By Akaninyene Esiere
The 2027 general elections in Nigeria have already been set up to fail; not because it will not hold but because it will not reflect the desires of the electorate. In the amended electoral law used to conduct the 2023 elections, the National Assembly introduced a novel system whereby the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) could carry out live transmission of votes. That law had a fusion of manual and electronic transmission of results and was meant to curb rigging.
However, INEC used the outcome of the elections to show that it was independent only in name and not indeed as it refused to rely on the foolproof electronic transmission of results and leaned on the hardcopy result sheets where results were mutilated and forged. Nowhere was this more pronounced than in Rivers State where the Presidential candidate of the Labour Party, Mr. Peter Obi won the election overwhelmingly but the INEC results showed that it was the incumbent President Bola Ahmed Tinubu who won.
Many well meaning Nigerians had thought that with the seeming progress made in 2023, the National Assembly would amend the electoral act to allow for only electronic transmission of results. Which explains why, despite the flaws and obvious bias of INEC, many still hoped that the 2027 elections would be an improvement on the last one.
They could not have been more disappointed. The National Assembly under the leadership of Mr. Godswill Akpabio has elected to dash their hopes of a better electoral system by insisting via the amended law that Nigeria is not ripe for doing things right.
As argued by Dr. Shehu Mahdi, a social critic and public commentator, in a conversation with the Arise Television last week, the Nigeria that the National Assembly says is not advanced enough to have live voting results’ transmission, is one that they want to write the West African Examination Council exams electronically, that the university admissions body conducts electronic examinations, that are encouraged to have the national identity number (NIN), to have electronic banking access, that the government credits some old citizens and students accounts electronically, to do many other things electronically. But not so when it comes to using the same technology to decide who should govern them; though we are well over sixty-five years old as an independent country, and more than two and a half decades old under unbroken civilian rule. Dr. Mahdi ended his submission this way: since the parliamentarians are biased in giving the country a bad electoral law, it is them who will one day fall victims of the same law.
As it stands, the 2027 elections have been concluded and the “winners” are most of those who will be standing for election under the All Progressives Congress, and perhaps the Wike faction of the People’s Democratic Party.
The current situation had already been foretold. For one, REFLECTIONS! had argued repeatedly that what we currently practice in Nigeria may at best be called civilian rule but certainly not a democracy. There are no democratic principles, no democratic institutions, no democratic processes and systems and certainly no democratic practitioners in Nigeria today. Apart from the strident efforts of this government to kill opposition parties and impose a one party system, the new electoral law is the nail of finality of the government to ensure that the 2027 elections are a forgone conclusion.
INEC is one of those notoriously inefficient and unreliable institutions that the citizens merely tolerate. Under the immediate past Chairmanship of Professor Mahmoud Yakubu, it lost the little credibility it had. The phrase “go to court”, which signifies that if you do not like the results of the election announced by the Commission, you could approach the court to retrieve your mandate, became a national lexicon. INEC handed over its statutory mandate to an already compromised judiciary because the electoral umpire decided not to conduct credible elections.
A major pain point in all this charade is that INEC is asking for nearly a trillion naira (N874 billion) to conduct the 2027 elections with results already well tucked away in its back pockets. Since this government came into power, the economy has been on a tailspin especially in 2023 and 2024. Admittedly, there was a breather in 2025. This year would have been used to consolidate the little gains of last year but the elections are going to pose a serious threat to the economy.
Even the Central Bank Governor, Olayemi Cardoso, agrees that the election and electioneering campaign spendings will stand in the way of economic recovery and growth. One is tempted to ask why waste our time,
human, material and financial resources to carry out an exercise whose outcome has already been predetermined?
Last Friday, INEC released its 2027 elections timetable fixing the presidential and National Assembly elections for Saturday, February 20, 2027 and the governorship and state assembly elections for Saturday March 6, 2027. The timetable is in itself another big flaw. Given what happened in 2023 especially in Lagos state where the Labour Party presidential candidate won the election and voters sympathetic towards the party were prevented from voting during the governorship election, all elections should have been conducted in one day.
This awkward journey of electoral processes is not peculiarly Nigerian; it is an African problem. The philosophy of democracy as practiced in the Western Hemisphere is alien to Africa. We do not understand how an incumbent president or governor could lose an election which is why you still have the Paul Kagames, the Paul Biyas, the Yoweri Musevenis and the likes. Even in Donald Trump’s America, democratic credentials are beginning to fade. REFLECTIONS! has argued repeatedly that the current political system is fundamentally flawed and, hence, incapable of delivering good governance not only in Nigeria but also in the entire continent of Africa. It is now a moral imperative for African scholars to brainstorm on the system or set of systems of governance for the continent. Western democracy is a financial albatross around the neck of Africa.
**Esiere is a former journalist!
©️2026
