Follow Us on Google
Since the transition from military to civil democratic rule over 20 years ago in 1999, Nigeria’s constitutional democracy has suffered from stunted growth. The lofty promises of dividends of the hard-earned emocracy in the form of improved welfare and security of lives and properties of citizens remains unfulfilled.
These unfulfilled promises of quality service delivery in the form of a sustainable mechanism of good governance to the majority of the people by their elected political leaders has led many to question the very relevance of democracy towards the advancement of their socio-economic development. Interestingly, it is not democracy that is irrelevant to Nigeria’s socio-economic development but Nigeria’s unique brand of constitutional civil democratic rule that is increasingly becoming undemocratic.
In the last 24 years, Nigeria’s constitutional democracy has been greatly undermined by a peculiar form of a flawed electoral process, which is an anathema to the fundamentals of civil democratic governance, as it takes away from the people the power to freely elect their political leadership without any form of inhibition. The progressive retrogression of Nigeria’s political process to a degenerate criminal franchise of power grab by every means possible for self-service has succeeded in entrenching a sustained culture of political heist that has rendered democracy prostrate in Nigeria.
Consequently, the political leaders of the Nigerian state at all levels do not necessary enjoy genuine democratic legitimacy as their authority is not conferred on them by people power. It is this stolen mandate that has arrested the socio-economic development of the Nigerian state and its people. To make worse a bad situation, the power of the people to reward and punish their elected political leaders during the quadrennial electoral cycle is completely taken away from them, thereby perpetuating a degenerate leadership status quo, which is averse to public service in its preoccupation with self-service.
However, there was a successful attempt at reversing this ugly trend between 2011 and 2015 when the President Goodluck Jonathan administration embarked on a series of reforms aimed at sanitizing Nigeria’s flawed electoral process to a more credible one. It was the success of this attempt at electoral reforms that resulted in a remarkably improved electoral process, which culminated in the unprecedented loss of then incumbent President Jonathan to then opposition candidate Muhammadu Buhari. Nigeria had taken its rightful place as the largest democracy in Africa, or so it seemed. Unfortunately, the modest gains of 2015 were drastically reversed in subsequent elections.
The colossal failure of the Buhari administration to fulfil its change promise of tackling corruption and insecurity, as well as improving the economy, was very clear on the eve of the 2019 general election. Having violated the social contract it entered with the people to improve their lives between 2015 and 2019, thereby reducing them to the poorest and most insecure in the world, with corruption spiralling out of control, an alternative route might have been adopted to remain in power by avoiding popular sanction for a disastrous rule. Condemned by both local and international observer groups as falling short of the standards of the improved general election of 2015, the 2019 elections could best be described as the worst in Fourth Republic.
Characterized by massive rigging by stuffing of ballot boxes, underage voting, widespread violence, vote-buying collectively aided and abetted by a thoroughly compromised electoral management body in concert with equally compromised security agencies, the 2019 elections were clearly manipulated to retain the ruling party in power against the popular wishes of the majority of Nigerians whose lives were made miserable by the current administration. Arising from the flaws of the 2019 general election, there was a widespread clamour for the reform of Nigeria’s electoral management laws in order to plug some of the loopholes exploited by politicians going into the 2023 elections.
Among many other progressive and innovative provisions, a reformed electoral law, which allowed for the use of technology in the accreditation of voters and the electronic transmission of results from the polling unit into a central sever that could be viewed in real time was the real game changer. However, the highly anticipated positive effects of these legal reforms may not have met the expectations of many Nigerians as the electronic transmission of results from polling units into the central sever of Nigeria’s electoral management body failed to happen during the presidential election of February 25, 2023. According to the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), the failure to transmit presidential election results electronically and the inability of Nigerians to view them in real time was due to “technical glitches.”
Consequently, the outcome of the presidential election, which saw the candidate of ruling APC, Ahmed Bola Tinubu, emerge ahead of this closest rivals, Atiku Abubakar of the main opposition PDP and Peter Obi of the Labour Party, has been widely disputed and the winner along with INEC dragged before the Presidential Election Petition Tribunal for judicial review. But as the presidential election tribunal is set to begin hearing of the petition of the litigants, it has become imperative that the decisions of the presiding learned and respected jurists be guided by the morality of rule of law, for law and morality are inseparable as the law was crafted to safeguard morality.
Whereas the operating system of a constitutional democracy is hinged on the principles of the rule of law, this has not been the case with Nigeria because its moral code has been substituted with the immorality of technicalities. Requiring facts rather than truth, judicial decisions in matters of electoral disputes have often relied more on technicalities rather than on the morality of the rule of law. Whereas not every truth is a fact, the presiding jurists as Nigerians who live in the reality of its of electoral malfeasance must be guided more by the truth (morality) than facts (technicality) of the matter before them. And whereas technicalities of the rule of law are shallow as they do not address the subject matter of litigations beyond the letters of the law, morality encapsulates the spirit, intendment and righteous persuasion behind the crafting of the letters of the law.
The crafters of the law are imperfect mortals whose efforts may not always fully convey the full import of the spirit, intendment and righteous persuasion behind the letters of the law. Unfortunately, dealers in electoral heist have often taken advantage of these imperfections on the grounds of technicalities to get away with their stolen mandates. The exploitation of unintended loopholes in the law to get away with unlawful acts has been greatly aided and abetted by adjudications on technicalities. This situation runs contrary to the principles of rule of law, which guarantees equality of every citizen of a constitutional democracy before the law, as adjudication of litigations on technicalities alone makes justice a privilege and not a fundamental human right.
If the judiciary is to live up to its reputation as the last hope of the common man and, considering the fundamental importance of credible elections to a functional democracy, the judiciary should be guided more by the morality of the rule of law and less by technicalities in adjudicating electoral disputes. The interest of the common people of Nigeria is best served in functional constitutional democracy, which gives them power to place and replace their political leadership at their free will.
That the constitution describes the fundamental duty of the state as the welfare and security of lives of its citizens this suggests that all judicial adjudications arising from electoral disputes should be in furtherance of the aforementioned. By giving moral force to judicial adjudications, litigation in electoral matters must be weighed on the scale of the original intention of the Constitution, which is the welfare and security of citizens, and any action or otherwise, which appears to go contrary, should be interpreted as unlawful. Having been widely acknowledged that a flawed electoral process is injurious to the socio-economic development of the Nigerian state and its people, as much as a single incidence of electoral malpractice, which compromises the independence of the electoral management body and security agencies acting at the behest of powers of incumbency, should be considered substantial enough a violation of the Electoral Act.
