J G Nkem Onyekpe

JGN Onyekpe

When judges and justices elect to become, or to act as, counsels in an election litigation suit before them, then there is no hope for the nation and its democracy. This is a fundamental problem, because given the underdeveloped level of the nation’s politics and political culture, the final word on who  becomes the president is, today, not the announcement or declaration by the electoral body, but the pronouncement or judgement of the apex court. Therefore, one would have expected that the judiciary would have been patriotically conscious of this role imposed on it by the peculiarities of  Nigeria’s backward political and electoral systems  and the lawlessness, abuse, and impunity built into them and, then, stand courageously and firmly to give hope to the nation by helping to address the roots of the problems. But when it comes to determining whether a declared winner who has already been sworn in as president actually won the presidential election, historically, how many of Nigeria’s judges and justices have been brave, courageous, dispassionate, and impartial in the true and active sense of the words? How many have ever stood on the pedestal of truth and excellence? How many have walked and worked in the light of wisdom and reason? How many have ever stood against amorality? This has been a fundamental problem of the nation’s presidential elections since 1999.

Therefore, the journey of nation-building  is yet to start in Nigeria, hence we cannot properly say “we have a long way to go!”.

This expression is applicable only where and when a nation has realised it is in darkness and has found its way out of the darkness of underdevelopment and now ready and set to begin the  journey towards development. The current 2023 presidential election imbroglio is yet another propitious opportunity for the  judiciary to address the  crisis of an old order incapable of leading the nation out of darkness, yet manipulating the institutions, organs, and agencies of the nation,  so that a new order does not peacefully emerge.

I end with the admonition of Professor Samuel Huntington in his Political Order in Changing Societies (1968):

“The truly helpless society is not one threatened by revolution, but one incapable of it.”. This admonition is pertinent, apropos of the current situation of Nigeria, because as Karl Marx wrote long ago, earlier in the nineteenth century before Huntington, “Revolutions are the locomotives of history”.

Beleaguered Nigeria, its peoples, and citizens are today counting on the judiciary, the nation’s defacto electoral umpire, to midwife a peaceful revolution and save the nation from the avoidable calamitous path of a violent and sanguinary revolutionary explosion. May the opportunity now at the disposal of the judiciary not be squandered by it.

J G Nkem Onyekpe,

University of Lagos, Akoka.