Yar’Adua’s legal victory

The much awaited judgment of the Presidential Election Petition Tribunal was delivered on Tuesday, February 26. Expectedly, the tribunal conferred legitimacy on the government of Umaru Musa Yar’Adua. The tribunal upheld the April 21, 2007, election that brought Yar’Adua to power by throwing out the petitions of the All Nigeria Peoples Party’s presidential candidate, General Muhammadu Buhari and his opposite number in the Action Congress (AC), Alhaji Atiku Abubakar.

The decision of the Presidential Election Petition Tribunal put to a head the long-drawn battle that pitted Buhari and Atiku against the winner of the 2007 election, President Yar’Adua. The battle to overturn the electoral victory of Yar’Adua began last year, immediately after Yar’Adua was declared the winner by Professor Maurice Iwu’s Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC). Both Buhari and Atiku, a former vice-president in the cabinet of Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, had headed straight to the election petition tribunal to challenge the victory, claiming that the conduct of the election was anything but free and fair. Alhaji Atiku, especially, wanted Yar’Adua’s victory at the polls quashed because, as he claimed, he was unfairly excluded from the election.

But all that is now history. Yar’Adua has claimed another landslide victory over his opponents. The petitioners lost on all the areas they sought relief from the tribunal. In fact, the tone, tenor and substance of the judgment portrayed the petitioners as unserious, suggesting that they should never have embarked on such a legal journey in the first instance.

The outcome of the judgment would have come as a surprise only to the petitioners. Because of some hard facts beyond even the confines of legal interpretations and manipulations, it is unlikely that the judiciary would have allowed itself to be used to cause a dislocation to the country’s weak democratic joints. Giving the government of Yar’Adua the boot by the tribunal would have created more than a crisis; it would have stretched the thin thread of the nation’s democracy to the limits. But there was no way that both Buhari and Atiku would have claimed legal victory when they could not even muster enough power to challenge the Peoples Democratic Party’s presidential standard-bearer at the April 2007 polls.

The battle that was finally determined on Tuesday (that is if the petitioners do not file an appeal) was lost by the two petitioners long before the April elections. The two politicians had failed abysmally to confront the monstrous PDP political machinery with the steely offensive that should have given them victory. While the PDP was roller-coasting across the country, the political parties whose standards the two politicians bore were enmeshed in internal acrimony. When that was resolved, they chose to direct their attacks on the then president, Chief Obasanjo, instead of trading on their political goodwill and appealing to the good senses of the electorate.

But, again, all that is now history. Yar’Adua and by extension the PDP have shown that good organisation has its own reward. One factor that the PDP has over the other parties is organisation. Regardless of the vicious and dangerous games opposition political parties usually accuse the party of playing, the fact remains it has held tenaciously to its strongholds while overrunning the political enclaves of the opposition groups.

There is, however, a bitter taste to the sweetness of Yar’Adua’s legal victory and this is not unrelated to the future of democracy in Nigeria. As things stand today, the nation may have continued its journey to a ruinous destination. Personally, as much as I appreciate Yar’Adua’s legal triumph, there is a rather tragic twist to the victory, especially as it relates to Nigeria and its fledgling democracy. And this tragic twist has more to do with the unchecked journey to the unknown with the constitutional legitimacy it has given to electoral irregularities. If there is one issue that all contestants in the last elections agreed on, it is to the fact that the elections were fraught with irregularities. President Yar’Adua, who has never hidden his abhorrence for falsehood, accepted the fact of a grossly manipulated election. In one instance of his truthfulness, the president told the nation that the election that brought him to power was rigged.

The president’s declaration was more than a mere political statement meant to shore up popularity votes; it was an admission of truth by a man who understood the worth of conscience. But the judgment which granted relief to Yar’Adua, figuratively, whitewashed a dirty election. It made no mention of the fact that malpractices in elections distort the beauty of democracy, that they bring people with questionable character into governance. The tribunal closed its eyes to the fact that wrong is wrong. When something is wrong it cannot be right unless attempts are made at restitution. Therefore, as far as the tribunal was concerned nothing was wrong with the election that Yar’Adua would have won without the arm-twisting tactics of the PDP powerbrokers.

The justices of the presidential election petition tribunal drew copious legal references from the contestable Obasanjo-Buhari 2003 judgment. The implication of this is that such contestable legal references in which illegitimacy got legal whitewash will continue to be used to determine the fate of legitimacy and legality. Invariably, the path of legitimacy will be lost to political brigandage in the future, as ruinous legal references become laws of the land. Nigeria, ultimately, will be the loser.

So, are we going to continue with this ritual of seeking the court’s power to confer legitimacy on presidential election winners every four years? Are we ever going to conduct elections, like the June 12, 1993 presidential election, that will be worldwidely adjudged as free and fair?

There is something added to the Yar’Adua victory dance; it is an orgiastic interpretation to what should have been a somber, regal movement.

REACTION

It is saddening that almost all the past and present Nigerian leaders have “controversy” as their middle names. And as for Ahmadu “Controversy” Ali, how I wish he gives Nigeria and Nigerians the needed breathing space, for no man can tame the tongue. It is a restless evil full of deadly poison.

- Ajuwon Olu’ Johnson, Ibadan.