NGScorecard

ANPP candidate Muhammadu Buhari challenged Yar'Adua's victory in the April 2007 presidential election, presenting extensive evidence of irregularities including non-use of prescribed voting materials and manipulated results in several states.

The Supreme Court dismissed the petition in a majority ruling, holding that while the election process had serious shortcomings, the petitioners had not proven the irregularities to the standard required to overturn the result. Two dissenting justices argued the election should have been nullified, and the split judgment was widely seen as reflecting how flawed the underlying election had genuinely been.

Sitting Vice President Atiku Abubakar, who had fallen out with President Obasanjo and contested the 2007 election under the Action Congress banner, filed a separate petition challenging Yar'Adua's victory on similar grounds of widespread electoral malpractice.

As with the Buhari petition, decided the same month, the Supreme Court dismissed Atiku's challenge and affirmed Yar'Adua's election, closing off the last major legal avenue to overturn the 2007 result.

The EFCC's corruption case against former Delta State Governor James Ibori, built under Nuhu Ribadu's leadership, alleged embezzlement of several hundred million dollars in state funds during his 1999-2007 governorship.

Nigerian courts dismissed or struck out charges against Ibori on procedural and jurisdictional grounds on more than one occasion during 2009, and he was never brought to trial domestically. He was arrested abroad in 2010 and eventually convicted in the United Kingdom in 2012, a outcome achieved entirely outside the Nigerian judicial process that had repeatedly failed to convict him.

The Transcorp consortium challenged the federal government's 2009 revocation of its licence to operate NITEL, arguing the revocation was procedurally improper given the investments it said it had already made in the company.

The court upheld the government's revocation, finding that Transcorp had failed to meet its contractual payment and investment obligations. The ruling secured government's control over NITEL but did not resolve the underlying question of how to successfully privatise the ailing carrier, which remained unresolved for years afterward.

Boko Haram founder Mohammed Yusuf was captured alive by the military during the July 2009 Maiduguri uprising and died in police custody hours later. Human rights organisations documented that he had been extrajudicially executed rather than processed through the justice system, and called for a full, independent investigation and prosecution of those responsible.

No police or military officer was prosecuted for Yusuf's death during Yar'Adua's remaining time in office. Human rights groups and later analysts widely cited the killing, and the impunity that followed it, as a significant factor in the radicalisation of Boko Haram's remnants into the insurgency that followed for the next decade.