Reporting News and opinions
the Doctrine of Necessity’s cheeky cousin: the 2008 Supreme Court blockbuster Rotimi Amaechi v. INEC & Ors. If Nigerian politics is a Nollywood script full of plot twists, this case was the director yelling “cut!” and rewriting the ending after the credits rolled.
There is an old legal maxim that justice must not only be done, but must also be seen to be done. Somewhere between Osadebe Avenue and King’s Square, however, that venerable principle was evidently fed into a shredder, doused in kerosene, and traded for prime-time television ratings.
If you are an African policymaker/technocrat/leader who has been following the World Bank’s development advice for the last say 30 years, this finding would shock you.
The BBC reviewed results from more than 6,000 polling stations in Rivers State. Its investigation found that the polling-unit figures it could obtain suggested that Obi had won the state by a substantial margin. The BBC also reported that Tinubu’s official declared total was more than 106,000 votes higher than its polling-station tally, while Obi’s official figure was more than 50,000 lower.
Armed with high-resolution scanners, magnifying glasses, and a fresh grievance, politicians comb through the educational credentials of their opponents. They obsess over font kerning, faint seals, and misaligned margins, convinced that somewhere between a crooked signature and an unreadable stamp lies the ultimate prize: getting the Supreme Court to invalidate millions of votes before lunch.
