2027: Build your own results machinery or don’t contest – Agbakoba tells parties

Senior Advocate of Nigeria, Dr. Olisa Agbakoba, has told political parties that those unable to collect and preserve their own election results have no business on the ballot, warning that they cannot lean on the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) to prove their case in court.

Speaking on ARISE NEWS on Wednesday, Agbakoba said parties that want to challenge INEC’s declarations in 2027 must be ready to present authenticated results of their own, gathered through agents deployed across polling units.

“If you’re not ready to monitor the elections right across Nigeria, don’t go on the ballot. Or don’t complain,” he said.

He criticised the common practice of parties heading to court to ask judges to compel INEC to release results from its Result Viewing Portal (IReV), describing it as “lazy.”

In his view, party agents already sign the polling unit result sheets (Form EC8A) and should hold those records themselves.

Agbakoba explained that INEC is presumed to have acted regularly in official matters, a presumption parties can only overcome with credible evidence. A party that shows up in court with its own verified records, he said, puts the court in a position to see “something else that is coming from the same source,” which can rebut that presumption. A party without such records, he added, has “no reason to question” it.

The senior lawyer noted that this approach has never been tested in earlier presidential election petitions, but said he hopes it will change in 2027. He predicted that parties would use AI tools to pull results from IReV and produce faster tallies, and that such parallel compilations could pressure INEC to be more accurate because it would know it was being watched.

On the right to publish results, Agbakoba cited the 1984 case of NUJ v. FEDECO (INEC’s predecessor), saying it affirmed that anyone may publish results already in the public domain. INEC’s exclusive power, he said, is only to declare a winner. He added that the Electoral Act itself penalises publishing fake results, which implies that publishing genuine ones is allowed.

For media houses using AI to collate and project outcomes, he set one condition: results must come from IReV and be clearly attributed to it.