While in my comment of last week, I reasoned that the Anambra political debacle represents the extent to which Nigeria's public leadership factory has been burnt down by political arsonists and terrorists, what I want to do today is point out how the Nigerian judiciary has acted in a way that will most likely keep our public leadership factory burning long into the future!
To this end, I need to briefly revisit the Supreme Court judgment in favour of Peter Obi. After the 2003 governorship election in Nigeria, INEC declared Chris Ngige of PDP the governor-elect of Anambra State, and he was subsequently sworn into office. However, his election was challenged by Peter Obi who was the candidate of APGA. After spending three out of four years, the Appeal Court nullified Ngige's election and declared Obi the rightful winner. Feeling robbed of the better part of his term, Obi approached the Supreme Court which decided that he was entitled to a full term of four years.
While the Supreme Court obviously counted the period that Ngige was in office as if it was a time when Anambra either made no progress or suffered severe governance disabilities, the facts on the ground seemed to question the wisdom of its judgment because during the three years he served as governor, Ngige legally governed the state, attended all council of state meetings, collected various amounts of internally-generated revenue, etc. I stand to be corrected by legal experts, but until I'm so corrected, I believe that the problem was that Ngige was not properly elected, and it was not that he did not properly govern Anambra!
Since neither the 1999 Nigerian constitution nor our current Electoral Act has any express or implied provision(s) for staggered elections, and in view of the fact that the constitution specifies a term of four years for anyone elected to the office of state governor, one does not need to be a Professor Itse Sagay or Ben Nwabueze to figure out that all adjudication and judicial pronouncements on governorship election disputes must be situated within the ambit of the unalterable term of four years. This is to avoid making extra-constitutional decisions which invariably give rise to actions that are unconstitutional, even though judicially sanctioned. The need for all levels of the judiciary to act within the term limit of four years specified in the constitution is especially important because once the specified term limit is taken for granted, the result is bound to be both unconstitutional elongation of governors' term and staggered elections as we are already witnessing since our Supreme Court decided that Obi was entitled to a full term of four years.
While in the beginning, it was Ngige and Obi who were the pioneer beneficiaries of the term elongation, we now have at least three other states where sitting governors who constitutionally should spend only four years in office are allowed to enjoy one or two years because the courts ordered re-run governorship elections which they won, and so started fresh four-year terms courtesy of the Peter Obi Supreme Court judgment!
What is the impact of staggered elections on the electoral strategy of political parties? What are the cost implications of staggered elections for INEC and the political parties? What are the long-term political implications of staggered elections? First, this judgment has created a fundamental problem which can only be solved by either the Supreme Court reversing itself or constitutional amendment. This is the real problem-the Supreme Court seems most unlikely to contemplate reversing itself and the current office-holders (especially those of the ruling party) who are the biggest beneficiaries of term elongation cannot be expected to be committed to constitutional amendment-our politicians are much smarter than we think!
Without a doubt, the ruling party is the biggest beneficiary of staggered elections. How? As it stands, the Peter Obi Supreme Court judgment remains the precedent that the various levels of the Nigerian judiciary use to decide election cases, but its impact on the electoral strategy of political parties is that the ruling party will naturally focus on the strategic goal of engineering re-run election scenarios as the means of systematically increasing the number of states where staggered elections are to be held. This is because the more staggered elections there are, the tougher it will be for opposition parties to cope both financially and logistically, and the easier it will be for the ruling party to mobilise the entire federal might at its disposal toward capturing one or two states at a time!
This has already been proven by the fact that the PDP has not lost any re-run election held so far. I fear that by the Supreme Court judgment in favour of Obi, Nigeria's political future has been judicially awarded to the PDP in a way that puts the country firmly on the road to becoming a one-party state. How else do you explain the number of incumbent governors decamping to the PDP? As they say, 'Nigeria is now PDP's to lose'-courtesy of the Supreme Court. Time will tell.
