When adjudicating on election cases, Vice President Yemi Osinbajo warned the judiciary against substituting the decision of the electorate.
The Vice President, speaking at the 53rd Annual Conference of the Nigerian Association of Law Teachers, which was held at Bayero University in Kano under the topic “Democracy, legislation, and electoral process,” emphasized that law should promote rather than detract from the election process.
He referred to the Supreme Court’s ruling in the case of APC versus Marafa, in which the court declared the APC’s primary elections in Zamfara State null and void, effectively enthroning the Peoples Democratic Party in all elected posts in the state.
Osinbajo said, “There is a real issue of whether the courts have not assumed a larger duty in election cases than was constitutionally intended. In other words, are our courts going beyond the constitutional expectation in election cases?
“It is important to emphasize this because the whole idea of democracy is that it is the people who determine who their leaders will be.
“The law, electoral processes, everything must bow to the will of the people. The appropriate interpretation must always favour the will of the people.
“This means that electoral justice must not be for the candidate alone. Indeed, the principal players, the electorate, must be front and centre of judicial reflection on how to determine electoral cases.
“The judiciary must be wary of substituting their will for the will of the electorates.
“They must seek every interpretation that leaves the people with the choice of who they prefer,” he added.
Osinbajo tasked law professors with ensuring that the caliber of legal journals was maintained in order to assist even judges in making better-informed judgements.
“The criticism of decisions of our courts used to be standard. We had in our law journals critiques of several judgments of courts.
“Our courts will usually quote those journals if a judge wanted to give a dissenting opinion or perhaps felt the need to support his views with some scholarly interventions; they refer to our law journals.
“We must not allow the situation where our legal journals disappear completely,” he said.
Governor Abdullahi Umar Ganduje of Kano State, for his part, said the country needs a strong institution for long-term democracy, and he urged law professors to help come up with recommendations for reforms needed to establish long-term democracy in Nigeria.
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