Thoughts & lessons from the Presidential Tribunal verdict

Yesterday was another decisive, epochal day when Nigeria transited another critical juncture in its fourth democratic voyage. Not a few feared that the worst may happen. But the day broke normally. 

The streets were scanty as organized labour called off work. Some thought that one was staged. It was hushed tones amongst the banks. Even as they all opened for business, they shut off their doors to customers, rather abruptly by midday.

I guessed they too reasoned something may just give. Politics (election), religion and ethnicity are three issues that can be quite emotive in Nigeria, especially nowadays and it was fatally dreaded that the outcome of the PEPC was going to evoke a lot of passions and violent sentiments. 

After months of waiting and of uncertainty, the PEPC has rendered its judgement.  Without mincing words, today has turned out to be an awful day for Obi and his Labor Party and for Atiku and the PDP.  Not only was Obi’s lawsuit dismissed with hefty cost, his challenge to the presidency was severely repudiated and reprimanded by the five justices for its frivolity, lack of merit and abuse of the judicial process.  

While President Tinubu has a cause to celebrate his second victory, he and his team have a lot of work to do to restore the citizens’ confidence and faith in the democratic experiment and the electoral process.

The abysmal voters turn-out during the last election were due, in large measure, to the precipitous decline in the Nigerian standard of living and the lack of the dividends of democracy. These are also pointers to a democracy that has not met the expectations of the citizenry. 

The implication is that President Tinubu must not pop out the champagne bottle yet, but he and his team must go to work round the clock, for the next four years to restore the faith of Nigerians in the democratic process.  The stakes couldn’t be higher with the upsurge in military coups in the West African sub-region. 

Now that the court has affirmed that President Tinubu was elected fair and square, he must get busy with delivering for the electorate. Without a doubt, his oil subsidy removal and the forex policies have imposed additional hardship on the citizens, the president and his team are sending the clear message that they are committed to delivering the goods for Nigerians. 

Now let’s address the PEPC’s verdict and the lessons it sends to the Nigerian political class.  One of the hallmarks of democracy is for the loser to accept the choice of the electorate, no matter how unpalatable it might be.  

While it is the inalienable right of losers in any election to seek redress through the courts, we must put an end to the proclivity of Nigerian politicians not to accept electoral defeat but instead to seek to substitute the mandate of the electorate with the courts.  

In an adversarial court system under which we operate, it is the responsibility and burden of the litigants challenging the declared electoral results, to prove by the preponderance of evidence that the electoral process was so flawed that it denied them victory. 

Going by the pronouncement of the Judges at the PEPC, the Labor Party and the PDP failed substantially in meeting that high bar.  The court therefore had no choice than to throw out their law suits. Any other insinuation only does damage to our judicial and electoral systems.

The Nigerian election tribunal should begin to impose hefty cost on litigants to reduce the abuse and waste of the court’s precious time and resources on frivolous electoral law suits.  The PEPC has started that process with the fine imposed on the Labor Party and the PDP.  The cost needs to be raised higher as a deterrent to politicians wasting the court’s time through the demand for frivolous intervention. Nigerian politicians must understand that there are no perfect elections anywhere in the world.  

Finally, we do a disservice to our judicial system when we denigrate it because its verdict does not compute with our partisan position. In the next few days and weeks, we can expect supporters of the losing candidates to threaten the justices who severely reprimanded them for their frivolous and meritless law suit that turned out to be a fishing expedition in search of evidence.  

With the hefty cost imposed on the Obi’s case, and the harsh repudiation of his case by the Presidential election petition court, it is obvious that all the legs have completely fallen off of the wobbly three-legged stool on which his suit stood. 

It would be an abuse of court process to waste the Supreme Court’s time and resources on a doomed appeal.  Of course, it is prerogative a vexed candidate to waste their time and resources.  It is also the prerogative of the supreme court to impose additional cost on them if they choose to pursue a fatally flawed and doomed law suit.

Regarding the particular case of Mr. Peter Obi, who exemplifies the quest of Nd’Igbo to produce a candidate, a president from the South Eastern part of the country, my advice to my Igbo brethren is to throw away the shovel and stop digging. They need to start the long and arduous process of building a redemptive bridge back to the mainstream of Nigerian politics.  

All is not lost but they must get to work immediately by quickly abandoning the Obi’s presidential ship to cast their nets further into the sea.  I also respectfully admonish them to quit doing more damage by their vitriol and offensive rhetoric now that the court has rendered its judgement.

Such decision would be a great first step in that process of reconciliation and healing.  They must take a page out of Tinubu’s political playbook.  After decades of Yoruba playing tribal and oppositional politics under Great Awo’s AG and UPN political parties, Tinubu changed course. 

He got a lot of flak and faced massive opprobrium from his kin who regarded him as a traitor for not supporting the misguided and myopic Oodua Nation movement. 

Our Igbo brethren need their over version of Tinubu who has a track record of being detribalized and who has the political capital to bridge the gulf and build a bridge across the Nigerian ethnicized politics. 

Tinubu entered into what many pundits described as the union of the incompatible with his political romance with former President Muhammadu Buhari.  Our Igbo brethren must learn that tribal politics anchored on exploiting Nigeria religious divide is a loser any and every day.  I pray that they heed my brotherly advice. 

Our Igbo brethren have a right to aspire to the highest office in the land and it would be a great loss and very destabilizing to the polity if they are totally alienated politically. But they must trace and crawl their way back from the political abyss into which an ethnic based politics has placed them.