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| Dr. Olisa Agbakoba |
As Nigeria inches toward the 2027 general elections, a familiar tension is sharpening: the Independent National Electoral Commission’s exclusive statutory power to formally declare results versus the constitutional right of citizens and the media to report, analyse, and discuss information already in the public domain. Senior Advocate of Nigeria and former Nigerian Bar Association president Dr. Olisa Agbakoba has formalised his position in a detailed letter dated 12 October 2026 to INEC Chairman Professor Joash Amupitan (SAN).
The letter, titled “Ensuring the Right to Publish INEC’s Electoral Records in Respect of the General Elections of 2027, Pursuant to Section 39 of the Constitution of Nigeria,” argues that the commission’s authority to declare final outcomes must not be stretched into a de facto monopoly over electoral information.
Agbakoba’s intervention is not an isolated legal opinion. It builds on remarks he made days earlier at the 10th Annual Conference of the Guild of Corporate Online Publishers (GOCOP) in Lagos, where he urged the media to test the scope of Section 39 of the 1999 Constitution (as amended) in court. It also lands amid public warnings from the INEC chairman against the declaration of privately collated results, and a parallel stance by the African Democratic Congress (ADC) that its agents will document, collate, and publish polling-unit figures while clearly labelling them as independent compilations.
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The Core Distinction Agbakoba Draws
At the heart of the letter is a careful separation. INEC alone has the statutory responsibility under the Electoral Act to collate results at prescribed levels and declare winners. Nothing in that responsibility, Agbakoba maintains, should prohibit citizens or journalists from reporting figures already announced at polling units or contained in authentic electoral records — specifically Forms EC8A to EC8E — provided the reporting is accurate and does not misrepresent the official documents.
“While INEC retains its exclusive statutory responsibility for the formal declaration of results, nothing in that responsibility should be understood as prohibiting citizens or the media from reporting results that have been publicly announced at polling units or from publishing information contained in authentic INEC electoral records (Forms EC8A-EC8E), provided that such reporting is accurate and does not misrepresent the official records,” he wrote.
A citizen who accurately reports a result from an authentic polling-unit result sheet does not, by that act alone, assume INEC’s statutory role. Rather, such a person “participates in the legitimate public scrutiny of the electoral process.”
This distinction matters because Nigeria’s recent electoral history has repeatedly shown that the gap between what is recorded at the polling unit and what is eventually declared higher up the collation ladder is where public confidence erodes. The 2023 general elections offered a vivid illustration: the IReV (INEC Result Viewing) portal was meant to make polling-unit result sheets visible in near real time.
Technical failures, delayed uploads, and later disputes over discrepancies between uploaded forms and declared totals fuelled widespread suspicion. Independent analyses by media organisations and civil-society groups, including reviews of specific local government areas, highlighted mismatches that the courts ultimately resolved in favour of the official declarations, but not without lasting damage to trust.
Constitutional Foundation and Historical Precedent
Agbakoba anchors his argument in Section 39(1) of the Constitution, which guarantees every person the right to freedom of expression, including the freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart ideas and information without interference. He also points to the practical reality of the IReV portal itself: if the public can view the uploaded sheets, the value of that access is “limited” if citizens are discouraged or prohibited from discussing, analysing, reporting, or projecting what those records show. “Access should be meaningful, not merely nominal,” he insists.
He further invokes a 1984 Lagos State High Court judgment in Suit No. M/191/83, Nigeria Union of Journalists & 2 Ors. v. Inspector-General of Police & 3 Ors. In that case, the court rejected a directive restricting the media from publishing election results that had not been officially released by the then Federal Electoral Commission. The court held that the statutory authority to declare final results did not prevent journalists — or any person privileged to receive the information — from imparting accurate results already announced at polling centres.
“Where therefore a journalist is present and around and receives such information, could anyone dispute that it is his duty to impart such information? Such liberty avails not only journalists but also every person who is privileged to receive such information,” the judgment stated.
That ruling, delivered in a different political era, still offers a useful reference point. It underscores that preliminary announcements by returning officers at counting stations were not prohibited, and that accurate reporting of publicly available information did not usurp the electoral body’s final authority.
Trust Deficit and Technological Realities
Nigeria’s electoral process has long been plagued by perceptions of opacity. The annulment of the June 12, 1993 presidential election — widely regarded as one of the country’s most credible polls — remains a potent national memory precisely because the results were visible enough for the public to form a clear picture of the outcome before the process was truncated. Agbakoba references that episode to argue that transparency and public visibility of results are essential to electoral legitimacy.
Today the technological environment is different. Political parties, civil-society groups, and ordinary citizens increasingly deploy digital tools, including AI-assisted systems, to photograph result sheets, aggregate data, and produce parallel tallies. The IReV portal was introduced to meet part of this demand for visibility. Yet its performance has been uneven: delays in uploads, validation failures, and questions about whether it constitutes formal electronic transmission have limited its impact.
Subsequent amendments to the Electoral Act have sought to strengthen the legal footing of electronic processes, but operational reliability and public confidence remain works in progress.
Agbakoba therefore calls on INEC to improve the timely publication of verified polling-unit results on IReV and to establish clear procedures for addressing discrepancies between polling-unit records, uploaded documents, and collated figures.
He proposes that, where feasible, the commission set benchmarks for making information available within two hours of the close of polls or the completion of counting at the relevant stage. An electoral body whose records are open to independent assessment, he argues, is better positioned to demonstrate that its decisions rest on verifiable evidence. When citizens can compare polling-unit figures and follow the collation process, the eventual official results become more acceptable and the suspicion that declared outcomes diverge from what was recorded at the grassroots diminishes.
Parallel Voices and INEC’s Position
Agbakoba is not alone. The ADC has publicly stated that it will collate and publish independently verified polling-unit figures for the 2027 elections, emphasising that this does not replace INEC’s official process and that the figures will be clearly identified as privately compiled. The party grounds its position in the same constitutional freedom of expression that Agbakoba invokes.
INEC’s leadership has taken a more restrictive public stance. At a stakeholders’ meeting marking 100 days to the polls, Chairman Amupitan urged media organisations to resist declaring privately collated results, stressing that under the Electoral Act the authority to declare results rests exclusively with the Commission and that “it is far more important to be right than to be first.” The warning appears directed primarily at premature announcements of winners rather than the simple reporting of figures already posted at polling units.
The practical boundary between the two, however, is precisely what Agbakoba seeks to clarify.
Why This Matters Beyond 2027
The debate is ultimately about the character of democratic accountability in a low-trust environment. When results are treated as proprietary information controlled solely by the electoral commission until the final official declaration, the space for independent verification shrinks and the incentive for rumour and conspiracy grows. Conversely, when authentic polling-unit records are promptly visible and freely discussed, discrepancies surface early, public scrutiny intensifies, and the eventual official outcome — if it aligns with the primary records — gains greater legitimacy.
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Agbakoba frames his recommendations as measures intended to strengthen, rather than undermine, INEC’s authority. Clear guidance to citizens, parties, journalists, and observers on responsible reporting, combined with meaningful access to electoral records, would reduce avoidable disputes and lessen the burden on the judiciary to resolve controversies that transparency might have prevented.
As a long-time human-rights advocate, founder of the Civil Liberties Organisation, and former NBA president, Agbakoba brings both legal weight and institutional memory to the conversation. His letter is less a confrontation than an invitation for the Commission to define the rules of engagement clearly before the pressures of a high-stakes election cycle intensify. Whether INEC responds with clarifying guidelines, operational improvements to IReV, or further legal clarification remains to be seen. What is already clear is that the question of who may report what — and when — has become central to the credibility of Nigeria’s next general elections.
In a democracy of more than 100 million registered voters, the right to receive and impart accurate electoral information is not a peripheral media privilege. It is a practical safeguard for the integrity of the ballot itself.
Samuel O. Sulaimon is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of Naijapiz. He covers News, Sports, Finance, Faiths, Education, Technology.
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