By Iduh Onah
NIGERIA’s 2027 General Election is already intensely being fought on a battlefield that extends far beyond polling centres. It is a contest over whether citizens will believe the institutions conducting the elections, the politicians seeking their votes, the media reporting the contest and, ultimately, the results that will emerge.
That was the tension that ran through the 10th Annual Conference of the Guild of Corporate Online Publishers (GOCOP), where three related propositions conflated. First is Dr Olisa Agbakoba, SAN, who framed Nigerians as shareholders in “Nigeria PLC”, with the election serving as an opportunity for citizens to determine the country’s direction. Second is GOCOP President, Danlami Nmodu, mni, stressing that credible elections cannot be the responsibility of INEC alone but must be a shared enterprise involving politicians, government, the media and citizens. Thirdly is INEC Chairman, Prof Joash Amupitan, SAN, who reduced the institutional challenge to a harder proposition: electoral trust is earned through operational fidelity.
Put together, the message is uncomfortable but very useful, which is that Nigeria does not have a trust problem that INEC can solve by itself, but a trust ecosystem problem.
INEC’s case is that it is preparing differently for the 2027 elections which commences with the Presidential and National Assembly elections on January 16, 2027 to end with the Governorship and State Assembly elections slated for February 6, 2027. According to the Commission, its timetable is being implemented, voter registration has expanded the register to about 103 million, and PVC collection began on October 9, 2026.
INEC also talked about technological and logistical preparations – upgraded BVAS machines, nationwide audits, the new eEC8A system for digitally capturing and transmitting polling-unit results, cybersecurity measures, procurement and logistics tracking, and staff training.
But the central question is not whether INEC has more technology; rather, it is whether Nigerians believe the technology, procedures and people operating them can be trusted; a distinction distilled by gender and democracy advocate, Dr Adaora Onyechere Sydney-Jack, who warned that technological credibility cannot substitute for institutional credibility. Her point talks to the core of INEC’s challenge: being that a sophisticated electoral machine is useful only if citizens believe the institution operating it is accountable, transparent and willing to punish violations.
That is why Amupitan’s emphasis on “operational fidelity” is crucial. Trust, in his formulation, is built polling unit by polling unit, dataset by dataset and process by process. The implication is that every unexplained malfunction, delayed process, disputed figure or contradictory official statement carries a cost beyond the immediate incident, inevitably feeding the suspicion that the system cannot be trusted.
The same principle applies to election security. Police Commissioner for Election Planning, Monitoring and Evaluation, Dr Abayomi Shogunle, told the conference that security planning for the 176,846 polling units will be driven by predictive and risk analysis rather than a crude one-size-fits-all deployment.
While this sounds positive, in an environment in which several instances of threats to potential voters already exist without commensurate proactive response by security agencies, Shogunle’s assurances looks too lame even as he stated that the police had already begun deployment planning and had tested what he described as an academic approach in Anambra and Ekiti, using problem-analysis and deterrence strategies to prevent violence.
Election credibility, it is vital to stress, cannot survive insecurity. Voters who cannot reach polling units, officials who cannot operate freely, or communities intimidated by political violence cannot be said to have participated in a credible election, however advanced the voting technology may be.
Again, Shogunle’s insistence that the police will follow the law, particularly on who has the authority to announce results, also points to an emerging fault line creatively imagined by Agbakoba – that there is an expanding gap between what the law permits institutions to declare and what the media can instantly report on and circulate.
Agbakoba’s intervention is particularly noteworthy in the context of global standards in election reporting in advanced democracies, particularly around exit polls. His challenge to the media to test in court the extent of the constitutional right to obtain and disseminate electoral information, particularly against some provisions of the Electoral Act governing the announcement of results is therefore germane.
His central argument is that Section 39 of the Constitution protects the right of the press to receive and disseminate information, while the electoral law gives INEC the authority to declare official results. He therefore wants the legal boundaries clarified, between the right of journalists to ask voters who had voted whom they voted for (exit polls) as they leave polling units, and on the basis of that make projections on who is leading in an election before official results.
While Agbakoba’s hypothesis may have overtime been validated in Western democracies, in our ‘nascent democracy’, the possibility of practicing it, even if legally validated, could be dangerous in Nigeria’s electoral process. This is because, as one participant at the conference noted during the interactive session, and stressed by Shogunle, in Nigeria’s election environment dominated by untamed political nuances, if millions are able to receive unofficial results digitally before an authorised returning officer makes official pronouncement, the boundary between reporting information and appearing to declare an election could be dangerously blurred.
The media therefore faces an awkward or delicate dual responsibility; that of defending its constitutional space combined with extraordinary editorial restraint. This is perhaps reflected in Amupitan’s warning to publishers against fake news, unverified leaks, sensationalism, clickbait and AI-generated deepfakes, which is essentially that speed must never supersede accuracy.
Notwithstanding the contemporary reality of Amupitan’s concerns, GOCOP President’s position provides the necessary counterweight, even when the right to report on exit poll may be prohibited under the existing Electoral Act. The media, Nmodu said, cannot become an extension of INEC’s public-relations machinery in the name of combating misinformation. Its duty, he says, is to scrutinise both government and opposition, report facts fairly and hold power accountable.
That is the real test of the proposed INEC-GOCOP partnership on fact verification and voter education. Verification cannot mean simply reproducing the commission’s version of events. It must mean checking claims against evidence; whether the claim comes from INEC, a political party, a candidate, the police, an activist or an anonymous social-media account.
There is another dimension to credibility that cannot be reduced to technology, logistics or media ethics in terms of who gets to participate meaningfully in the political process. In that regard, Sydney-Jack’s intervention should therefore not be treated as a peripheral gender issue. She warned that women’s representation is declining sharply, with party nomination processes; particularly opaque consensus arrangements that seem to exclude women before voters even have the opportunity to choose.
Sydney-Jack described this challenge as moving from “performative inclusion” to genuine inclusion; an argument that exposes a deeper contradiction in Nigeria’s electoral politics. In other words, even if the country organises a technically impressive election but still produce a democracy that large sections of the population feel unrepresented or underrepresented, that remains a quasi-democracy.
If women constitute a substantial proportion of the electorate but remain dramatically underrepresented among candidates, the credibility conversation cannot stop at whether BVAS worked or whether results were transmitted electronically.
Democratic credibility also involves who is permitted to compete, whose interests are represented and whether political parties provide genuinely open pathways to candidature.
The same broader concern animates Agbakoba’s economic argument. Elections are not simply exercises in electoral engineering; they are supposed to give citizens an opportunity to judge political choices. Therefore, cost of living, insecurity, employment, fuel pricing, healthcare and economic policy will matter to voters far more than the technical sophistication of an election-management system.
Agbakoba’s “Nigeria PLC” analogy therefore adds an important democratic test – that citizens are not spectators at the 2027 election; they are shareholders assessing the direction of the company (Nigeria). Nmodu’s parallel appeal to politicians to put the people first and fashion policies around their welfare pushes the debate from electoral mechanics to the quality of governance that elections are supposed to produce. These dynamics are ultimately why the trust question is bigger than INEC.
INEC must prove that it can administer the election transparently and impartially. The police must demonstrate that security will protect participation rather than intimidate it. Political parties must give voters meaningful choices. Government must provide an environment in which citizens can vote without fear. The media must defend its independence while refusing to become an amplifier of falsehood. Citizens themselves must resist the temptation to treat elections as somebody else’s responsibility.
The 2027 election will therefore be judged on more than whether machines work or whether polling units open on time, but even more by whether Nigerians believe the process was fair. That belief cannot be manufactured by technology, publicity or official assurances, and it must be built through evidence.
Ultimately, the challenge before INEC, the media, political actors, security agencies and citizens is consequently the same – they must collectively make the process sufficiently transparent that trust becomes a reasonable conclusion rather than a mere act of faith.
