INEC has lost all Credibility to be an Independent umpire of Nigeria’s Elections

By Obiageli “Oby” Ezekwesili

DOCTRINE OF NECESSITY OPEN MEMO

The question of whether Nigeria can conduct a credible 2027 election is already answered. Nigeria cannot hold a credible 2027 election under the leadership of INEC. INEC has lost all credibility to be an independent umpire of Nigeria’s elections, and ignoring this could upend our hard-won democracy.

On Friday, 30 October 2026, and again on Sunday, 1 November, INEC’s Director of Information and Communication Technology, Dr Lawrence Bayode, told Nigerians on national television what many of us had feared and some of us had warned against.

Registration officers of the Independent National Electoral Commission used their official login credentials to inject AI-generated photographs, duplicate records and other fabricated entries into the preliminary register of voters. He said it was not isolated. He said it was found across several states. He said the Commission knows who did it and how they did it.

The INEC Director in that interview said the words that should stop every Nigerian in their tracks: that “the trust is on ground zero, and that some staff are trying to take us back to where we are coming from”. My hands went to my head after that interview.

Let us be clear about what this is. This is not a hack from outside. This is not a glitch. This is sabotage from within the very institution to which the Nigerian people entrusted the register of our sovereignty. The people paid to protect the list of citizens manufactured phantom citizens. The 2027 general elections are now a matter of months away, and the foundational document of those elections has been admitted by its custodian to be compromised.

I speak today as an Occupant of the Office of the Citizen which I have long told the world – especially Nigerians – that it is the highest office in any democracy. It is the Office from which all other offices, including that of the President, Senators, Representatives, Governors and public appointees like the Chairman of INEC, derive their authority and legitimacy. The register of voters does not belong to INEC, nor the Federal Government, nor the ruling party- APC. It belongs to us, the Citizens of Nigeria. Period. INEC merely holds it in trust. That trust, by its own admission, has been totally broken with the AI infiltration of the voters’ register.

INEC cannot investigate INEC. Impossible. No institution that has just confessed to corrupting a national asset from within can then ask the nation to trust it alone to repair the damage. It is a principle of accountability so basic that we apply it to everyday contexts. The accused does not sit as judge. The staff who held the credentials, the supervisors who approved their access, the ICT department that built the platform with the loophole they exploited, and the Commission that certified the display of that register all now have an interest in the size of this scandal being declared small.

Consider what INEC has done since the discovery. Its statement of 27 October named no cause. Three days later, its Director of ICT said on air that officers were compromised in several states, yet he also said he is still gathering evidence before reporting to the Commission. Almost one week after that, Nigerians still do not know how many records are affected, which states, which local governments, which officers, or whether a single one of them has been suspended, let alone handed to the police.

INEC’s defence that this was only a preliminary register is no comfort. It is the preliminary register from which the final register will be certified. If the preliminary register is poisoned and the investigation is conducted in secret by the poisoned institution, then the certified register will carry the poison into polling day. This is the same INEC whose conduct of the 2023 elections collapsed public trust among most Nigerians who were told then to trust the institution.

Citizens are being told again to trust INEC in the face of colossal corruption of the voters’ register. Trust is not restored by the repetition of the word. It is restored by the removal of the substantial conflict of interest of allowing INEC to carry on with “cleaning up” the massively corrupted voters’ register.

I have a strong position on what must be done to restore credibility to the Voters Register of the 2027 elections. Only a Caretaker Rescue Team of independent citizens can restore credibility to the Register. I therefore call for the immediate constitution of a Caretaker Rescue Team: an independent Citizens’ Electoral Team of eminent, non-partisan Nigerians and technical experts, with a public mandate to take custody of the clean-up of the voters register and to superintend citizens’ conduct of the 2027 elections at every stage.

This is not a radical demand. It is the only proportionate one. When a bank’s own staff are found to have forged its ledger, the regulator does not ask the same staff to audit the ledger. It brings in independent examiners, freezes the records, and publishes the findings. When the custodian of a nation’s sovereignty confesses to the same crime, the sovereign, which is the people, must do no less.

Every other proposal on the table today asks INEC to do better. Nigerians have heard that for a quarter of a century. Credibility cannot be rebuilt by the institution that destroyed it, because credibility is not a property of institutions. It is a judgment made by citizens. Citizens will only believe a register that citizens have been allowed to verify.

Three reasons make the Caretaker Rescue Team the only path that can work.

1. Independence is the cure for the specific disease. The disease is insider capture. The only remedy for insider capture is independent external control. A Team whose members hold no party card, seek no office and are accountable in public is the one body that no faction can plausibly accuse of cooking the result.

1. Time does not permit a second failure. We simply do not have time to experience a second failure. The elections are in 2027. There is no room for an INEC internal inquiry that drags for months, produces a report nobody sees, and leaves the register to be certified under a cloud. A citizens’ Team working in the open can audit, publish and certify on a timetable the whole country can see.
2. The 2023 precedent closes the door on faith alone. Nigerians extended their faith to INEC in 2023 and watched the promises of technology collapse on election night. Faith is spent. What remains is verification, and verification must be done by those who have nothing to hide and nothing to gain.

Who sits on the Team, and Terms of Reference:

Composition: The Citizens’ Electoral Team must be drawn from Nigerians whose integrity is not for sale and whose expertise is beyond question:

• Independent forensic data, cybersecurity and biometric experts, Nigerian and international, who can read the ABIS logs, the access trails and the image files for themselves.

• Representatives of civil society organisations with a track record of election observation and voter mobilisation.

• The Nigerian Bar Association, the professional bodies of ICT and accounting, and the academic community.

• Faith leaders and traditional institutions with moral standing across regions and religions.

• Observers from every registered political party, with a right to see everything and a right to control nothing.

• Credible international observer missions as witnesses to the process.

No serving or former INEC official, no office holder, no candidate and no party official can be a member.

Terms of Reference/Mandate. The Team must be empowered, by public declaration and by a “Doctrine of Necessity” law by the National Assembly, to:

1. Take immediate custody of the full preliminary register, every image file, every access log and every audit trail, and ensure nothing is altered or deleted.

1. Conduct and publish a complete forensic audit of the national voter database: how many records are fraudulent, in which states and local government areas, through whose credentials, and how they passed INEC’s checks.
2. Publish the names of every officer implicated and verify that each has been suspended and referred for prosecution.
3. Supervise the removal of every fraudulent record and certify, in public and with the evidence attached, that the final register is clean before INEC is permitted to adopt it.
4. Set and enforce the standards under which citizens will observe, verify and defend the 2027 elections: open access to the register, to polling unit results, to the transmission of results and to collation, at every level.
5. Report to the Nigerian people, not to INEC, on a published schedule, until the 2027 results are declared.

To my fellow citizens, the register of voters is the first ballot. If it is rigged, every ballot that follows is rigged before it is cast. Nigerians have watched a monopolistic political class capture institution after institution and then ask us to trust the captured institution to reform itself. We have seen where that road leads. It leads to election nights when the technology we were promised goes dark, and the courts tell us it did not matter.

This time, we must not surrender the field. The Office of the Citizen is not a slogan; it is the seat of sovereignty from which the Constitution of this Republic derives its first words, “We the people.” The people did not delegate to INEC the right to corrupt our register, and we do not delegate to INEC the right to conceal the extent of its corruption.

INEC has told us that trust is at ground zero. We agree. Trust will be rebuilt from ground zero only by the citizens whose votes are at stake, and by no one else. The Caretaker Rescue Team would not abolish INEC or usurp the Constitution. INEC would continue to hold the legal instruments. But the clean-up of the register, the certification that it is clean, and the oversight of how citizens are allowed to observe, verify and defend their votes in 2027 would be conducted under the custody of the Rescue Team, in the open, with INEC answerable to it and to the public, rather than the other way round.

A strategic move to avert the collapse of our Democracy with damaging consequences would require proactive leadership by the National Assembly. It is unusual for us to expect such leadership from a lawmaking body that has, in the past, mostly failed to act in favour of the interests of people. Perhaps, we may experience a redemptive turnaround from lawmakers who themselves would be in the first line of injury should we all refuse to see and prevent the gravity and scale of danger ahead. For the fact is that the temperature of the ongoing party campaign would worsen if this historic and unprecedented level of corrupt assault on Nigeria’s electoral system is not tackled immediately.

I call on the National Assembly to make a Public Declaration and act under emergency rules to pass a “Doctrine of Necessity law to constitute and empower the Citizens’ Electoral Rescue Team to take over the work of restoring credibility to the 2027 Elections immediately.

I call on civil society, the professions, faith leaders, the youth who registered in their millions, the National Assembly, the judiciary and the international community to join in demanding the Caretaker Rescue Team now. Not after the register is certified in December by the guilty INEC. Not after the elections are announced.

We, the citizens of Nigeria from the North and South; East and West of Nigeria, must act NOW, while the evidence is still intact and the clean-up can still be done in the open.

Shall we?

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