Loading content
Supreme Court · 1979
How is a constitutional requirement expressed as a fraction of a number of states to be calculated?
What you are reading
Every case here is a real, reported Nigerian decision. What we publish is our summary of it in plain language. We do not print a law-report volume and page, because a citation that leads nowhere is worse than no citation at all — and we will not have this platform be the source of one.
This decision is reported in the Nigerian law reports. Locate it by its case name in a law report series or through the court's own record, and read the judgment before relying on it.
The question the court actually had to answer. Everything a judgment settles flows from this, and nothing beyond it does.
How is a constitutional requirement expressed as a fraction of a number of states to be calculated?
The 1979 presidential election required the leading candidate to obtain a stated share of the votes in a fraction of the states of the Federation.
The result turned on how that fraction was to be computed where the number of states did not divide evenly.
The Supreme Court upheld the declaration of the result.
It construed the constitutional requirement as the electoral body had applied it, and the petition failed.
Stated narrowly, as the case is genuinely cited for — not stretched into the broader proposition it is often summarised as.
A constitutional formula is applied as the Constitution's own words require, and an election result is not disturbed on a construction the text does not bear.
Our explanation of what the decision means for an ordinary reader. It is not the judgment.
Nigeria's first presidential election under the 1979 Constitution came down to arithmetic — how to treat a fraction of a number of states that does not divide cleanly.
The case is remembered less for the arithmetic than for what it showed: a presidential result was contested in court, argued, and decided by judges rather than in the street.
The part most summaries leave out, and the part that most often causes a case to be cited for something it never decided.
Named generally. Read the official text of any instrument you intend to rely on.
This decision is reported in the Nigerian law reports. Locate it by its case name in a law report series or through the court's own record, and read the judgment before relying on it.
Subject area: Electoral Law