Former president of Centre for Committee of Defence of Human Rights (CDHR), Malachy Ugwumadu has said that the electorate should decide the leadership recruitment at the polling booths and not at the courts.
Ugwumadu stated this on Arise TV yesterday when he gave reasons why the call for electoral and judicial reforms should be supported ahead of the 2027 general elections.
He said, “Leadership recruitment process must be a function of the direct participation of the electorate. That is what is known as adult suffrage. In some cases, universal adult suffrage. Where at any time, the direct participation in the process of the leadership recruitment process is circumvented either by the process of litigation, which is a wonderful way of resolving human disputes and conflicts, or electoral malpractices.
“At that point, we’re no longer talking of democracy in the true philosophical sense because democracy focuses on the people. So when the people are excluded either by electoral malpractices or even some judicial interventions, then you’re already having problems.
“It’s by far more important that we redirect or re-engineer the process by which we guarantee that leadership emerges through electorate intervention, electorate participation.
“So that whereas we have at the moment an overbearing judicialisation of the process, the aim, the target, and goal should be to have the electorate decide leadership at the polling booths and not in the courts. If we put that aside, we go to the next question about where, however, disputation arises, which is very natural, very common, known as election contestation. Election itself is a contest.”
Ugwumadu added, “Where disputation arises, it’s in the best interest of the electorate of Nigeria as a state, given the trajectory that we have all monitored, that the burden of proof of what had happened, particularly in relation to the victory secured by candidates, should be the burden of the election body and not the other way round, which is what we have at the moment. Where losers, well, losers in parentheses, who probably were rigged out of the process, intimidated out of the process, and made to suffer one infraction or the other. Now with the additional burden of proving wrongly or proving rightly what the election management board did or didn’t do, that is double jeopardy as I see it.”
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