From the polling booths to the courtrooms : challenges of strict application of time frame in judicial contestation of election disputes in Nigeria

After her longest military interregnum spanning almost two decades since 1984, Nigeria returned to a democratic system of government in May 1999. By May 2019, five presidential and other national and sub-national elections were held in the country. Virtually all of these elections were characterized by intense political strives and electoral malpractices of varying degrees, leading to the challenging of elections in the election petition tribunals and other courts, long after the conclusion of the polls. This challenge has heightened the spate of judicialization of politics-the practice of excessive utilization of the courts for adjudication of core political matters in the country. But a significant by-product of judicialization of politics in Nigeria is the apparent relegation of substantial justice and possible miscarriage of justice arising from a resort to a technicality in the strict interpretation and enforcement of time frame for such adjudications. This paper, using a doctrinal research methodology of relying on primary and secondary sources of information, shows that the current strict interpretation of the constitutional provisions on the time limit for adjudication of electoral disputes defeats the essence of substantial justice and impacts negatively on the role of the judiciary in social engineering. For comparative constitutional purposes, the paper also juxtaposes the practice in Kenya, another country in Africa with electoral disputation experiences, with the practice in Nigeria. The paper concludes that a review of the law is imperative and then makes somerecommendations