ABSTRACT
Nigeria’s political transition from three decades of authoritarian military rule to democracy constitutes a momentous aspect of the country’s political history. It is momentous, that the country has witnessed its longest experience of civil ‘democratic’ rule in its post-colonial history from the culmination of the handover of power by the military on 29 May 1999 till date, after a series of aborted political transition programmes launched by successive military regimes at various times during the period of authoritarian rule. Equally epochal is the 2007 general elections in the country. It marked the
first successful ‘civil-civil’ political transition. By the civil-civil transition is meant the transfer of power from one elected government to another devoid of military intervention in governance. Recognition of the salience of the elections is of course without prejudice to the fact that they have turned out to be the most contested in the country’s checkered electoral history. The widespread contestations are no doubt a fall-out of the very suspect democratic credentials of the elections. The level of concomitant judicialization of politics electoral contestations have engendered, has contributed in no small measure to the exceptional expansion of judicial power and its impact on governance in Nigeria, examined in this chapter. However, by far the most remarkable feature of the transition from mili-
tary authoritarianism is the judicialization of ‘pure politics’,1 leading to the phenomenal rise of judicial power in the country’s transition experience in the post-2003 period. In this regard, one of Ran Hirschl’s classifications of the multi-dimensional facets of judicialization of politics is relevant. He observes that the judicialization of pure politics (or ‘mega-politics’) manifests in various forms. The manifestation of judicialization of pure politics includes judicial monitoring of policies in economic planning, national security and other prerogatives of executive power under the rubric of the ‘political question’. Others relate to restorative justice measures, regime transformation and legitimation, as well as collective, fundamental existential and identity
questions of statehood. He further identifies in this category, the judicialization of democratic electoral processes.2
