Nigeria has a dangerous habit of treating election reforms like flood repairs. We wait until the rain has washed away the bridge before asking whether the foundation was strong enough. As political parties quietly position themselves for the 2027 general election, former Independent National Electoral Commission Chairman, Professor Attahiru Jega, has once again sounded an alarm. His warning is not about who will win or lose the next election. It is about whether Nigerians can trust the process at all. History suggests they have every reason to pay attention. Since the return to democracy in 1999, nearly every presidential election has ended with judges interpreting ballots that citizens believed they had already cast. Democracy was never designed to outsource the final decision to courtrooms. It was designed for the ballot box to speak so clearly that the courtroom becomes almost unnecessary.
Jega’s greatest concern lies in what appears to be a technical provision but carries enormous political consequences. Section 60(3) of the amended Electoral Act allows election officials to rely on the physical result sheet, Form EC8A, where electronic transmission fails. On paper, that sounds practical. Technology can fail. Networks can become unstable. But Nigeria is not debating this law in an ideal society. It is debating it in a country where elections have long been shaped by desperate political actors willing to exploit every available loophole. Jega argues that this provision unintentionally creates an incentive to abandon electronic transmission in favour of manual processes that are easier to manipulate. His concern becomes even more compelling when viewed alongside previous assurances from both INEC and the Nigerian Communications Commission that network coverage across Nigeria is sufficient to support electronic transmission in most locations. If the infrastructure exists, why should the law leave such a wide escape route?
Another issue that deserves far more public attention is the removal of qualification as a ground for challenging an election after the polls. At first glance, this appears to be a legal adjustment buried deep inside legislative language. It is far more significant than that. Nigeria’s Constitution prescribes minimum qualifications for those seeking elective office. If questions later arise about forged certificates or false declarations, should citizens simply accept that such matters can no longer form the basis of an election petition? Jega himself questioned the logic behind the amendment and suggested that it could unintentionally create room for certificate fraud and other forms of qualification abuse. In a democracy where trust in public institutions is already fragile, reducing scrutiny over who is legally qualified to govern may prove more damaging than lawmakers anticipated.
Perhaps the most important part of Jega’s intervention has received the least public attention. He is asking Nigerians to rethink the structure of election management itself. He argues that INEC currently performs too many responsibilities under one institution. It organises elections, regulates political parties, manages voter registration, and carries enormous administrative burdens. He recommends creating separate institutions to prosecute electoral offenders, regulate political parties, and manage constituency delimitation while allowing INEC to focus on conducting elections. This is not a new proposal. Similar recommendations appeared in the Electoral Reform Committee chaired by the late Justice Mohammed Uwais after the deeply disputed 2007 elections. Nearly two decades later, many of those recommendations remain largely unimplemented. Reform, it seems, is one of Nigeria’s favourite discussions and one of its slowest actions.
The greatest threat to Nigerian democracy may not be ballot box snatching, vote buying, or election day violence. It may be public exhaustion. Every election followed by litigation, every disputed result, every legal ambiguity chips away at citizens’ confidence that their votes truly determine political outcomes. Democracy survives because people believe participation matters. Once that belief weakens, voter apathy quietly replaces civic engagement. Professor Jega’s warning should therefore not be viewed as criticism of one administration or one political party. It is a reminder that democracies rarely collapse overnight. They weaken gradually through loopholes left unaddressed, reforms postponed, and institutions stretched beyond their capacity. If Nigeria genuinely wants the 2027 election to strengthen democracy rather than deepen public distrust, the time to repair the rules is now, before campaigns begin, before ballots are printed, and before another generation of Nigerians starts asking whether elections are decided by voters or by the loopholes hidden inside the law.
