NGScorecard

ANPP candidate Muhammadu Buhari challenged Obasanjo's re-election in the April 2003 presidential election, presenting evidence of widespread irregularities across several states.

The Supreme Court dismissed the petition and affirmed Obasanjo's re-election, applying a similarly high evidentiary bar to the one it would use in the 2007 petition that followed. Buhari would go on to challenge the subsequent 2007 election result as well.

All Progressives Grand Alliance candidate Peter Obi challenged the declared result of the April 2003 Anambra State governorship election, which PDP's Chris Ngige had been declared to have won, alleging the result was manufactured before votes were even properly counted.

The Court of Appeal ruled in March 2006 — nearly three years into Ngige's term — that Obi had actually won the 2003 election, ordering his immediate removal and Obi's installation as governor. The ruling stood as a landmark demonstration that even a sitting, federally-backed PDP governor could be removed by the courts.

Lagos State challenged the federal government's withholding of statutory allocations owed to its local governments, imposed after the state created additional local council development areas without National Assembly approval.

The Supreme Court ruled the withholding of allocations unconstitutional, but the federal government continued withholding funds for a period even after the ruling before eventually complying — a notable instance of a Supreme Court judgment against the federal government not being immediately honoured.

The EFCC prosecuted former Bayelsa State Governor Diepreye Alamieyeseigha for money laundering, after his 2005 arrest in London and subsequent impeachment, over allegations of diverting state funds into personal assets including London properties.

Alamieyeseigha pleaded guilty in July 2007, just weeks after Obasanjo left office, and received a sentence widely seen as lenient relative to the scale of the allegations. It remained, nonetheless, one of the few cases from the period to reach a conviction while the underlying conduct was still relatively recent.

Residents of Odi, Bayelsa State, sought compensation for the destruction of the town and the deaths of civilians during the November 1999 military reprisal operation ordered after the killing of police officers by local youths.

The case remained unresolved through the rest of Obasanjo's term. A Federal High Court would not order the federal government to pay compensation to Odi until 2013, under a much later administration — over a decade after the operation occurred.

Nigeria and Cameroon had disputed sovereignty over the oil-rich Bakassi Peninsula for decades. Both countries submitted the dispute to the International Court of Justice for a binding resolution.

The ICJ ruled in October 2002 that Bakassi belonged to Cameroon. Rather than ignoring the ruling, Obasanjo's government engaged in a multi-year negotiated handover process, formalised in the 2006 Green Tree Agreement, and Nigeria formally transferred the territory in 2006 — a rare example from this period of full compliance with an adverse international legal ruling.

Amid PTDF corruption allegations widely seen as linked to his opposition to Obasanjo's third-term bid, Vice President Atiku Abubakar was excluded from INEC's list of candidates for the April 2007 presidential election, effectively barring him from the ballot he intended to contest under the Action Congress banner.

The Supreme Court ruled just weeks before the election that Atiku could not be excluded from the ballot, ordering INEC to include him as a candidate. INEC complied, and Atiku contested the election, though he ultimately lost to PDP's Umaru Musa Yar'Adua.