“There shall be for the Federation a President.”

– Section 130 (1) of the Constitution of Ni­geria

It is the general intendment of both the letter and spirit of the Nigerian consti­tution that there shall always be a Pres­ident in office. The end of the tenure of one President automatically marks the commencement of the tenure of another under a seamless succession arrangement clearly spelt out in the Constitution. Under the prevailing order, ascension to the office of President is only legitimate after a democratic election process in which the candidate with the highest votes plus the requisite geograph­ic spread is deemed elected as President.

It is to avoid the existence of a vacu­um in the event of certain developments such as death, physical disappearance, im­peachment and resignation that the same document makes adequate provisions for a prompt and orderly succession from one President to another. Under the present constitutional regime which is aptly ossi­fied by precedents already set by previous presidential successions, namely, President Obasanjo to President Yar’ Adua, President Jonathan to President Buhari, the hando­ver day is May 29th of the year of election in which a winner emerged, and the subse­quent transfer of power is instantaneous, the out-going president steps down, the newly elected one steps in a highly choregraphed constitutional ritual.

It is therefore preposterous that some peo­ple are suddenly manufacturing outlandish propositions suggesting that the expected handover date could be postponed, delayed, or otherwise interfered with. Trying to dis­till these cacophonous contentions has been quite difficult because the whole “sound and fury” naysaying orchestral seems to revolve around an obviously failed expectation about the outcome of the last presidential election in which the candidate of the APC, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, emerged as the winner.

The single thread running through these anti-inauguration theories is that just be­cause people are vexatiously denying or dis­puting the results of an election, the hand­ing over ceremonies must be suspended until the courts finally resolve the pending peti­tions. They contend that it is only the courts that can decide who truly wins an election. This extravagant contention is stemming from individuals who are fraudulently mak­ing claims to non-existent expertise in the rarefied field of Constitutional Law. There modus operandi is not only ridiculous and offensive against the spirit and letter of the constitutional text which purposely intends a peaceful and orderly transfer of power in the polity, it also manifests a pattern of un­fairly concentrated attacks on the palladium of Nigeria’s democratic constitutionalism.

We have seen bizarre instances in which even non-lawyers recklessly assume some quackery “authority” in constitutional jurisprudence, audaciously interpreting the document in their own perverted, if not juristically blinded, ways. Constitutional Law is a complex specialist turf within the field of law. It demands rigorous and in-depth multi-disciplinary erudition and it is not a commonplace forensic mechanism for polit­ical rascality or for spewing out arcane and impracticable governance prescriptions in the media.

While it is within anyone’s right to dis­pute an election result, it is however not right to cook up a narrative indicating extraor­dinary impropriety where there was none or deliberately overstating factual incidents in furtherance of a hoax. Selectively citing convenient sections of the Constitution, usually out of context, to buttress crooked partisan narratives have become the fad of every Dick and Harry blindly resisting the election results. Every true constitutional law practitioner knows that as an organic document, its proper interpretation must be a holistic process intended to bring its original and contemporary intentions into relevance, the document being a timeless in­strument for social engineering instead of the ongoing unprofessionally cherry-picking of inappropriate portions of the Constitu­tion to buttress bogus partisan claims.

Purposefully, both the design and phi­losophy of the Constitution, elections are supposed to be won and lost at the polls and never inside the courtrooms. There is some­thing fundamentally wrong in an environ­ment where people are made to believe that the will of the voters remains tentative until a court of law confirms it. This extravagant involvement of the Judiciary in politically charged election matters is an ill-wind that will blow no one, especially the Judiciary itself, any good. I have severally warned on this page that the “over-judicialization” of the electoral process is a direct affront on Electoral Justice which conceptually posits that it is only the electorate that can confer legitimacy on a candidate in any genuine democratic election.

The rabid election denialism that Donald Trump shamelessly promoted in America and exported elsewhere has now landed our shores with the unfortunate devastat­ing effect on the political process especially in view of the obvious weaknesses of our national institutions of which the Judiciary is a key part. Those saying that it is the court alone that decides who wins democratically conducted elections should ask themselves why US courts recently bluntly refused to entertain the virulent election suits that were filed by the garrulous sore loser, Don­ald Trump in 2019/20?

Trump approached more than 60 differ­ent courts in his bid to overturn the election result in favor of Joe Biden but none of the judges felt compelled enough to accept his bogus petitions even as a sitting President. The US courts acted the way they did be­cause they recognised the inherent danger in politicians drumming up and deliberately exaggerating election fraud claims just to give democracy a bad name and thereafter seek to undermine the respectability and honor of the otherwise a-political judges. It is either we are not prepared for electoral democracy or that we are only prepared to accept election results that meet our bigoted partisan expectations. The way we are going, it will be difficult to conduct elections in Ni­geria in the future without unnecessary vex­atious litigations and contrived acrimonies or even bloodshed.

The fact that people expect their candi­dates to win election at all costs does not transform such baseless expectations into le­gal reality. For example, many people expect­ed the APC to lose the presidential election because of the woeful performances of the Buhari administration; no doubt, the party did not have a good chance of winning the election but when you consider the fact that the opposition recklessly divided themselves into separate and smaller and inconsequen­tial factions, it becomes obvious why the re­sult went the way it did.

It is that “prophesied expectation”, more like an article of faith, that has led some people into the ongoing ironclad denialism. After God allegedly assured some candidates that they were going to win the election, it is easy to understand the lingering disbelief of their loss, but it would be unfair to blame the winner for taking a legitimate advantage of the ego-driven divisions in the opposition camp. It is even laughable that opposition pol­iticians who did not see the wisdom in unit­ing to fight the election together are now in locked steps opposing the results in the court.

The bizarre call for delays in the inaugu­ration of the president-elect as President on the appointed day is akin to the biblical ma­ternity dispute in which two women brought before King Solomon’s court. The fraudulent claimant was okay with the splitting of the baby into two equal halves just because it is physically possible to do so while the legiti­mate mother rejected the resulting horror. That is exactly the kind of argument of those presently clamoring for a delay or outright stoppage of the presidential inauguration fixed for May 29th. Just because something is theorised as possible does not necessarily mean that it is probable or even practically desirable; in the extant situation, the Consti­tution clearly abhors any governing vacuum.

Judicially delaying a scheduled constitu­tional process is not only obstructing democ­racy it is also calling for anarchy because those who do not believe in the electoral pro­cess in which the person with the highest votes wins would have achieved their evil machination. We have passed this slippery road before. It led to the infamous June 12 election annulment which subsequently threw Nigeria into chaos and set her back developmentally by decades. That is why to­day’s vociferous obstructionists should be timeously stopped in their tracks.