NIGERIANS love a good buzzword. We grab onto one, hold it tight, and convince ourselves that once we crack that one code, the country will transform overnight into Singapore. We did it with sovereign national conference. We did it with restructuring. And now the latest silver bullet? Electronic transmission of election results.
Before the political class lights up social media with accusations of me being anti-democracy, let me state clearly ,I support anything that makes our elections cleaner and more credible. Any sane Nigerian should. But I have a problem with how we approach these things. We treat every new reform like it’s the Messiah that will save us from ourselves, and when it doesn’t deliver paradise, we move on to the next buzzword and start the cycle all over again.
Let me start from the beginning. The most trending political topic in the last one week has been the Electoral Act amendment bill, and the most contentious part was the Senate’s decision to remove the provision for mandatory real-time electronic transmission of results from polling units to INEC’s Result Viewing Portal. Senate President Godswill Akpabio at a book launch on Saturday admitted with the casual confidence of a man who knows he has the numbers that lawmakers deliberately struck out the provision during clause-by-clause consideration. His reason? Network failures could lead to legal disputes during elections.
Now, that explanation is not entirely bogus. Nigeria’s telecoms infrastructure is patchy at best. According to the Nigerian Communications Commission, mobile network coverage is still inconsistent across several rural areas, particularly in the North East and parts of the South South. Anyone who has tried to make a phone call in some parts of Borno or Bayelsa knows this is not fiction. But here’s where Akpabio’s argument falls apart ,the solution to potential network failure is not to scrap electronic transmission entirely but to build in safeguards for when technology fails. You don’t throw away the car because of a flat tyre, you carry a spare.
The removal of the clause sparked outrage. Peter Obi, the Labour Party’s 2023 presidential candidate, led protesters to the National Assembly on Monday carrying placards that read “Akpabio don’t destroy our democracy” and “Stop betrayal of the ballot.” Civil groups under the banner Enough is Enough mobilised on social media with the hashtag #OccupyNASS.
And the pressure worked or at least appeared to. By Tuesday, in what felt like a political fire drill, the Senate held an emergency session, rescinded its earlier position, and passed an amended Clause 60(3) allowing electronic transmission of results from polling units, with a caveat: where the technology fails, the signed Form EC8A becomes the primary source of results.
So the Senate buckled. Good. But let’s not throw a party just yet.
My concern is that we are celebrating the container while ignoring what’s inside it. Electronic transmission of results is a tool, not a cure. And I say this because we have been here before. Remember when INEC introduced the card reader and biometric voter accreditation system? It was going to be the death of ballot box snatching and multiple voting. And to be fair, it did reduce those particular crimes significantly. But what happened next? Our ever-adaptive politicians simply shifted the fraud upstream. They couldn’t stuff ballot boxes anymore, so they started buying votes right at the polling units. In broad daylight. With cash. Like they were selling tomatoes at Wuse market.
In some constituencies during the 2023 elections, vote buying was so brazen that agents were handing out cash in open view of security operatives. A 2023 report by the Centre for Democracy and Development noted widespread incidents of vote buying across multiple states, calling it “the new normal in Nigerian elections.” We plugged one hole and the water found another crack. That is what happens when you focus on systems and ignore the characters operating those systems.
And let’s talk about 2023 specifically, because the electronic transmission argument has a hole that nobody on the protest line seems interested in discussing. INEC actually used electronic transmission of results in several gubernatorial elections that year. The results were uploaded to the IREV portal. And yet and this is the part that should give every honest reformer pause candidates who lost those elections still alleged rigging. They still went to court. They still claimed democracy had been murdered and buried in a shallow grave.
This is the pattern. When our politicians win, the election was free, fair, and a testament to the will of the people. When they lose, INEC is compromised, the system was rigged, and democracy is under siege.
Electronic transmission does not fix that mentality. No technology does.
Some will argue and it’s a fair point that electronic transmission at least provides a verifiable trail that makes it harder to alter results between the polling unit and the collation centre. I agree. That transparency layer matters. But we should be honest about its limits. If the numbers are cooked before they get entered into the system, transmitting them electronically just means you’re sending doctored results faster. The real fraud in Nigerian elections increasingly happens at the point of voting through inducement, intimidation, and voter suppression not necessarily during transmission.
So what should we actually be doing? Three things.First, INEC needs the political will and funding to prosecute vote buyers. Not warnings. Not press statements. Actual prosecution. The Electoral Act already criminalises vote buying with fines and imprisonment. Between 2015 and 2023, how many politicians were convicted for buying votes? You can count them on one hand and still have fingers left over. Laws without enforcement are just suggestions.
Second, we need to invest in voter education at the grassroots level. A significant portion of the electorate, particularly in rural areas, doesn’t fully understand how their vote connects to governance outcomes. When a voter collects N5,000 to vote for a candidate who will steal N5 billion from the treasury, that’s not a technology problem. That’s an education and poverty problem. And until we address it, no amount of electronic wizardry will save us.
Third and this is the uncomfortable one we need to stop treating every electoral reform as the final solution and start building a culture of credible elections over time.
Countries with strong democracies didn’t get there with one magic law. They got there through decades of incremental improvements, institutional strengthening, and above all, a political class that gradually accepted that losing elections is not the end of the world.
As for Peter Obi leading protests at the National Assembly, I respect any citizen’s right to demand better from their lawmakers. That is democracy at work. But I will say this protests and hashtags must be matched with sustained civic engagement beyond election cycles. The #OccupyNASS energy is commendable. But where is that energy when local government elections are being rigged wholesale by governors across the 36 states? Where are the placards when state electoral commissions hand laughable victories to ruling party candidates at the local level?
Selective outrage is the enemy of genuine reform.Let me be clear so nobody misquotes me. I want electronic transmission of results. I want every vote counted and verifiable. I want INEC to have every tool available to deliver credible elections. But I refuse to join the chorus that pretends this is the magic wand. Our problem has never been the absence of a single reform. Our problem is a political class that treats every system like a puzzle to be gamed and a populace that keeps looking for that one big thing that will fix everything.
There is no silver bullet. There is only the slow, unglamorous work of building institutions that are stronger than the men who run them. Electronic transmission is one brick in that wall, not the wall itself. The sooner we accept that, the sooner we stop celebrating half-measures and start demanding the full package.
- Nda-Isaiah is a political analyst based in Abuja and can be reached on jonesdryx@gmail.com. His syndicated column appears on News Point Nigeria newspaper on Saturday.