory and controversial judgments just because they do offer the dispute parties the right to appeal the judgment.
For all these reasons, one can see why Nigerians are losing interests in the democratic and electoral systems, the fact that voting or giving a candidate the highest votes in a free and fair election does not guarantee that candidate will eventually emerge as winner at the end of the day, but rather the courts will always have the final say in the determining the winner through a judicial process that is overly stretched and sometimes imperfect.
For the survival and development of this country, it is very important that Nigerians do not lose hope in our electoral system, but to play a significant role in upholding our democracy by pushing for changes in strengthened the electoral system. Nigerians need to hold politicians accountable, by not counting on or rendering support to politicians who are not willing to accept defeat in free and fair elections. However, this is not to discourage parties or candidates with genuine grievances to seek redress. Also, there is need to call for strengthening prosecution laws with stringent punishments for people who are involve in dubious acts to truncate or invalidate the votes of their opposition or meddling in opposition parties’ political processes.
Abdulrazaq Alkali Executive Director OCCEN Nigeria
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