Nigeria: The Making Of Supreme Confusion

 By Chidi Odinkalu

Most people do not know or remember that, strictly speaking, there were and remain no official results for Nigeria’s 2007 presidential election. Organised by the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, the vote itself occurred on April 21, 2007 under Maurice Iwu, a professor whose academic discipline coincidentally was alchemy. His main qualification for the position of Chairman of the INEC was that he was close to President Obasanjo’s fixer, Andy Uba.

The results began trickling in the following day. Under Nigeria’s Constitution, a winner of a presidential election must secure the highest number of votes in addition to winning a minimum of 25% of the votes in at least 24 of the 36 states of the federation. What this means is that it is impossible to declare a lawful result in a presidential election until the results in at least 24 states have been computed.

Judicial Mercenarism

By Chidi Odinkalu

In July 1977, the Organisation of African Unity adopted a Convention for the Elimination of Mercenarism in Africa. It offered a definition of a mercenary to include someone who “is motivated to take part in hostilities essentially by the desire for private gain and in fact is promised by or on behalf of a party to the conflict material compensation.” The drafters of the Convention for the Elimination of Mercenarism in Africa probably did not foresee that it would encompass the conduct of judges.

Yet, at the beginning of this month, the immediate past president of the Nigerian Bar Association, NBA, Olumide Akpata, took to the floor of the International Bar Association, IBA, conference in Paris, the capital of France, to invite the association to take an active interest in a new species of judicial subornation in Nigeria which can best be described as judicial mercenarism.