When I think around the 2027 election, I see President Bola Ahmed Tinubu as a man trying to enter his own house by jumping over the fence. You will get in, of course, but your neighbours will call the police, and the whole world will wonder why jump over the fence if it is your own house? This is the ultimate challenge of the 2027 election, and it is called legitimacy.
Consider first, Nigeria’s 2023 election. It was not a perfect election, and a perfect election is impossible in present-day Nigeria, given our high levels of social indiscipline. But by most measures of electoral integrity, the 2023 election was legitimate. It was legitimate, first and foremost, because it was competitive. For example, in January 2022, about a year before the election, there were effectively only two major political parties in Nigeria, the ruling APC and the main opposition PDP. Following party primaries by June 2022, there were effectively four major candidates from four different parties in competition for the presidential election.
When presidential contenders like Peter Obi and Dr Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso felt the PDP platform would not sufficiently meet their electoral ambitions, they simply moved their supporters to other parties. The EFCC and the ICPC did not go chasing after them, to stymie their chances or distract their efforts in the name anti-corruption. The courts did not issue any spurious judgments that ultimately constricted the political space for opposition parties and their candidates. The late President Muhammadu Buhari did not interfere with the process.
Above all, the electoral umpire, INEC, did not de-register or refuse to recognise the leaderships of any opposition parties. INEC did not favour particular factions of parties or selectively uphold court judgments that, regardless of their legal merits, merely end up favouring only the ruling party. In fact, going into the election, Nigeria ended up with a genuine multi-party system composed of several strong parties and candidates in respective races throughout the country. All of these not only affirmed the competitiveness of the electoral process, but also reinforced the legitimacy of the eventual outcome, namely that the APC won the election fair and square. Today, by contrast, Nigeria effectively has only one political party only a few months before the election, thereby rendering any idea of legitimacy of the process completely mute.
Secondly, the 2023 election was legitimate because the institutional reputation of INEC and of its leadership was in very good standing throughout the period leading to election day. This is important. The level of confidence that voters, observers, parties, and all other national and global stakeholders have in INEC particularly and in the general political environment before election day is one of the most important measures of election integrity and legitimacy. How that reputation holds after the election is an entirely different issue, which I address shortly.
When APC politicians suggested that the electronic transmission proposed in the electoral bill 2022 should be hosted by the Nigeria Communications Commission (NCC), an agency the government controls, Nigerians rejected the suggestion. Nigerians insisted, instead, that INEC should host the transmission. Also, in her keynote speech at the 20th Daily Trust Dialogue in January 2023, which I moderated, then U.S Ambassador to Nigeria, Mary Beth Leonard, said among other things that the “The United States has full confidence in INEC and its ability to organise and conduct credible and transparent elections.” Her statement was widely reported in the news, and without any pushback from any quarters at the time.
Both of these events clearly show that Nigerians and international observers had strong confidence in INEC up to election day in 2023. Today, however, the integrity of INEC and its leadership, as neutral arbiters of the election process, is already being seriously and strenuously called to question, even by those who would otherwise support the government. These reputational problems of INEC are to the extent that, for the legitimacy of the 2027 election, the continuing stay in post of its chairman is simply no longer tenable.
At first glance, the constriction of Nigeria’s political space appears to be driven by multiple actors like the courts, anti-corruption agencies, and the internal crises of opposition parties that are allegedly driven by the ruling party. But these factors, even combined, are not decisive. They only become electorally consequential when the electoral management body, INEC, fails to act as a neutral umpire counterweight. And importantly, this is a question of perception because ultimately, it is INEC that determines whether the rules of the game remain fair, open, and credible, regardless of the merits of court judgments it now claims to be following.
This is why INEC’s current posture is so critical. Its apparent readiness to implement court decisions that reshape party leadership, combined with its ambiguity on key issues such as electronic transmission of results, sends a troubling signal. Even if these actions are legally justifiable, the cumulative effect will delegitimise the entire process. Once INEC is perceived to be narrowing the political space for everyone but the ruling party, electoral legitimacy would be lost even before any votes are cast, regardless of whatever court judgments.
Third, the 2023 election was also legitimate because it was largely free and fair. The manufactured controversy over the 2023 election was a classic example of election denialism, much like the U.S 2020 presidential election, which Donald Trump lost but insisted he won. For Nigeria in 2023, that controversy rested on a mathematical impossibility: the idea that a party that splits into three (the PDP) would have any one of the splinters as winner.
Otherwise, the 2023 election stands on solid data as a consolidation of the increasing improvements in Nigerian elections since 2011. For example, the margin of victory between the winner and the loser is a useful guide for indicating fraudulent elections in Nigeria. In 2003, the gap between the winner and loser in the presidential election was 12 million votes. In 2007, it was 18 million votes. By contrast, in 2015 and 2019, the gap between Buhari and then President Jonathan and former Vice President Atiku Abubakar, respectively, had narrowed to just under three million. This indicates that vote padding and vote inflation had significantly reduced in our elections in 2015 and 2019. In 2023, the gap was less than two million votes.
The number of seats won by opposition parties in an election is also another indication of fairness of the process in Nigeria. In 2023, Nigerian opposition parties had their best election, ever. Five parties that were almost unknown before the election (LP, NNPP, SDP, ADC, ADP) won a total of 70 National Assembly seats for the very first time in their history. NNPP and LP won governorship seats, while seven incumbent governors lost senatorial bids. Thus, even though the election was challenged legally and narratively, its legitimacy remains intact.
This is my whole point today, to reiterate that this is how to win an election. That is, to win in a manner that preserves and reinforces the legitimacy of the outcome. As an incumbent in a patronage political system like ours, President Tinubu should still be able to win in an open and fair contest. Instead, the President has elected to follow a convoluted bandit-strategy that does nothing but simply throw the baby away with the bathwater.
If current trends of destroying the opposition and emasculating the political space continue to election day, there would be no controversy in 2027, because there would have been no contest at all. Tinubu would simply have won. But he would also have lost Nigerian democracy, and certainly with it, his place in history. A word, as they don’t say, is enough even for the unwise.
