In 2027 the idea of rigging elections and telling your opponents to go to court to challenge the outcome of the election will no longer be tenable. People will no longer obey the idea of going to court, and they will take laws into their hands. People will resist the idea of going to court.
Any attempt by the government in power to manipulate the 2027 general elections will be resisted, and should the polls or their results be tampered with, this would create dire consequences for the country. Nigerians will resist any attempt by INEC returning officers to announce fake election results. Nigeria’s judiciary, particularly in Edo 2024 electoral matters, has given a wrong interpretation of Section 137 of the Electoral Act 2022 by referring to True Certified Copies of INEC documents as dumped documents. While the executive and legislative arms of government receive the bulk of public criticism, the judiciary remains a greater enabler of bad governance by consistently validating fraudulent elections like the Edo 2024 Election Tribunal judgement that accepted certified true documents and later ignored documentary evidence in favour of oral evidence. Until the judiciary is cleansed of corruption and political influence, democracy in Nigeria will remain an illusion—an expensive game played by the elite at the expense of the masses. The 2027 elections may become war if the Edo tribunal ruling is not reversed, and allowed to stand, it will set a dangerous precedent that could turn Nigeria’s 2027 elections into farcical, impotent rituals.
When the story of Nigeria’s democracy is told, the judiciary will occupy one of the most despicable roles. In most of such cases of signing results under duress, the judiciary has chosen to play dumb by ruling that the law says the results read by the returning officers stand and have thereby sided with forces that were raping basic democratic precepts. There is, however, a strong sentiment in Nigeria today that there must be accountability and sanctions for people who violate the principles of free and fair elections and seek to hide under legal technicalities. Such stories have tended to create the basis to completely delegitimise Nigerian elections because they are so scandalous and anti-democratic that they become what Nigerians remember about the elections. Nigeria’s 2027 elections will be a decisive test for our future democracy.
There is danger ahead of voting and collation of results of the 2027 elections, which will be determined by armed politics and guns if electronic collation of election results is not introduced from wards to local government collation centres because the experience from the Edo 2024 governorship election has shown that wards and local government collation centres are now INEC spiritual and magical centres where one vote can change to one million votes. The post-mortem analysis of the Edo 2024 governorship election by many election observer groups documented how the collation process of the election results by INEC was opaque, chaotic, and vulnerable to manipulation and, in some locations, violently disrupted, especially in Oredo, Egor, Etsako West, Etsako East, Akoko Edo, Owan East local government and others. The report also identified six challenges which plagued the collation of results of the 2024 election: INEC’s missteps and misconduct; deliberate denial of access to observers and media; logistical shortfalls; intentional disruption by politicians, political thugs and party agents; and intimidation of collation staff by security agents. Also, there were reported cases of denial of both local and international observers and the media to collation centres in Edo State. Instructively, the outcome of the Edo 2024 election tribunal proceedings stands to shape popular mindset within the Nigerian voting population, even non-voters, who may have been discouraged by endless electoral malpractice, particularly as the 2027 election nears; unexpected judicial outcomes also have their way of forming opinions in the minds of the populace. If people feel that court judgements flowing out of post-election matters lack merit, fairness and dispassion, they may equally get discouraged in the process.
The Independent National Electoral Commission has insisted that electronic collation of results is illegal in Nigeria. There has been a clamour for electronic transmission of election results in the country, with the issue forming a core plank of the 2023 presidential election petitions which were filed at the Presidential Election Petitions Court by the Peoples Democratic Party and the Labour Party. The commission has clarified at different fora that the result viewing portal was not for collating election results or determining the winner; neither was the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System an electronic voting machine.
At the national level, what we remember is that failure in posting the 2023 presidential elections on the IReV portal. The fact that BVAS machines were successfully used to accredit voters in most polling units has disappeared from the story of the elections, in spite of its importance in providing legitimacy to the process.
The manual collation of results of Nigeria’s election is in danger as the electoral campaign has been plagued with violence as the country is besieged by conflict and insecurity on multiple fronts. Amid this fracturing, the state is struggling to maintain its legitimacy, and new sources of public authority are gaining ground.
Non-state armed groups (NSAGs) are becoming an increasingly important feature of day-to-day life for people across Nigeria. Across the north, vigilante groups have been enabled to tackle widespread banditry and Islamist terrorists in the form of Boko Haram and Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP). Elsewhere, separatist violence – related to calls for the establishment of an independent state of Biafra – continues, and the threat of a resurgence of violence in the Niger Delta remains a concern. With the state struggling to maintain control, the military is now deployed on active duty in over 90 percent of the country.
In the north alone, the conflict has killed thousands, contributed to the deaths of hundreds of thousands more and caused widespread displacement. The state has paid a price for its inability to control the situation. The 2023 poll showed that Nigeria is heading in the wrong direction, and only 34.75 percent of registered voters participated in the last two elections in the 2019 and 2023 elections. These hint at a worrying trend: the state is facing not only a problem of security but also one of legitimacy.
Inwalomhe Donald writes via inwalomhe.donald@yahoo.com.
