For every Nigerian who has had the benefit of a decent education, now is the time to obtain something else: some kind of swivel for your attention on public issues.
As you may have heard, last weekend, there was a curious breach of INEC’s Continuous Voter Registration Portal.
Lere Olayinka, a media aide to Nyesom Wike, the Federal Capital Territory Minister, who is nominally a member of a faction of the PDP but operates within the political orbit of the APC, published information from the depths of a database to which he should not have had access.
DSS is investigating, it claims. But DSS, an organisation with a poor image in Nigeria, including the rogue detention of a journalist for over 13 years since he set foot on the soil of his fatherland, does not inspire confidence.
INEC is also investigating. It should. It inspires fear, even loathing. Its preliminary narrative is a convenient “lone insider, audit trail identified the account,” which localises the problem to one bad actor and protects the claim that the system itself is sound.
I fully expect DSS to follow the same trail, and it may be right.
But the problem is bigger, arising from our electoral commissions’ decades of failing public tests.
Nigerians are staring at a pivotal election seven months away in which there is no reason to trust that INEC chairman Joash Amupitan is not a plant set in place to read a predetermined script.
Five months ago, I set out where the INEC fault lines are. The commission cannot win the race for public trust by refusing to resolve the problems of 2023, including the international recommendations to which it committed.
That includes a simple question: how did the aide of a powerful but untrusted minister across town obtain the detailed screenshots he deployed to mock a politician for transferring his voter registration to the FCT just two weeks after the politician sought an FCT House of Representatives seat on the NDC platform?
The FCT office in Maitama is only a few miles from INEC headquarters in Garki. But it is technical proximity, not physical distance, that is at issue in Olayinka’s conduct.
That is why it has become urgent for INEC to demonstrate that there is no real vulnerability or technical compromise in the management of its information systems.
Unfortunately, this is the very problem that INEC has the strongest institutional incentive to deny. The challenge is that neither the commission nor the DSS currently demonstrates true independence from Abuja’s two landlords: President Tinubu and Minister Wike.
All of this is against the background of President Tinubu signing the Electoral Act 2026 Amendment into law, defending it as a democratic reform measure, with opposition parties and civil society seizing on that critical Section 60(3) loophole that could undermine the centrepiece of electoral credibility.
The amendment permits manual result transmission where communication fails, weakening the 2026 requirement for mandatory electronic transmission.
The PDP has accused the APC of crafting an escape hatch for electoral manipulation ahead of 2027, while Tinubu has dismissed the backlash as “political points-scoring.” This is the key integrity test of the coming election.
While we are here, keep in mind that in April, President Tinubu announced that he would extend the 2025 budget implementation deadline to June 30, 2026, three months beyond the original March 31 closure.
Sadly, this stimulated no public outrage or alarm in Nigeria.
But this is precisely how institutional decay disguises itself. It is the normalisation of a government that cannot execute its own plans, cannot account for why it failed, and uses policy adjustments to conceal rather than confront systemic failure.
When the fiscal year ends and money remains unspent, it signals that either the government planned unrealistically, failed to execute efficiently, or deliberately underspent.
And while Tinubu assented to the 2026 budget nearly two months ago, the government has not, as of June 5, published the Appropriation Act as the final approved budget. It is not available in the Budget Office’s own published accounts.
In contrast, during the 2025 cycle, the Budget Office published two documents within days of that budget’s assent, demonstrating that the office posts such documents promptly when it chooses to do so:
- 2025 Appropriation Act — 19 March
- 2025 Appropriation Act as passed — 25 March
This is critical because of the N9.09tn conundrum: while the public document shows N58tn, the signed law puts the figure at N68.32tn. That N9.09tn gap, the stash most likely to contain insertions, constituency projects, and mandate-unrelated allocations, appears to be creating significant difficulties for Aso Rock.
But we move on, and as we do, it is with the stunning allegation that APC governors have diverted N800bn in FAAC funds for Tinubu’s 2027 re-election campaign.
ADC described the alleged diversion as “shameless, cruel, and criminal.”
On May 16, SERAP petitioned INEC to investigate, but the commission has commenced no such undertaking.
The allegation, if true, would be a cruel twist in the Nigerian story: a campaign finance, in-your-face theft.
But while INEC and DSS are investigating the alleged CVR breach, they do not seem to be interested in an N800bn federal funds scandal.
Meanwhile, the routine reinvention of Nigerian politics continues. Following last month’s primaries, Senate President Godswill Akpabio has congratulated the Senators who lost, declaring that he is exploring possible “ways” to turn defeat into victory for them.
It is a fascinating reminder. In 2009, a version of this played out in the Peoples Democratic Party, which at that time straddled Nigeria the way APC now does. Then Senate President David Mark, who now leads the ADC, provided a version of what Akpabio is now doing, demanding automatic tickets for all 80 Senators in the 2011 elections.
Two years earlier, in 2007, Mark had superintended President Olusegun Obasanjo’s third-term ambitions, and later in 2014, argued that there ought to be no election in 2015 because Nigeria was “in a state of war.”
Yes, we have seen many of these manipulations before by men in the byways of power, including unprincipled, reed-thin operatives drifting towards the party in control, breaching every rule and gathering every drop for themselves. Dr Thomas Fawora called them “dealers in stolen goods.”
And remember that also in 2009, governors of the PDP demanded automatic tickets for 20 of their first-term colleagues. Demanded.
Yes, we have been here before. We have seen power, privilege and pomposity in their raw forms.
We experienced and endured “Africa’s most powerful party,” as it liked to style itself.
Nigerians walked away, shaking their heads, from the accident where that entity was crushed by the weight of its presumptions and manipulations.
APC seems to have avoided that scene entirely. It is speeding towards its own.
Had anyone asked, my recommendation would be this: Find one General Obasanjo, and ask him for a bedtime story.
