LAST week Thursday, October 26, 2023, marked the formal end of our 2023 general elections. Though many election petition tribunals are still at work at the state level and in respect of some National and State Assembly cases, the confirmation of President Bola Tinubu’s victory by a unanimous decision of the Supreme Court ended the transitional process.

In summary, both the Appeal Court (the originating point of the Presidential Election Petition Tribunal, PEPT) and the Supreme Court, the final arbiter, declared that the petitions brought against Tinubu’s victory by Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, Peter Obi of the Labour Party, LP, and Chichi Ojei of the Allied Peoples Movement, APM, lacked merit.

Nigerians did not expect too much from the Judiciary because the highest courts of the land have never upturned the declared victory of any sitting president. Though the late President Umaru Yar’Adua had in 2007 admitted that his victory was flawed, the Supreme Court still ruled that the opposition candidates failed to prove their cases.

The 2023 general elections, especially the presidential,  went down as one of the most controversial in Nigeria’s history, not because of the result it produced or any offence committed by the winner. The Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, headed by Professor Mahmood Yakubu, played a fast one on Nigerians. After raising their hopes that a fool-proof, electronic transmission of the results would be conducted in real time, INEC suddenly abandoned the process and went back to manual collation. They claimed their system suffered a “glitch” which only affected the presidential election while National Assembly results went through, largely successfully.

We commend the opposition parties and their presidential candidates, especially Atiku Abubakar and Peter Obi, for their patriotic and peaceful comportment throughout their quest for elusive justice. They stretched Mahmood Yakubu’s INEC, the Judiciary and even the declared winner, Tinubu, to the limit, and exposed the many problems waiting to be fixed to get our democracy back on track.We also congratulate Tinubu for his foresight, resilience, political sagacity and staying power displayed over 17 years of relentless pursuits which eventually put him in the presidential chair. We hope he will bring out the same political and executive capacities to fix our country, especially its economy and security. With nothing to distract him now, he has no further excuse for failure.

Though he has never admitted that anything was wrong with the election that brought him to power, we are convinced that President Tinubu will need to take a moment to reflect on the imperative to reform our electoral processes and restore power to the people. 

It is time to reform INEC and our electoral laws, procedures and restore power to the people.