Human rights lawyer and Senior Advocate of Nigeria, Olisa Agbakoba, has renewed his call for urgent reforms to Nigeria’s electoral framework, insisting that the electronic transmission of results must be clearly enshrined in law to safeguard the integrity of future elections.
Speaking yesterday in Lagos on the country’s electoral process, Agbakoba distinguished between electronic voting and electronic transmission of results, stressing that while the former may require broader technological infrastructure, the latter is an immediate and practical reform.
“E-voting is different from electronic transmission,” he said. “Let’s start with transmission. Transmission simply means seeing the results. Right now, they hide it.”
He explained that under the current largely manual collation system, results announced at polling units can be altered during movement to ward, local government and state collation centres.
“The presiding officer leaves the polling unit and goes to the ward collation centre. Are you going to follow him? In between, the results can change. By the time it moves from ward to local government to state, it has changed. That’s the problem,” he stated.
Agbakoba noted that although the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) had issued guidelines providing for electronic transmission, the absence of explicit statutory backing in the Electoral Act created legal uncertainty.
According to him, a Supreme Court ruling invalidated reliance on INEC guidelines where such provisions were not expressly stated in the law, thereby weakening the push for digital transmission.
“In fairness to INEC, they made guidelines. But the court held that those guidelines are not in the Electoral Act and therefore cannot override the Act. That was a big setback,” he said.
He warned that unless the National Assembly amends the Electoral Act to make electronic transmission mandatory and unambiguous, the country would continue to witness disputes arising from manual collation.
“What I want to see is simple: if you vote, does your vote count? That is the issue,” he added.
Agbakoba argued that transparent and real-time transmission of results would significantly reduce election petitions and restore public confidence in the system. He maintained that once results are uploaded directly from polling units and made publicly accessible, opportunities for manipulation would shrink.
He also reiterated the need to implement the long-proposed Electoral Offences Commission to prosecute those who engage in vote buying, result falsification and other malpractices.
“Since the recommendation for an Electoral Offences Commission was made years ago, nothing has happened. The beneficiaries of the current system do not want change,” he said.
The senior advocate further suggested a shift in the burden of proof in election petitions, proposing that once substantial allegations are raised, INEC should be required to demonstrate that it complied with electoral laws and procedures.
Until such reforms are implemented, he cautioned, Nigeria’s elections would remain vulnerable to what he described as “magomago” — manipulation and avoidable controversy.
“We don’t yet have a perfect Electoral Act. Until we fix it, these problems will continue,” he said.
