Founder, Nigeria Election Petition Organisation and Lawyer, Ameze Belo-Osagie has identified qualification disputes as the biggest source of successful election petitions in Nigeria, saying documentary evidence makes such cases easier to prove.
Speaking during an interview with ARISE NEWS on Sunday, she explained that herresearch, based on more than 3,300 election tribunal judgments spanning more than two decades and over 800 interviews across 17 states, also found a sharp rise in election petition judgments between 2019 and 2023.
“And qualification is actually the most popular category in terms of successes in the data set. And I think that’s in part because it’s the easiest to prove.”
Osagie, a Knight-Hennessy scholar whose research focuses on electoral malpractice and the role of the courts. “You can come with, you know, paper record-based evidence, such as evidence that educational certificates have been forged or that someone has a criminal conviction, and make your case very easily.”
She said other categories of electoral disputes face greater evidential difficulties because challengers must meet the burden of proof required by the courts. “But for other issues like, you know, vote buying or electoral violence, it’s much more difficult to assemble the right to meet the burden of proof that the court requires.”
Osagie said the number of election petition judgments also increased significantly between the 2019 and 2023 election cycles, rising from about 543 to 943. “Our data shows an increase from about 543 judgments to 943 between 2019 and 2023.”
She said candidates pursue election litigation for different reasons, including dissatisfaction with the electoral process, efforts to highlight flaws and the desire to maintain political relevance.
“You hear political candidates saying everything from, you know, wanting to maintain the momentum of the campaign if they’re going to run again, to being genuinely frustrated with how the process went and wanting to use the courts as an opportunity to highlight errors and flaws that INEC could change or improve in the process.”
Osagie said one of the motivations behind her research was to make Nigeria’s court system easier for ordinary citizens to understand, describing it as difficult to access and interpret.
“The court system in Nigeria is a little bit like a black box.”
She said Nigerians often see headlines announcing court decisions without having access to the reasoning and evidence behind those decisions. “We may sometimes see headlines that describe the result of what happened, but often people don’t get the data or explanation they need to really understand the rationale.”
Osagie said election litigation should serve as a means of establishing facts about what happened during an election, even when a court does not change the declared winner. “The reason why we go to court, in theory, to use the popular phrase, is that regardless of who wins or loses, the court process is an engine of fact-finding.”
She said the value of litigation is reduced when cases are resolved through technicalities rather than detailed examination of the evidence.
“But if the court process doesn’t really allow for that thorough analysis and investigation of evidence, and instead resolves a lot of cases on the basis of technicalities, then a lot of the benefits of litigation are not going to be fully brought out.”
Osagie revealed that the new Electoral Act has made a major change by removing qualification disputes as a ground for post-election tribunal challenges. “For the first time in Nigeria’s democratic history, the courts have removed qualification disputes as a basis for going into the post-election tribunal.”
She cited the case involving former Bayelsa governor-elect David Lyon, whose election victory was overturned after his running mate was found not to have the required educational qualifications. “That is no longer a basis to go into a post-election tribunal.”
Osagie said the new law also provides financial penalties for candidates and lawyers who attempt to raise qualification issues through post-election proceedings. “And not only did they remove it from the Act, they’ve also now introduced direct financial penalties, both for the candidate and even for the lawyers who may try to bring up the issue.”
She said the constitutional validity of the change remains under challenge in court. “There are constitutional challenges to the removal of this section that are ongoing in the courts.”
Osagie also identified the treatment of electronic evidence as one of the most important and troubling trends in Nigerian election litigation. “I think the trend that I have found very interesting, though also a bit troubling, is looking at how the courts have resolved cases that involve electronic evidence.”
She said technologies such as BVAS should make some electoral claims easier to establish, particularly allegations of overvoting. “The BIVAS system should make this really easy to prove in court because then you just bring the BIVAS report that shows the number of accredited voters, you bring the voter’s register, who was registered to vote, and you bring the number of votes.”
She underscored some cases involving electronic evidence have failed because of what she described as courts misinterpreting or over-interpreting a Supreme Court precedent concerning BVAS machines. “But we see a lot of these cases failing in the courts, in part because a lot of courts are, in my view, sort of misinterpreting or over-interpreting a Supreme Court precedent that required challengers to bring not just the BIVAS report, but the actual physical BIVAS machines themselves into the courtroom.”
Looking ahead to the 2027 elections, Osagie said disputes before elections are likely to become particularly important. “So certainly I think the big trends to look out for in this 2027 cycle are actually a lot to do with pre-election litigation rather than post-election litigation.”
She pointed to ongoing disputes involving opposition parties, saying such cases can determine who appears on the ballot before voters even cast their votes. “That is very critical because it decides not just the output of the election, but even the inputs. Who is going to get to appear on the ballot and who has the right to decide?”
Osagie also highlighted tougher criminal penalties introduced for INEC officials involved in electoral malpractice. “The other major trend that I’m particularly interested in is that the new electoral act introduced far stiffer criminal penalties on INEC officials for being involved in kind of malpractice or corrupt process during the course of the election.”
She said previous laws have often imposed penalties without producing corresponding convictions. “Historically, we’ve seen that penalties entered into the act are not always converted into convictions.”
Osagie said greater access to election information should be central to electoral reform, particularly through stronger disclosure requirements by INEC. “Everything that I think results in INEC disclosing more information rather than less to the Nigerian people, so that we can get a better sense of what happened on election day, how these results were reached, the counting etc. I think that will be a positive trend.”
She said transparency should therefore remain a central objective of reforms to Nigeria’s electoral system. “So to me, anything that involves greater transparency, that’s the key set of reforms to push towards.”
Osagie also questioned the structure that makes INEC a respondent in virtually every election petition. “So I think that making INEC the respondent has actually been a mistake that we’ve made in the structure of our system.”
She said INEC can end up defending declared results while also holding the evidence needed to examine challenges to those results. “So, you know, having this situation where the people who are trying to say there’s nothing wrong with the results, everything was fine, are also the people who hold the result sheets, the BVAS machines, et cetera, I think has caused a sort of conflict of interest that sometimes makes litigation less productive.”
Osagie said election litigation can also serve purposes beyond changing the outcome of an election. “Well, the benefits of litigation go beyond just the outcome in court.”
She said some politicians also use litigation to keep their campaigns and political grievances in the public conversation.
“Entering into litigation allows them to stay in the news cycle and kind of within, you know, the sphere of relevance, so to speak.”
Despite the high failure rate of election petitions, Osagie said the number of cases continues to rise. “But one thing I can say is that the rates of failure certainly don’t seem to be discouraging people, because even as failure rates continue to increase from the last cycle, we see more and more cases being filed.”
Osagie said her broader concern is that electoral malpractice should be prevented before elections rather than relying on litigation to punish it afterwards. “I have come to the view that we need to be far more focused on making malpractice difficult to commit before the fact, rather than trying to punish it after.”
She called for reforms that would make it harder for election cases to leave the judicial process without the allegations being fully examined.
“I would certainly say that I would be inclined to push for reforms that make it more difficult for cases to pass out of the legal process without the facts of the allegations being thoroughly investigated, looked into, concluded on, and cases decided on that kind of merit basis.”
She also called for electoral information to be made more accessible and easier for Nigerians to understand, including information about the use of technology in elections. “We have to do better at making information both accessible and understandable in technical areas.”
Osagie said better public understanding of electoral processes would help Nigerians engage more meaningfully with debates over electoral reform. “I think we need to be thoughtful about how to explain to Nigerians step by step what those processes actually involve on the ground, so that they can come to better decisions about what reforms and changes to legislation they want to push for.”
Erizia Rubyjeana
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