By Oshio Baba.
There was a time in Nigeria when the common man, stripped of power, stripped of connections and stripped of money, could walk into a courtroom with nothing but his truth and walk out believing that truth had been heard. That time is now spoken of in the past tense, not because the law has changed, but because the men and women entrusted to interpret it appear to have changed. The judgment of the Federal High Court in Abuja in the matter between Senator Sunday Karimi and Aro Bamidele has become, for many observers in Kogi West, the latest illustration of that shift, even though the final pronouncement went in favour of Aro.
The facts as they played out in the open are not in serious dispute. Karimi won the APC primary election conducted on May 18, 2026. He was declared the winner. Bamidele, who had withdrawn before the contest, later approached the court asking it to declare him the winner of that same primary and to set aside the party’s subsequent submission of Karimi’s name to INEC as its candidate for the 2027 senatorial election. The APC, Karimi and the Independent National Electoral Commission were listed as defendants. The case was initially instituted at the Lokoja Division of the Federal High Court but was subsequently transferred to the Abuja Division over security concerns, a transfer that in itself told a story about the temperature the dispute had generated in Kogi West and about how a pre-election matter had come to be seen as a security matter.
Justice Salim Ibrahim heard arguments from all sides and reserved judgment for a date to be communicated to the parties. At those proceedings, counsel to the defendants challenged the competence of the suit, arguing that it was statute-barred and should be dismissed. John Olusola Baiyeshea, SAN, who represented Karimi, alongside Dayo Akinlaja, SAN, for INEC, and A. G. Ivom for the APC, urged the court to dismiss the case on the grounds that it was not instituted within the time prescribed by law. Baiyeshea argued that the APC primary was conducted on May 18, while Karimi’s name was submitted to INEC on June 29, but the plaintiff did not file the suit until late July. He relied on Section 285(9) of the 1999 Constitution, as amended, which prescribes a 14-day period for instituting pre-election matters. According to him, the plaintiff failed to commence the action within the constitutionally stipulated period, thereby rendering the suit incompetent. The senior advocate further argued that the date of the event giving rise to a cause of action, rather than the date on which the plaintiff became aware of it, was the relevant consideration in determining whether the suit was filed within time. He maintained that the period should be calculated from the date of the primary election and not from when Bamidele allegedly became aware that Karimi’s name had been submitted to INEC. Baiyeshea also questioned the plaintiff’s compilation of the primary election results, alleging that, in his haste to assemble the figures, Bamidele included part of the votes scored by President Bola Tinubu during the presidential election in the senatorial election results.
This week Wednesday, Justice Ibrahim delivered his judgment and described the petition as lacking merit and affirmed Aro as the duly elected APC candidate for the 2027 Kogi West Senatorial District election.
On the surface, that should have ended the matter. A court affirming the man who won on the field should have restored confidence. Yet what followed the judgment was not celebration. It was a graveyard silence. It was not the silence of agreement. It was the silence of shock, of disbelief, of a people who had followed the proceedings expecting law to follow logic and logic to follow evidence, only to be confronted with a process that seemed to live in a world of its own. In communities across Kogi West, in motor parks, in markets, in lecture halls and in village squares, the conversation did not erupt in relief or even in open anger. It died. And that death of conversation is more damning than any protest, because it signals a loss of faith that goes beyond who won or who lost.
In the old Nigeria, the judiciary earned its title as the hope of the common man because it was predictable in its fidelity to principle. A judge was expected to be bound by the record before him, to decide on the evidence adduced, to give reasons that a layman could follow, and to ensure that his judgment on one page did not contradict his finding on another page. The law, as taught in our faculties and as pronounced by the Supreme Court over decades, is clear that a court cannot grant what was not sought, cannot make a case for a party, cannot substitute speculation for proof, and cannot reward a withdrawal as if it were participation. A withdrawal is a withdrawal. It is a voluntary abandonment of a right. It does not create a right. It does not preserve a right. It extinguishes it for that contest.
That principle is precisely why the public watched this case with such anxiety. How does a man who withdrew before a contest become the beneficiary of a contest he did not contest? How does a suit that appears to have been filed outside the 14 days prescribed by Section 285(9) survive long enough to generate weeks of tension, to be moved from Lokoja to Abuja over security concerns, and to hang over an entire senatorial district like a cloud? How does a compilation of results that allegedly mixed presidential votes with senatorial votes get to the stage of serious judicial consideration? When a judgment contradicts itself, it ceases to be a judgment in the classical sense and becomes an opinion searching for a justification. When a court appears to accept that a candidate withdrew and yet proceeds to treat that withdrawal as inconsequential to the outcome, the ordinary Nigerian is left to wonder whether the law is still a set of rules or has become a set of preferences.
Even more laughable to the watching public was the place given to the argument of INEC on monitoring an election. INEC is the umpire. Its duty is to observe, to record, to report what it saw. Monitoring is not participation. Monitoring does not create a winner. Monitoring does not cure a withdrawal. To elevate a monitoring report above the clear act of withdrawal, above the declaration of a winner, and above the absence of a contest by the other party, is to turn the umpire into a player after the match has ended. The law has never intended INEC to be a kingmaker. Its report is evidence, not verdict. When evidence is allowed to swallow the substantive act it was meant to record, the entire electoral process becomes a theatre where the script is written after the performance.
This is why many now say the judiciary has lost its face in this case, even if the final judgment was clothed in the language of law and justice and even if it affirmed Aro. Law without justice is a shell. Justice without logic is a performance. A judgment that cannot be explained to the market woman in Kabba, to the student in Lokoja, to the farmer in Yagba, without that person feeling cheated by reasoning, has failed its most basic democratic function, which is to make the loser feel that he lost fairly and the winner feel that he won honestly. The fact that Aro was affirmed does not erase the confusion that preceded the affirmation, nor does it answer the question why a matter so clearly statute-barred and so clearly founded on a withdrawal was allowed to travel from Lokoja to Abuja and to keep a district in suspense.
Where then lies the hope of the Nigerian judiciary and of Nigerian democracy? It does not lie in more judgments of this kind. It lies in a return to first principles. It lies in judges who understand that their power is borrowed from the people and that every time they depart from the record, they withdraw a little more from the account of public trust. It lies in an appellate system willing to correct what is manifestly perverse, not out of sympathy for a party, but out of fidelity to the law. It lies in a legal profession willing to speak, not in whispers in chambers, but in open defence of principle, even when the beneficiary of a wrong judgment is powerful.
The generation coming will read books of history. They will read about this era and they will ask whether Nigerians at this time still believed in the courts. If verdicts like this are allowed to stand without clear, consistent and convincing reasoning, God forbid, what they will read is not the story of a democracy maturing, but the story of a society tilting toward an animal farm where the more you see the less you believe, where power justifies itself, and where self help becomes the only means of survival for the common man who has been told by the court that his eyes deceived him.
That is the danger. It is not about Karimi alone. It is not about Aro alone. It is about whether a man who withdraws can still win, whether a man who wins can still lose, and whether the ordinary Nigerian can still enter a courtroom believing that the law will protect him when politics has abandoned him. Once that belief dies, democracy dies with it, not with a coup, not with a gunshot, but with silence. And it is that silence after the Federal High Court judgment in Kogi West that should frighten us all, because a people who no longer argue with a judgment have stopped believing that argument matters.
– Oshio Baba wrote from Lokoja.
