As I pointed out in my April 20, 2019 column titled “Atiku’s Citizenship and Buhari’s Illiterate Lawyers,” Buhari assembled unbelievably ignorant and rhetorically impotent lawyers to defend him, not only because he loves to mirror his trademark incompetence in everything he does, but also because he knew that there was nothing at stake for him in the petition since the tribunal’s ruling was a foregone conclusion, as I pointed in a social media post titled “Why Atiku Isn’t Coming” a day before the tribunal’s verdict.
The tribunal judges, who were supposed to be neutral arbiters, were infinitely more effective defenders of Buhari’s stolen mandate than his own lawyers were.
Imagine the severity of ignorance it must take for any Nigerian to make the case that someone born in the former British Northern Cameroon (and whose immediate ancestral provenance is traceable to the nucleus of the defunct Sokoto Caliphate) is not a Nigerian citizen even when the constitution explicitly confers citizenship on people that were born in British Northern Cameroon.
Even the unambiguously partisan tribunal chose to not touch such sophomoric legal and constitutional illiteracy with a barge pole. It dismissed it. That says a lot. Nevertheless, there are many fundamental respects in which the tribunal’s ruling has wounded the very soul of Nigeria.
When (not “if” because this is all prearranged) the tribunal’s verdict is upheld by the Supreme Court, it would mean that barefaced electoral fraud perpetrated through the arbitrary manufacture of fanciful figures for an incumbent office holder, intimidation of voters with the aid of the nation’s security apparatuses, and all the other unmentionably unconscionable electoral malfeasance Buhari perpetrated to hold on to power are now entirely legitimate.
The implications of this are many and varied.
For one, it has destroyed the vaguest vestige of hope that democracy will grow and thrive in Nigeria. It will inaugurate unexampled voter apathy in future since voting no longer matters. Buhari’s predecessors also did rig elections, to be sure, but they rigged elections that they would have handily won because they had no opposition.
Buhari was the serial opponent of his predecessors, but until 2015, he never even campaigned for votes outside the Hausa phone Muslim North (he routinely ignored even predominantly Muslim Kwara and Kogi states and, of course, snubbed the entire Christian North), so he couldn’t haveconceivably won a national election with such an insular focus.
Even Nasir El-Rufai described Buhari in an October 4, 2010 article titled “Buhari Should Stick To Facts”as “perpetually unelectable because [of] his record as military head of state and [his]insensitivity to Nigeria’s diversity and his parochial focus.”
Perhaps the most distressing implication of the tribunal’s ruling is that education and even a pretense to honesty will no longer matter.
Buhari’s claim to possessing a school certificate is supported only by an affidavit in his INEC forms, which turned out to be false. That’s a prima facie case of perjury.
He could very well have truly sat for his school certificate exam and received proof of this. But that is not the issue. He consistently swore under oath that his school certificate was in the custody of the Nigerian military. It has now come to light that this is entirely false. The tribunal said this lie is immaterial.