THE FACTS: Why Nigeria's Supreme Court Removed Ihedioha and Declared Uzodinma Imo Governor

In what has come to many as a rude shock, and to some others as a welcome development, Nigeria's Supreme Court yesterday declared that Governor Emeka Ihedioha of Imo State was not validly elected.

The apex court therefore ordered the nation's electoral umpire, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) to immediately withdraw the certificate of return it earlier issued to Ihedioha last year.

The judgment was unanimous from the 7-man panel of the apex court headed by the Chief Justice of Nigeria, Tanko Muhammad, and was read by Justice Kudirat Kekere-Ekun at about 6:20pm yesterday after an 8-hour-long sitting.

They declared that Senator Hope Uzodinma of Nigeria's ruling party, the All Progressives Congress (APC) scored the highest votes cast in the March 09, 2019 election, and is the validly elected governor of the state. Hence, they also ordered INEC to immediately issue a certificate of return to Uzodinma, and that he be immediately sworn-in as the executive governor of Imo state.

According to election results earlier declared on March 11, 2019 by INEC in the Imo governorship elections,
PDP's Emeka Ihedioha scored 273,404 votes,
AA's Uche Nwosu scored 190,364 votes,
APGA's Ifeanyi Ararume scored 114,676 votes,
APC's Hope Uzodinma scored 96,458 votes,
YPP's Ikedi Ohakim scored 527 votes, among other contestants. Consequently, Ihedioha was declared by INEC as the winner of the elections and returned duly elected governor.

However, in arriving at the above final results, INEC had canceled the election results in 388 out of the 3,677 polling units in the state. It said that over-voting had occurred in those places and hence excluded their results in the final vote count. The APC and its candidate, Mr Uzodinma reportedly had a massive number of votes in those 388 polling units.

Earlier, Uzodinma had unsuccessfully challenged the declaration of Ihedioha as the winner of the governorship election at the Imo State Election Petitions Tribunal. He presented the excluded results before the tribunal through one of his witnesses who is a policeman, and asked the tribunal to declare him governor instead of Ihedioha. But the tribunal had refused the results presented before it because according to the panel, they were not presented by the right person.

Yesterday, the Supreme Court's 7-man panel unanimously declared that those results were wrongfully excluded by INEC. It then proceeded to add the previously excluded results to the final results declared by INEC. Based upon this, APC's Uzodinma's number of votes scored overtook those of PDP's Ihedioha. It was based upon this that the apex court declared Senator Uzodinma as the validly elected governor of Imo state.

The Supreme Court also agrees that Uzodinma's total votes have the required spread across the state as prescribed by the constitution.

It is worthy of note that the 388 polling units that have now decided the governorship election represent only about 10.55% of the total number of polling units within the state. This raises questions as to whether or not there was indeed over-voting in those areas as claimed by the INEC.

I think that a better course of action would have been for the apex court to have looked into INEC's claim about over-voting and made a ruling on that first. Determining the verity of that claim would have been crucial in deciding whether or not the election was indeed flawed, whether Ihedioha or Uzodinma was rightly duly elected, or whether ordering a rerun election would have been the best course of action.



Chukwubuikem Paul Anunaso is a civil/structural engineer who is keen about democracy and good governance. He is the editor of The Paul Anunaso Blog and can be reached at anunaso.cp@gmail.com