Elections held in 2003. In Anambra, Ngige and Obi were the major contenders. The electoral commission declared Ngige the winner. Obi cried and took his grievances to the tribunal. By the time the courts corrected the error, it was 2006. Ngige had stayed three full years as governor. In the eyes of the law, Ngige was never a governor.
Yet Anambra was a bit lucky. Ngige wasn’t a political buccaneer. But despite people remembering his good works with longing, the law views his tenure as an aberration. In other words, in 2003, our laws left a window for a political pirate to be in office for three years or more.
But twenty years after, in 2023, this bizarre anomaly has only been partly rectified. The election petitions are now time-bound. They must be concluded in a total of about ten months. As good as that innovation is, the problem is still huge. An election pirate can use thugs and hijack ballot boxes and rewrite results, BVAS notwithstanding. Then with some lubrication of the system, INEC will announce the dubious results gathered by a compromised collation mechanism and ask aggrieved persons to go to court. Effectively, in 2023, such an impostor could be president for eight months, hobnobbing with respected world leaders.
In eight months, that pirate will change all the security chiefs, including the heads of the Army, Police and DSS. He will ransack intelligence files and trample on taboos. In eight months, he will install new ministers and ambassadors. If he is imaginative enough, he could begin a carrot and stick mending of the judiciary. A few sting operations against corrupt judges will send shivers down the spine of the judicial system.
Then if he is sufficiently meticulous, he could force the resignation of some stubborn justices of the supreme court, because the system is generally slack and only a few persons are ramrod straight and whistle clean. He doesn’t need to invent anything. Some of these tools have been used at the state and federal levels in the past. He could use the CCB and CCT to sift files and come up with interesting indictments. All political foes would, after fretting for a few months, begin negotiating political soft landings.
Eight months is a short time but it’s a long enough time to make new laws and take drastic actions. To create one new agency with sharp teeth to focus on witch hunting. To resurrect buried skeletons and white papers. To revisit old inquiries.
The central idea will be to make the pirate become synonymous with Nigeria. So his critics will become unpatriotic people. And anyone who challenges the validity of his election could face a treason charge. He might mobilize intellectuals and social media influencers to troll opponents with sick innuendos, to criminalize and demonize legitimate dissent. To prove a major point, one or two bold traditional rulers could be used to set examples for others.
The pirate might spice his self-aggrandizement with a few lofty projects. In eight months, he could become the darling of African presidents to whom he would have extended an uncommon generosity. Eight months is time enough to motivate the NASS with blinding foreign currency to decentralize power in the country or create new states. Some of the actions initiated and concluded by such a president could be practically irreversible.
He could begin some elaborate tokenism to curry the favour of mosques and churches. A president in a hurry, ready to deploy the treasury and fury, can alter the country in more fundamental ways in eight months than a president in eight years. Besides some roads and bridges which would be advertised on CNN, he could begin the campaign that continuity was necessary for the survival of the country. And eminent persons could be assembled to visit aggrieved candidates to urge them to drop their petitions in the interest of national unity.
This lacuna is dangerous. In eight months, such a cunning president could make his removal almost impossible. An independent judiciary could remove him the way it removed Ngige. But Ngige was a governor against whom the president had allowed his friends to seek a pound of flesh. If Ngige were a president, would the court have removed him in 2006? President Buhari actually has hinted that his failure to upturn some of the results of shabbily conducted presidential elections in the past was down to a spineless judiciary doing the bidding of a sitting president.
We borrowed the presidential system from America. In America, all legal contestations happen before winners are sworn in. All legal disputes are time bound. And the time fits within the 2-month widow between elections and oath-taking. In America, the elections are more transparent, and disputes are few. In America, thugs don’t play a major role, and result sheets are not vulnerable.
In America, the police are not saints, but they do not engage in the sort of electoral atrocities that happened in Rivers on March 18. We borrowed the presidential system from America without worrying about where we would find the requisite amount of good faith, honesty and transparency to drive the system
This is 2023. We must rethink the process and abridge the time for all legal disputes without undermining petitioners. So that before a politician is sworn in, all controversies surrounding his election would have been laid to rest in accordance with the law. That will confer true legitimacy. But we can’t achieve a clean system by having a porous process that depends on the courts to sort out basic problems.
The freer and more transparent the process, the fewer petitions that will be filed to suffocate the judicial system. The more digital the system, the easier it would be to detect and retrieve evidence of malpractice and fraud. INEC Must assume a more assertive role. If we abridge legal procedures without cleaning up the system and banishing the use of thugs for instance, we could be papering over cracks and making it easier for perpetrators of electoral fraud to get away with the fruits of their wrongdoing.
Evidence gathering needs time. The trial courts in Nigeria have been allocated six months to finish disputes. The appellate courts have two months each. We can reduce the time to 6 weeks for trial and 2 weeks for a single and final appellate process. All elections courts will be televised for enhanced transparency. To achieve a new timescale the legal processes must be changed to favour a more arbitration style.
Yet we must re-examine this exorbitant presidential system. If we decentralise power and adopt the parliamentary system, we might reduce the concentration of power in a few hands and the win-at-all-costs mentality.
Ugo Egbujo
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