Issues in The Presidential Election Tribunal Judgment – TheNigerialawyer

President Buhari should sign the amended Electoral Act into law
in the interest of democracy

The Presidential Election Tribunal recently delivered its much
awaited judgment. The five-man tribunal, chaired by Justice
Mohammed Garba, unanimously threw out the petitions filed by the
Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and its candidate, Alhaji Atiku
Abubakar, challenging the declaration of President Muhammadu Buhari
as the winner of the 2019 presidential election. While the PDP and
Atiku have signified intention to file appeal at the Supreme Court,
there are hard lessons and far-reaching implications from this
judgment.

By far the most significant is that both the 1999 Constitution
and the Electoral Act 2010 really have to be retooled. A
constitution that in one breath states “…educated up to secondary
school” and in another, talks of “being able to read and write…” in
the schedule of interpretations, creates more problems than it
seeks to solve. Besides, the issue of electronic voting, collation
and transmission of results must also be resolved.

The Nigerian experience with democracy has for long been marred
by a fraudulent electoral system. Ballot stuffing, manipulation of
manually written results, snatching of ballot boxes and compromise
of election officials to falsify results had become more of the
norm than the exception. The crisis of confidence in the Nigerian
electoral system has virtually transferred the onus of determining
outcomes to the judiciary rather than the voters. The 2019 general
election has recorded such huge harvest of cases – over 1200 of
them – lodged with the various tribunals across the country. And to
think that the number would have been higher if the five states
where elections are off season were part of the process.

Sadly, endless post-election litigations and protracted court
processes, appeals and conflicting judgments on election-related
matters have infected the judiciary with the massive corruption
that has become part of the brand identity of Nigerian politics.
The challenge has remained because of the manual nature of voter
identification, balloting and result collation in our electoral
system.With the deployment of technology, the genuine votes of the
electorate will not only be counted under a transparent process,
they would also begin to count. Nigeria cannot afford to lag
behind, especially when many of our citizens have lost confidence
in the extant electoral voting method because of its susceptibility
to manipulation.

Without any doubts, adopting this method will help eliminate
disputes over electoral fraud and thereby obviate the need for
long-drawn litigation. The precedent of the electoral system of
various advanced democracies shows clearly that credible elections
are made possible by the adoption of the best technologies. Yet, by
remaining with the manual electoral system, Nigeria was not being
faithful to its rush for modernisation in other spheres of life. In
a country whose banking system is easily one of the most
technologically savvy in the world, it is anachronistic that the
electoral system that empowers the ruling class should remain mired
in antiquity.
President Buhari has to worry about the legacy he is leaving behind
for the sustenance of democracy. The president has to sign the
Electoral Act Amendment into law so that the Independent National
Electoral Commission (INEC) can use the off season elections to
perfect it before the 2023 general election. If the version already
passed cannot stand the test of time as the president once
complained, the National Assembly needs to urgently return to the
drawing board on the matter and use the opportunity offered by the
fresh window to do a more thorough job, and also provide stiffer
penalties as deterrence against those undermining and derailing the
nation’s democracy. There is a need also to provide more stringent
conditions to discourage frivolous litigations over outcomes of
elections.

Finally, the subsisting Electoral Act removes the onus of proof
of proper conduct of election from INEC. This is wrong. INEC must
take responsibility for the conduct of election and should be
required by law to prove that the election it conducted was free
and fair and complied with extant laws. Transferring this
responsibility to candidates is abdicating responsibility. That’s
how democratic nations and democracies are built.

Culled from Thisday Editorial

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