I have been singing this like a song for so long. Our judiciary needs to rethink the electoral justice that they deliver or else something is bound to give way someday. I hold the firm view that the judiciary is unfortunately de-legitimizing itself before the people with its recent decisions in a false belief in its power as the final arbiter. The people of Nigeria were not born to be slaves to anyone, not even the judiciary. If the judiciary continues to deliver decisions that fall below the moral standards of the people as to what are minimum standards of justice, which they agree to live by, Nigerians may revolt against the institution, and that would be most unfortunate.
The doctrine of demonstration of documents is most indefensible, with all due respect, particularly in the face of section 137 of the Electoral Act, 2022, which was inserted into the law to abolish it. The judiciary abused its powers to interpret the law when it incapacitated that provision to insist on re-enacting the injustice of defeating legitimate expectations through a doctrine that renders evidence of the votes of Nigerians, duly certified by INEC, ineffectual in the court, meaning that Nigerians suffer in vain to cast votes and only the declaration of INEC of anyone as a winner is what the courts reckon with. In the end, our courts affirm elections even after rejecting the results of the election that were tendered in evidence on the legally indefensible reasoning that they were dumped on the court because they were not “demonstrated” or “spoken to”.
They call it presumption of regularity. And I ask, presumption of regularity of what? There must be placed before the court, the very act that the court is to presume to be regular. In Nigeria, nothing is placed before the courts; INEC that conducted the election mostly never gives evidence and therefore does not tender the results which it expects the courts to presume regular. The ones that are presented by the petitioner, even though duly certified by INEC, are rejected on the basis of the absurd reasoning that the petitioner failed to call witnesses from polling unit to polling unit to “demonstrate” or “speak to” the results. The process is time bound.
The petitioner may not get up to three hours of testimony in all. When hundreds, not to mention, thousands of polling units are involved, petitioner is immediately harmstrung and effectively denied justice, even when that justice is evident from the certified results that the petitioner obtained from INEC.
In Kenya, which is a country that hitherto looked up to our judiciary, counsel are asked to submit reports of their scrutiny of election documents. The election of Uhuru Kenyatta in 2017 was annulled mainly on such reports of scrutiny of documents. No witnesses were examined. We cannot continue in our manner of enabling injustice through unfair judicial procedure. The sovereignty of the people is demonstrated in their ability to freely elect their leaders. When it is defeated by a corrupt election process that is enabled and defended by the judiciary, the people become slaves in their own land. Slaves have the fundamental human right of revolt.
By Chuks Nwachuku; legal practitioner and leadership and good governance advocate
