Separate but inter-dependent: The four quarters of Nigeria’s campaign season, By Chidi Anselm Odinkalu

The voting season is brief. It is the season for the security agencies, thugs, and lower-level staff of INEC to make hay. Thereafter, matters shift to the courts for the dispute resolution season, which belongs to the lawyers (mostly Senior Advocates of Nigeria, SANs) and judges. All four seasons are separate but inter-dependent.

The beginning of the campaign season for Nigeria’s presidential election in 1979 was dramatic. Michael Ani, then chairman of the Federal Electoral Commission (FEDECO), ushered in the season by announcing the disqualification of two of the five presidential candidates. Nnamdi Azikiwe of the Nigerian Peoples’ Party (NPP), and Aminu Kano of the People’s Redemption Party (PRP), he said, were disqualified because of irregularities in their tax returns. Both men, Ani continued, “are not fit to run the country.”

While their peers and competitors in the other parties were off campaigning, Nnamdi Azikiwe and Aminu Kano detoured to the courts to determine their eligibility to be on the ballot. The judicial verdict in favour of Azikiwe’s candidacy came down in the penultimate week of July 1979, a mere three weeks to the scheduled vote on 11 August. The decision permitting Aminu Kano to be on the ballot came down on 1 August 1979, with just 10 days to spare.

The uncertainty about whether either candidate would be on the ballot all but doomed the ambitions of Azikiwe and Aminu Kano in 1979. It was the first proof that courts were significant actors in determining the destination of the ultimate political prize in Nigeria.

As Nigeria enters yet another presidential campaign season, the nature of both political campaigns and the judicial role in them has very much evolved since 1979. The digital ecosystem has become a major site and market for political campaigns. For the first time, Artificial Intelligence will be a major factor in the 2026/27 campaign season.

Despite these new and exciting developments, the most significant evolution in political campaigns in Nigeria in the nearly five decades since 1979 is that the judiciary has become both a major public for political campaigns and the ultimate determinant of the destination of political power.

Democracy may be about choices and decisions by citizens in theory. As practised in Nigeria, however, citizens are mostly spectators. They do not decide winners and losers. Nigeria’s judges alone have the final votes. Politicians who do not play to the judicial gallery in Nigeria find that they do not have a snowball’s chance in hell of sniffing a path to office or power.

How so? It used to be that every election cycle comprised two seasons: pre-election and post-election season. In 2007, the Supreme Court effectively up-ended this dichotomy.

In the party primaries to select its candidate ahead of the governorship election in Rivers State in that year, Rotimi Amaechi, the Speaker of the State House of Assembly, emerged winner. However, the party hierarchy in Abuja led by the president, Olusegun Obasanjo, chose to disregard the outcome and substituted him with a defeated aspirant, Celestine Omehia.

On 26 January 2007, Amaechi sued. While his case worked its way up the hierarchy of the courts, the country went to vote. When the vote took place, the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, declared Celestine Omehia of the PDP the winner of the governorship ballot in Rivers State. On 29 May 2007, he took his oath to assume office as the new governor of the State.

Nearly five months later, on 25 October 2007, the Supreme Court decided that the PDP acted unlawfully when they replaced Rotimi Amaechi with an aspirant whom he had defeated in the primaries. Even more consequentially, the court held that when citizens vote in elections, they do not vote for candidates; they vote for parties. Since Amaechi was the rightful candidate of the PDP in the election, the court continued, he was the inheritor of the mandate conferred on Celestine Omehia.

In the immediate term, the court installed as elected a person who was not even on the ballot (admittedly, for reasons not of his own making). But there was an even more far-reaching consequence. The Court collapsed the distinction between pre-election and post-election season. This distinction had served three functions previously.

First, it enabled candidates and the INEC to calibrate the deployment of their assets, budgets, and messaging through the variable contours of the electoral season.

Second, it was understood that pre-election disputes went to the regular courts of the country, and that only election tribunals could decide post-election disputes. This was a very fundamental distinction. A single judge at first instance could decide a pre-election dispute but an election petition tribunal had to be constituted by a minimum of three judges working to very finite timelines.

Third, until the Amaechi case, pre-election disputes were not supposed to determine the votes of the citizens or decide the outcome of the election. If there was a pre-election dispute, it affected the parties and determined the eligibility of the candidates to be on the ballot. By contrast, the post-election season consequences resonated in terms of the outcome of the election. Only duly constituted election petition tribunals could decide that.

The Amaechi case ended the monopoly of election petition tribunals on the capacity to determine the lawfulness of an election outcome.

In 2019, for instance, the Supreme Court decided well after the votes had been cast and counted to retrospectively “waste” the votes credited to the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) and hand victory in Zamfara State to candidates who had clearly been rejected by the people of the state. In 2023, the Court of Appeal did the same thing in Plateau State. It took the Supreme Court to save the state governor by the skin of his political teeth.

Since the Amaechi case in 2007, therefore, the courts have conflated the political season into one prolonged obstacle course ending not in the ballot box but in courtroom theatre. In turn, this has forced politicians to re-calibrate their attitudes to political staffing, financing, and campaigning.

Every serious politician knows now that it is not enough to have their favorite people in both the INEC and the security services; they must also have their intimates in the highest possible echelons of the judiciary.

Judicial appointments have become so serious that, increasingly, they are now abandoned to politicians and their senior judicial clients alone. The politicians know that they need to be represented in the room when the haggling for the dispositive judicial votes are done.

This also means that the political campaign season is effectively perennial. Every politician in office knows they have to make good with the judiciary. Senior politicians seek to out-do one another in sundry donations to judges from cars to houses; hospital bills; and even dollars for overseas school fees for their children.

Everyone knows that the final call on winners and losers will be made in bargains with and by judges. Niger State Governor, Mohammed Bago, holds the record with over 100 vehicles doled out to judicial officers in one sitting. Every State governor is an active competitor in this Olympiad of judicial charity. FCT Minister, Nyesom Wike, takes the prize as Nigeria’s judicial Bob-the-Builder.

It must be more than a coincidence that as INEC flagged off its version of the campaign season at the end of last month, the judiciary in Nigeria was off on its annual vacation. They will be entitled to one more vacation at the end of the year.

In the end, every election cycle in Nigeria is now a never-ending campaign season of four quarters. There is a quarter dedicated to political charity for the judiciary. This can seem perennial. The party-political campaign season interrupts. That season belongs mostly to the parties, the politicians, and godfathers but many judges keep more than a watching brief.

The voting season is brief. It is the season for the security agencies, thugs, and lower-level staff of INEC to make hay. Thereafter, matters shift to the courts for the dispute resolution season, which belongs to the lawyers (mostly Senior Advocates of Nigeria, SANs) and judges. All four seasons are separate but inter-dependent.

Chidi Anselm Odinkalu, a lawyer, teaches at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and can be reached through [email protected].