The Act No One Read

Most of us think an election ends on election day. For a lawyer, Kolade Adegbola reminds us, it ends at the Supreme Court. Ahead of 2027, Nigeria has a brand new Electoral Act, and almost no one has read it. So Kolade did, and walks Jii through what actually changed.

The funding INEC gets to run the entire country, cut from twelve months to six. NIN added as valid voter ID. A voter's card you can now download and print, convenient, and quietly exploitable. Candidate lists that can stay secret until two months before you vote. On each one, the same question: real improvement, or an act written so the election favours whoever wrote it? No legal advice, just an attempt to know the rules before they are used on us.

Read Kolade's essay at inskriba.com. How We Live is an Inskriba production.

Jii: Welcome, welcome. It is good to have you again.

Kolade: Thank you for having me. Nice to be here.

Jii: We are here to talk about something a lot of people might not know much about, or have much interest in: the back end, the part that actually controls how an election goes. I remember the first time I was able to vote, I did not think about this side of it at all. I just went out and voted and moved on. But an election is guided by certain rules.

Kolade: By the Electoral Act, and the Constitution. The Constitution is also part of it.

Jii: Is the Constitution referenced in the Electoral Act?

Kolade: Yes, most definitely. Of course I have not explored the entire Act, because it is a lot, but the Constitution is referenced. There are provisions of the Constitution that set out the requirements for eligibility for a governor, a president, House of Reps, Senate, the whole executive. So the Electoral Act definitely references it, though I have not explored the entire sections.

Jii: So what made you write on this, and go into research mode? First, do you want to introduce the essay, so people know what we are talking about?

Kolade: The essay is about the reforms in the Electoral Act. Under President Buhari, Nigeria enacted the Electoral Act of 2022. Earlier this year, the National Assembly passed the bill to repeal it, and President Tinubu signed the new Electoral Act into law in 2026. That Act is what governs elections in Nigeria, top to bottom, from the presidency down to the councillor elections.

Kolade: I decided to study it because, in legal circles, there was a lot of discussion: does the new Act improve elections in Nigeria, or not? So I went into it to see what is actually there, whether anything moves the needle. That is basically what I did in the article: to see what the innovations are, what the new things are, what the Act has for Nigeria especially ahead of the 2027 elections.

Kolade: And why did I do that? Because I also felt that the 2027 elections are nearby already, and there is a new act, so we just need to know how the elections will go in the light of this new act. We have a new sheriff in town, and how will the elections go, what should we expect?

Kolade: Because for the general electorate, an election ends on election day. But for lawyers, an election ends at the Supreme Court. That is where elections really end. So the Electoral Act is a much bigger concern to me, because if I have looked at what is in the Act, I would be able to have it in mind when the election petitions come. And they will definitely happen, Nigerian politicians will definitely go to court on elections. So when the disputes start coming in, and people start making funny arguments in court, and there are funny judgments in court, it is worth putting out there that this is what the new Act asks for. It is just to inform and educate people ahead of the elections, and the litigations that will come after.

Jii: I do not think a lot of Nigerians, myself included, understand what civic duty means when it comes to what is consequential to our lives. Like I said, before, I never thought about the Electoral Act. I thought it ends at the election: you voted, move on. But there are guidelines that guard every election in Nigeria, from the presidency down to the grassroots.

Jii: I like that you took your time and read it, because not everybody is interested in reading it. And the result of you reading it and coming out to say, this is what I found, without necessarily taking a side, just bringing out the main points. We will go over the observations you have made and talk through them. There is no legal advice here, no this is what you should do. We are just talking about this to enlighten not just ourselves but the public, because these things are important.

Jii: I think I will throw out a questionnaire very soon where we ask people if they know about the Electoral Act. I did not know about it until you wrote it. I want to see how many people on average know about the Electoral Act. Not just know about it, but know what it contains, at least to a degree.

Jii: So from the article, which we put in the description, it is on Inskriba. I like the way the first part goes: the new reforms in the Electoral Act have drawn a lot of criticisms. Like many things in Nigeria, there is always criticism. Nigerians do not trust the government. They always think there is something hidden.

Kolade: There is always an ulterior motive somewhere.

Jii: Exactly. And you say, I have made a list of a few of the reforms, contributing my quota to the enlightenment of the general populace ahead of the 2027 elections. Especially because the election is very early in the year, literally the first month.

Kolade: Yes, first month. I think the second or third week.

Jii: So that election is going to determine how the year goes. And not just the year, the next four years. So we will start with timeline for election funding.

Kolade: Between the 2022 Act and the 2026 Act, the timeline talks about when election funds should be released to INEC. In the article I only mentioned what the 2026 Act says. Section 3 says election funds must be released to INEC not later than 6 months. But the 2022 Act said not later than one year.

Kolade: So what that means is that under the 2022 Act, INEC had one year before the election to get funds and use them for everything they need to do: manpower, logistics, and so on. But under the 2026 Act, INEC has just 6 months. Essentially, under the 2022 Act, the federal government must have disbursed funds to INEC since January this year. But under the 2026 Act, the federal government has up to about June this year.

Kolade: So if funds were disbursed to INEC in June this year, INEC has from now till December to be prepared for the elections. Personally, I do not think the reduction in the time is good enough, because Nigeria is a very big country.

Jii: It says here there are exactly 8,809 electoral wards, also known as registration areas, in Nigeria. These wards are divided across 774 local governments, with each local government containing between ten and twenty electoral wards. And now, like you said, INEC has six months to prepare to service those.

Kolade: I think the reduced time is not so good, because I am worried. They need manpower, time to gather manpower, time to gather logistics, to send the BVAS equipment, to provide security across the entire country. I do not think six months is enough for that. Considering that in doing all of this, it is not like everything will go smoothly. INEC will definitely encounter challenges.

Kolade: I really do not know why the time for the disbursement of election funds to INEC was reduced. I really do not know. But if we are now to look at it politically, an average Nigerian critiquing it might say the government probably just, because it is almost looking like they intentionally want to reduce INEC's effectiveness. Because they need time to prepare for the election adequately. The reduction of the time will inhibit INEC's ability to be prepared fully, and there might be things they have to do at the last minute. It might affect how well INEC will be able to conduct the elections.

Jii: Any successful infrastructure, any successful system or framework, needs money. And it does not just need money, it needs access to the funds early enough to operate well.

Jii: So the repealed Electoral Act had 12 months. This reduced timeline of the release of funds can affect execution. Like I said, 774 local governments, 8,809 wards.

Kolade: I just verified the polling units now. We have 176,917 units.

Jii: So you need to reach all of those, and we are not talking about anything straightforward. I am thinking about it as a random average person who does not know anything about how INEC disburses. You disburse from maybe Abuja, and then it goes to the states.

Kolade: The idea is it goes to the states, the wards and the polling units.

Jii: So I am looking first at recruiting, because I know from the last election they recruit volunteers from NYSC. The infrastructure of doing all those logistics needs to start way earlier. From the previous election, 12 months was not enough to prepare. And now we are reducing it to six months. I am not saying there is anything fishy, I am just saying the time is not enough. For remuneration of electoral officers, transportation, logistics, setting up. Because even within that time you need to plan for, have we set up what I would call disaster recovery? If something happens, are we prepared? Is six months enough to prepare for what we do not know can happen?

Jii: Thank you for writing this, for us to know what is in it. Because what happens is someone brings it up that we did not have enough time, and someone who has not read this will say, did you not have 12 months? And they say no, we did not have 12 months, we had 6 months. And everybody is going to look and say, when did this happen?

Kolade: Yes, because this issue might eventually come up in election petitions. In elections, people sue INEC alongside political parties, alongside political candidates. So it will definitely come up in election petitions too.

Jii: So the first one: timeline for election funding has reduced from one year to six months. Let us now go to means of identification for voter registration.

Kolade: Section 10(1). I think the difference between the 2022 and 2026 Act is just that the 2026 Act now includes NIN. The 2022 Act did not have that. I think that is a good innovation actually.

Kolade: There is an act, the NIMC Act, and the agency in charge just made an act this year also. So I think the federal government is kind of making an effort to harmonise the database of every Nigerian across the different places a database is needed. So I think it is a positive improvement that they included NIN as part of the means of identification for voter registration. Because that is just one of the many things we need NIN for now. JAMB students, WAEC students, they use NIN. Opening an account at a bank, you use NIN. Basically almost everything you want to do, you need NIN. The Act has now included voter registration as part of what we need NIN for, towards the goal of harmonising data and information.

Kolade: I have heard from colleagues that this new NIMC Act has some very wonderful innovations. Because Nigerians have always complained: why is it that to get a driver's licence I have to provide all my details, and then after the driver's licence, if I want to apply for an international passport I provide the same details again, and I want to apply for this, I provide the same details again. You should have a unified database where that can just be pulled out. So just by providing your NIN number, different government agencies can pull out anybody's details. You do not need to keep providing the details like that. I think it is a good innovation.

Kolade: And also, an NIN creates a unique identity for each person. I do not know how the technology will be done, but since everybody has a unique NIN, it should in some way reduce impersonation in voter registration. So I think it is a positive improvement.

Jii: I was looking at the NIMC Act 2026, and like you said, database harmonisation enables secure interoperability across ministries, departments and agencies, MDAs, synchronising the database to reduce identity fraud. I agree. Adding NIN, because that is what most people have access to, is a step forward, especially for young Nigerians for whom this is their first time voting, this is when they became eligible. Most of them have access to NIN.

Jii: The only thing I have an issue with, and this is probably just my security brain talking, is, and I need to ask first: when you go for voter registration, do you just present one form of identification and that enables you, or do you need to provide two, one corroborating the other?

Kolade: The section says that applicants must provide any of their certificates, Nigerian passport, or NIN. So one of those means suffices. But we are talking about Nigeria: sometimes when you walk into the office closest to you, the officials there might need some corroborating documents, some other documents to corroborate what your NIN says. More particularly because, for example, some people might have gotten married and would have changed names. They would even need to come with their birth certificate, some might need to come with an affidavit of change of name, just for their means of identification for their registration. I am just talking about what would actually play out when you walk into an INEC office, even though the Act says any of these is sufficient.

Jii: I was thinking about it because of the way Nigeria's identity system is set up. There are just so many, and this new NIMC Act is trying to bring everything together, so there is one across board. We have seen so many issues with people not remembering their date of birth. And because of the naming system, the way we name kids in Nigeria, there is the local name, which is your mother tongue name, and some people also add an English name, and some people change their names. So they have three, four names that are not consistent across different identification.

Jii: So I am thinking of most people who do not have, for example, a birth certificate. If you bring a birth certificate, you should bring another identification that has a picture. At least one of them must have a picture to say, okay, this name matches. And at this point you are just bringing NIN. Many people have made mistakes, many people do not have their correct details, the way it was set up there is so much confusion. You just bring NIN and I am saying, how am I supposed to believe that this is your identification? And this is talking from the government's part.

Kolade: I think from where the government or NIMC stands, what determines what is actually your identity, no matter the variations across different documents, is what your NIN says. What you are now obligated to do, what anybody should do, because the NIN provides for change of name, is: if you feel this my NIN is not actually how my name is spelled, or how my name is arranged, then you would have to go and change your name at NIN. But for the government, it is what they see on your NIN that is your name.

Kolade: Because also, apart from secondary school students, JAMB students, even NYSC registration now, they have also included NIN. So it is a full-scale harmonisation across all government agencies and parastatals.

Jii: When I read this, that was the first thing that came to mind. Especially with so many cyber incidents when it comes to identity in Nigeria, there are just so many loopholes people can use to exploit identity. That is the whole point of identity theft.

Kolade: We will see how they can improve it.

Jii: And just so people know, maybe voter registration will be over before this episode comes out, but if it is still on, just make sure you carry enough identification to say who you are.

Jii: The next one is the downloadable voter's card. Section 15: the Act empowers INEC to make the voter's card available in an electronic form, which will be available after payment of a fee. Section 18(1) says that when a person loses their voter's card, or it is destroyed or defaced, the person can apply to INEC for a replacement. This was not possible before?

Kolade: Yes, it was not possible in the previous Act.

Jii: I have had a voter's card since 2015, the first Buhari election. What is the difference? Is this downloadable as in I can download it and use my own printer?

Kolade: Yes, that means you can go online, get on your laptop and download it. Of course it says for a fee, so there will be a fee you have to pay, normally via Remita, and then you will be able to download it. But before this, under the 2022 Act, it was not available. You would have to apply on the INEC website, and then if it were to be issued, it would be a case of, go to the nearest INEC office to make the complaint, submit some documents, and then you can go back another day to get your actual ID card. That is how it was, if it got lost, if the card cut into two, got burnt, things like that. The point is, you would have to go to [inaudible] to get it.

Kolade: But now it is downloadable. And of course some may be asking, will I now take the soft copy to the polling unit? Of course you would still have to print it on a card. I think this is a good innovation, because it just means people do not need to move around going to the nearest INEC office to get their voter's card whenever it gets lost or destroyed.

Kolade: But then I think it might pose a problem considering Nigeria's situation, because it can be exploited. A person can just gather like 100 people who have lost their voter's cards, pay them off, download their cards for them, and now we have cards of 100 people. And it is Nigeria, that can be done. With the election in Ekiti earlier this year, we saw videos where random voter's cards were handed out to random persons in the neighbourhood. Because Nigerians do not go to collect their voter's cards, INEC has thousands of uncollected cards already. So someone can also take advantage of that. But the fact that there is a loophole to take advantage of does not mean overall it is not a positive improvement, because I still think it is.

Jii: I will just look at the difference between the 2022 and 2026 Act. It says registered voters can now legally download and print a copy of their voter's card if their physical card is lost. Like you rightly said, I have a problem with that from the security side, identity theft, impersonation point of view. Because one of the reasons you need your PVC, permanent voter card, is that there are security measures on the card that tell you this is legitimate.

Jii: You go to certain places and they are looking at your driver's licence: is this fake or not? There are security measures. And I expect that that is what is in the PVC. But now, if I can print it from any PDF, they will say they will put security measures so you will not be able to change it. But a PDF is a printable file, which means it can be duplicated.

Kolade: It can be duplicated.

Jii: So like you rightly said, I get 100 people. And I do not know if there is any framework or if there is any justification required, because all it says is, if your physical card is lost you can print. Are you required to provide a police report? Is there anything like that?

Kolade: Setting proof of something, that okay, your card got lost, or maybe an accident.

Jii: Exactly. Because if it is defaced, you can say, okay, send us a copy to determine if it is really defaced before we can allow you to download this copy. Which means if anything happens we can trace back to say, this is the person that voted. So I think this is a little loose.

Kolade: On that part, we may never really know until implementation, because how it will go depends on the operations of INEC itself, which is not in this Act. It is how INEC wants to implement that internally.

Jii: I do hope they have their internal security measures to make sure this is secure. And again, we are not giving advice, we are just understanding the Act, seeing the differences between what was there before and what we have now.

Jii: Next we move on to the timeline for submission of candidates list. It is very interesting.

Kolade: Section 29(1) says that political parties must submit candidate names within 120 days before the election, but the previous Act had 180 days. So 120 days would be four months, and 180 days would be six months.

Jii: Six months.

Kolade: So previously political parties had, at the latest, six months before the election. That would be that the latest time political parties had to submit their candidates was June. Now political parties have until about August. So it means that as of today, they have not disclosed their presidential candidates and they are still within what the law says.

Jii: It also means candidates can switch parties a bit more, if they lost.

Kolade: I think the Act provides that politicians cannot switch parties. I am sure I included that here, probably that would be the second part. I got to know from conversations with colleagues, and from what I see online from colleagues, that because primaries were held recently across political parties, the people who lost in those primaries cannot change parties. They just have to stay, and that is the law on politicians. Probably that will be the second part that I write on this, some other revisions in the Act. So they cannot change parties.

Kolade: I think that is good. But this part of the timeline for submission of candidates, I think the reduction is not so good. Imagine at this time, when the election is already here, there are some political parties that have not submitted names of candidates to INEC yet, and they are still within the law.

Jii: You wrote: this reduced time will ensure that political parties settle issues faster and conduct primaries faster, and give little time for unnecessary politicking between political parties. Political parties will settle internal issues quickly and decide their party candidates since they now have less time before the election. So because the previous Act said 180 days, and now they have 120 days. You are arguing that this reduced timeline will make political parties and candidates act fast.

Kolade: Yes, and this is on submission of the candidate list to INEC.

Jii: So I would argue that they have 120 days before the election, which gives them more time to decide the candidates.

Kolade: Yes, actually. 120 days before the election. So it means that before, they would have submitted to INEC by June. But now they have until August. So it gives them more time.

Jii: We are short of parties. Honestly, I just think it gives them more time. But is that different from when the president said that everybody in his ministerial cabinet who is going to run should decide? He gave them a deadline, I think it was June 1st or something, that they had to decide if they were running for a political position. And we saw a couple of them resign and say, okay, I am running for Senate, I am running for Governor of [inaudible]. Is that the same as this, or is it different?

Kolade: I think that would be different, because that is primarily talking about people in his cabinet. In Nigeria you cannot hold two offices at the same time, you have to resign from one if you will be contesting for another. That is why the Minister of Power, Adelabu, resigned to contest a primary. So that was just for people who intend to contest within his cabinet.

Jii: I would like to disagree with the reduced time. Maybe it is just the way I see it. Because 180 days is six months, 120 is four months. With the Nigerian government, I do not see why they are reducing the timeline for submitting candidates. I think we, the electorate, deserve to know as soon as possible who is running for my party.

Kolade: That is actually in the next point. Publication.

Jii: Publication of candidates list. Section 32(1) states that INEC must publish the names of candidates submitted by political parties within 60 days before the election. Again, a reduction. Please explain.

Kolade: Within 60 days is too small, because it essentially says that INEC can decide to publish the list of candidates by October, and they will still be within the law, while the election is January. And as I said, it gives the public little time to properly scrutinise candidates, because we would have just been knowing the candidates we want to vote for two months to the election, confirmed by INEC. I struggle to see the rationale behind the reduction.

Jii: They can come and say, we just want to make sure they are well scrutinised. But like you said, there is already a provision on switching parties after you have conducted and participated in the primaries. So this is interesting. I would say at least six months, you should already know. But then again, when you think about it, INEC is only going to get funds six months to the election.

Kolade: Exactly. So I think this one is kind of a ripple effect of the fact that INEC is only getting funds six months to the election. So it then makes sense that they will publish names two months to the election.

Jii: Ripple effect. And I guess one question I have is, this Electoral Act, who builds out the framework? I am asking because I would expect that INEC is involved.

Kolade: Yes, they would be. It is basically the legislature. Probably someone would sponsor a bill, or it would be the president bringing the proposal to the legislature. And it would definitely involve INEC as an advocate. Of course, the body entitled to conduct elections would be invited to Senate sittings at times, to discuss what is best for the Electoral Act and the conduct of elections. This Act was definitely not done behind INEC's back. It could not have been. They would definitely have been invited to Senate hearings when it was still a bill, from first reading to second reading to third reading, committee stage.

Jii: Sorry for cutting you short. So you are right. It is in the 1999 Constitution, requiring collaborative action between the National Assembly and the President of Nigeria. Which already, I do not know, you are the lawyer, I can sense conflict of interest in there.

Jii: It is in the Constitution. An electoral amendment or new law begins as an electoral amendment. It can be initiated through different paths: executive bills, members' bills, or civil society. Let us first rule out the civil society and public input, I do not think Nigeria is mature enough to do that. Executive bill: drafted by the executive arm of the government, often incorporating critical operational and logistical recommendations from the Independent National Electoral Commission. Okay, so that is what you were saying, involving INEC, so it is logical. And a member's bill, sponsored by individual lawmakers or committees.

Jii: Which means the president can come and see a lawmaker and say, I want you to raise this, I want you to push a bill. I am sorry if it sounds like I am pessimistic. I do not trust Nigerian politicians or lawmakers, but the trend is there, the history is there.

Jii: But like you said, the bill becomes law. It passes through identical parallel stages in both chambers of the National Assembly, the Senate and the House of Representatives. Three readings: the bill undergoes a first reading introduction, second reading, and third reading, and committee review and public hearing.

Kolade: That public hearing part, I do not know. Probably they have some dedicated bodies that they invite, and it is probably not shown to the entire country. Or maybe it is intended, because if something is a public hearing there should be intentional publicity. But that publicity, we do not see it. We only just hear that there is a new act in town. This NIMC Act now, it gets to you and you hear that there is a new act, and the whole public hearing thing was not as publicised as it should be.

Kolade: I also wanted to say about the rationale behind the reductions in the Act: I do not know why. But the Nigerian in me is saying that there is something political. Because seeing that each administration is almost making their own electoral act, one might want to say, not to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but they are making the act in a way that will make the elections favour them. So the Nigerian might want to think in that line.

Jii: I was just checking. Since we have read how the Electoral Act comes about, I Googled to see, for this 2026 one, how did it come about, which pathway did it go through? It says the Electoral Act 2022 repeal and re-enactment bill 2026 was passed using the format of a legislative repeal and re-enactment bill, travelling through an accelerated, highly contentious process of debate, harmonisation and executive signing. And like you said, the public hearing, I did not hear about it. Maybe you did?

Kolade: I did not, honestly.

Jii: And you are in the circle where you should hear about it. So from inception and formatting, instead of a minor amendment, the piece of legislation was introduced as a repeal and re-enactment bill. This design allowed the National Assembly to completely dismantle the structural gaps found in the 2022 Act and replace them with entirely new legal frameworks, which is what your essay is basically about, regarding timelines, party primaries, and voter identification. It was debated concurrently in both chambers.

Kolade: In both houses. I guess that is the accelerated path, because normally they are supposed to start at the House of Reps, and when they are done there they now go to the Senate.

Jii: Which is supposed to ease harmonisation. We have agreed on this, now you take what you agree, let us compare the two. That is why there is provision for harmonisation. The bill was debated concurrently in both houses, which means there was not even time for lawmakers to digest and understand what they are arguing on.

Kolade: I was just going to say that there have been much more accelerated hearings. I cannot remember which bill it was. Many times when the federal government wants to borrow loans. There was one loan recently that the federal government was going to borrow, I think it was $1.6 billion, from France or something. The entire sitting was about four hours, for the government to go and borrow that. I think it is almost like the executive has the Senate at the tip of their fingers, because I was just surprised. Why were you just talking for four hours for a loan, and all of these loans have a payment duration of the next 20, 30 years, and everything was just discussed and approved in a matter of hours?

Kolade: So the diligence of the Nigerian Senate on the laws they are passing, the approvals they are giving to the executive, is very, very questionable.

Jii: What caught my eye looking at this is that the House of Representatives quickly passed a version that included the mandatory electronic transmission of election results in real time. The Senate initially rejected the mandatory electronic-only transmission, favouring the format that allowed discretion. Which means the one where you say, according to INEC's discretion, you can either upload it in real time or not. This sparked intense public backlash.

Jii: But I honestly think this was just to make it seem as if it went public, because that was the highlight. I do not think that should even be the highlight. The highlight should be the first thing, the reduction of the funding window for INEC. Why did people not talk about that? Now we are talking about mandatory uploading of the results in real time. I honestly think this was just a ploy to make it seem as if the electorate is making a decision. But this is just one of the problems with the Act.

Jii: The Senate held an emergency session on February 10 to rescind their previous vote. Like, okay, we are listening to you, we are going to rescind what we said about it being discretionary, we are going to make it real time. Because the two chambers passed different versions concerning the election timetable and technical execution, a seven-man conference committee was formed. And this happened, the Senate reversal was February 10, 2026.

Kolade: Just about a week after.

Jii: On Monday, February 16, everything accelerated. The committee met to synchronise the document. The House of Representatives adopted the Senate's guidelines, and the Senate adopted the House's stance of making electronic results transmission to the INEC results viewing portal, IReV, mandatory.

Jii: We have talked about publication of candidates list. Campaign spending limit.

Kolade: They just basically increased the whole thing. In 2022, the maximum a president was allowed to spend on campaign was 5 billion, now it is 10 billion. For a governor, before it was 1 billion, now it is 3 billion. For Senate, the maximum was 100 million, now it is 500 million. For House of Reps, the maximum was 70 million, now it is 250 million. For State House of Assembly, in 2022 the maximum was 30 million, now it is 100 million. Local government chairman, the maximum you could spend was 30 million, now it is 100 million. For councillor, before it was 5 million, now it is 10 million. Then there is also personal donation, the maximum you can donate to a candidate for their campaign. Before it was 50 million, now it is 500 million.

Jii: On that last point, when they say personal donation limit from 50 million to 500 million, is this for each candidate or cumulative? What I mean is, can I donate no more than 500 million to one candidate, or for any election cycle can I donate no more than 500 million?

Kolade: I think it will be for a candidate actually. And I do not think it would be expected that one person can donate for a PDP candidate, donate for an APC candidate, donate for an SDP candidate. So reasonably it will be for a candidate, even though the Act does not really specify that.

Jii: And I like what you said here. It says, firstly, the electoral process in Nigeria is too capital intensive. Politicians spend too much on winning elections, absolutely too much. And I am reading directly from your article: now we have an Electoral Act enlarging the limit of what they can spend. Secondly, this is a law that I personally do not expect to be enforced, because campaign finance by political parties is almost impossible to track. And that is where I was going to go next: is there a record, is there a place where we can go and check, this is how much this person donated and to what party? Because we would now be able to say this is where the allegiance lies.

Jii: From most of this, we are seeing more than a 100 percent increase in campaign spending, because the governorship is from one billion to three billion.

Kolade: Even more than 100 percent. Yes, the presidency is from 5 billion to 10 billion.

Jii: And Senate is from 100 million to 500 million, that is 5x. Why? Why this?

Kolade: I honestly cannot think of the rationale except for a political reason. Because there is no reason why anybody should say politicians should spend more money on campaigns. Why should they spend more money? What happens to the previous spending? What problem is the increased spending coming to solve? Except it is just politicians giving themselves more freedom to spend money. That is basically what it is.

Jii: To spend money to buy votes.

Kolade: I struggle to see anything in this increment that is done in consideration of the electorate. It is just basically for themselves so they can spend more. And the tracking is very difficult, because election spending is basically done in cash in Nigeria. People move heavy money in cash. Once it proceeds, people can be moving 100 million, 200 million in cash. So it is hard to track, honestly.

Jii: So the points where we can track it, which we do not even have, which is not even recorded, is from the point where it is withdrawn, which is multiple loops. They can send it to multiple accounts, they can carry different notes of withdrawal.

Kolade: It can be done through someone's business or someone's company that really has nothing to do with elections at all.

Jii: It can be done with crypto too.

Kolade: So politicians basically have multiple ways around this, and at the end of the day they just present any report they like to INEC. For presidential elections now, APC can just come and tell INEC that we only spent 7.5 billion naira, and that would be a big lie. They probably spent five times that. But they will be able to present an account that was audited by [inaudible] auditing firms, signed by the chairman of the political party, and INEC will have to accept it.

Jii: They cannot verify it. And INEC is not specifying how they are going to track it, because, being honest, I do not think INEC was part of creating this. It might be part of it by name.

Kolade: By procedure, but it is almost not like their consent was required to pass this.

Jii: You put here, for example, that there are provisions for penalising defaulters, like Section 92(10), which provides that anyone who defaults on the personal donation limit pays five times it. So they increased personal donation from 50 million to 500 million, which means now I can come and meet you and say, okay, I will fund your whole campaign with 500 million, you have to do this. It increases the leverage that whoever is funding has on the politician.

Kolade: The punishment is a fine of 250 million.

Jii: Five times the excess. Why would you even need more than 500 million naira to run an election? Why would you want to give someone 500 million? What you are going to get and what you are going to give, I guess at this point you are literally selling your soul. 500 million naira.

Kolade: Honestly, it is a lot of money. And anyone who is giving 500 million to your political candidate, what they are expecting back is at least 5x. At least.

Jii: Exactly. I am investing in you. So I give you 500 million. Even if I do not give you 500 million, now I can ask for 500 million from whoever wants to support me. It is not everybody, because this is personal, this is for each person.

Kolade: So the candidate can get 500 million from [inaudible] people.

Jii: My God. And again, I cannot thank you enough for actually reading this and writing this essay. I would not have seen it. I would not have cared. I would not have bothered to read it. And that is part of the problem we are facing in Nigeria, because people like me do not want to read this. And we have a lot of people like me who, first of all, do not want to read it, and do not even know that this thing is happening. Maybe they just heard that there is an argument on X about this. And now you have basically given us a full breakdown, at least for the first article of this.

Kolade: What I said in the last part is that I struggle to see an honest enforcement of this provision. It would just be witch hunting. For example, during election petitions, APC can come up against PDP that we have evidence that PDP exceeded the spending limit, and that is when it will actually be enforced. So it is just in that context that we actually see enforcement. Or maybe if APC eventually wins, they can also get back at the PDP party chairman, bring up that he falsified the campaign spending report that was submitted to INEC, and then they can go from there to investigating financial crimes in the political party. That is really the context in which I see how it can be enforced, considering that this is Nigeria. But honest enforcement, no, because politicians do not do this to themselves. I do not think there is any consideration of the people in the increments of campaign spending.

Jii: I remember when President Jonathan was talking about how he had no shoes, when he ran for presidency after President Yar'Adua.

Kolade: 2011.

Jii: There was a lot of talk about how there was so much money in town because of that election. It just pushed a lot of money to people, to influence people. And where we will probably suffer this as the electorate is when the election cycle closes and that money stops flowing. And then there is inflation, the economic reality, the adverse effect of the push of money into the community. And it is going to be cash.

Kolade: Because of too much cash flowing into the economy.

Jii: Real hard cash that, like we said, cannot necessarily be tracked anyway. Let us go into mandatory electronic transmission. We slightly talked about this earlier, but this is one of the major changes they made, and this was the cause of arguments in both houses that they needed to harmonise.

Kolade: This one says that election results must be transmitted through the IReV portal, not like it was done before by the presiding election officer in the polling unit. But before such transmission, the election sheet must be signed by the presiding officer.

Jii: I guess that is what we were talking about, whether there is a standard form that will be uploaded. But still, this is a result sheet that can still be cancelled, as long as it is signed.

Kolade: Yes, it can be cancelled. Because there is still some hard copy process to it, not like everything is done online. It is like they are giving two options. There is the transmission of results via the IReV portal, and there is now this Form EC8A that must be signed. The provision is that if peradventure, for some reason, the option of results via the IReV portal is not possible, then we would have to resort to that Form EC8A. So where there is a failure of electronic transmission, the Form EC8A will be the primary source of the result of the election at the polling unit. The form is raised as a backup in case the result could not be transmitted via the IReV portal.

Kolade: My main issue here is that there is no specification of what amounts to failure of transmission. Failure of electronic transmission, because it is up to the presiding officer to decide, and it can be exploited. Because for some reason some people can just stop or interfere with the transportation of the electronics needed during the election to the polling units.

Kolade: Because in the last election, in Kogi State, there were some places where INEC officials could not get to. Some people were saying the governor went to destroy one particular road that was an entrance into the state so that the commission could not access it. And those commission officials, sometimes they are attacked and their equipment stolen. So if the presiding officer could even connive with some people that these machines, you do not need them today, and he just comes up and says there was a failure of electronic transmission, so we are resorting to paper, with multiple cancellations, nobody will be left with any choice really.

Kolade: So I also feel the provision for the IReV portal is just a fluke. I feel it is just decoration really. Because whenever there is a failure of electronic transmission, the presiding officer would have to upload a Form EC8A, and what amounts to failure of electronic transmission? There is no specification. It is just what the presiding officer says.

Jii: I was looking at this. It is officially watermarked paper, sheets colloquially referred to by voters as the pink slip, divided into distinct structured data fields. It has the statistical data box for the number of voters, number of ballot papers issued and so on. But what I was particular about, because we saw it in the last election, is cancellation and alteration. Does it provide anything on alteration and cancelling?

Jii: It says yes. Nigerian electoral frameworks account heavily for physical alterations and the cancellation of results, dictating strict protocols both for the physical Form EC8A itself and within the text of the Electoral Act. EC8A does not feature a dedicated cancellation box. Instead it relies on strict anti-fraud recording protocols, no-alteration rules, which is that the presiding officer is strictly forbidden from scratching out or using correction fluid or altering numbers once they are written into the results box. Maybe this is the new Act, we will wait and see.

Kolade: Well, they can still get around this, because a lot of the alterations are not done during the day. They are done during the night. Even if in a polling unit we have the Form EC8A, some people can have their Form EC8A somewhere else.

Jii: Exactly. Which is the fresh one.

Kolade: So that even if in the polling unit there are cancellations on it, some people can just write a fresh neat one that will eventually be uploaded.

Jii: Which still goes back to your point that there is a single point of failure. Whatever the presiding INEC official says is what goes. So if they have decided, go home, at night give me a fresh one, as long as [inaudible] is the one signature required on there, which is the INEC official.

Kolade: It is his own signature and the signatures of the polling unit party agents that are present.

Jii: Okay. So it is not a single point of failure, everybody involved: the INEC official and the party agents. I must admit that maybe that helps a little bit in curbing, or creating oversight of whoever is involved.

Kolade: The fraud that could happen before.

Jii: But still. Are all party agents required [inaudible]?

Kolade: That is up to the political parties themselves. It is not INEC's business. It is only political parties that will produce a list of, okay, these are our members and supporters in whatever polling units, these are the agents in your polling units. And I do not think, apart from APC and PDP, there is any political party that can cover every polling unit. So there will be many other political parties that will literally have no agent in the polling unit. Maybe no agents in an entire ward or an entire local government.

Kolade: So in the absence of some political parties, the presiding officer can do and undo the vote of that political party in their absence. And it is nobody's fault if your party fails to produce an agent in the polling unit. It is nobody's fault but your party, and whatever happens to your candidate's votes in that polling unit, it is up to you, failure to produce an agent. So there are still multiple points of failure, there are still multiple loopholes where all of this could still be exploited.

Jii: Technical glitches which would make them revert back to.

Kolade: Resorting to using the EC8A.

Jii: Let us move on to the political party selection process. That is the last one. Section 84(1) of the Act says that political parties can nominate candidates by conducting primary elections. Section 84(2) establishes that nomination of candidates by political parties can only be by consensus or direct primaries. This means that either the party agrees on one candidate, or this provision effectively ends the indirect primaries and party delegates.

Kolade: Party delegates is essentially, during the last election, party delegates were the ones who voted, who eventually represented the party. So instead of every single registered member of the party voting, they are delegates. I think it is categorised based on maybe a political zone or by local government. It is kind of like having an electoral college, a class of people who have been voting on behalf of everyone else in the party. So they are the party delegates. And that system really makes it easier, because if a political party has like 20,000 members and you now have like 1,500 delegates, it makes it easier for the candidates to buy all of them.

Kolade: And that happened in the 2023 elections a whole lot. Delegates were charging thousands of dollars for votes during primaries. And we had embarrassing moments of some candidates who lost in primaries going back to the delegates to collect their money back. I am serious, in 2023. I paid you guys thousands of dollars so that I can win the primary election, yet I lost woefully, give me back my money. We had news like that in 2023.

Kolade: So the delegate system makes it easy for candidates in political parties to buy votes. But that has been cancelled now, and now every single party member has to vote, or can vote. Either that, or everybody in the political party. For example, if there was no election, everyone just agreed that of course Tinubu will be the party candidate for the election.

Jii: I thought they did the primary where he had 11 million votes.

Kolade: Oh yes, because I saw a convention where Tinubu was adopted as party candidate, then later they said he got 11 million votes, and I am just like, does APC even have 11 million members? Even in past presidential elections, Tinubu did not have up to 11 million votes.

Jii: He had eight point eight something million votes. You are right. But the argument is, one of the arguments is that the people who could not vote in that election have now entered voting age.

Kolade: Maybe APC has now covered more states, because APC currently has 32 governors out of 36.

Jii: Honestly, maybe this political party selection process makes it harder for you to buy votes. Now you need to go through consensus or direct primaries. I wanted to applaud this, the political selection process. Now everybody has to convince more people to vote or to agree to choose you as the flag bearer for any position.

Jii: I like how you ended it. Electoral reforms are meant to revolutionise the conduct of elections for the better. That is, make it easier to register and get a voter ID, reduce electoral corruption, take away the power from political parties and put electoral power in the hands of the people. However, if electoral laws still contain loopholes that can be exploited by political parties, then it is not a solution. We have only given ourselves a new kind of problem.

Kolade: Exactly. And these problems will really come out when it is time for election petitions. That is really the time when this electoral law will be put under the test of litigation. It will be contested, it will be argued in courts, federal courts, court of appeal, supreme court. And honestly, from where a lawyer stands, it is in court really that we will actually know the implications of the provisions of the Act in real time. We are still reading this for knowledge's sake. The real-time implications and practical application, we will see that during the election petitions. And I look forward to seeing the many provisions that will be exploited during the litigations too. Because many times you look at some arguments that lawyers give on behalf of their political candidates and you just feel like, this lawyer, you are just supporting your candidate with this argument, you know that this cannot be the truth. But since the Act leaves such loopholes, there is really nothing we can do.

Jii: And maybe the next president will come and plug the loopholes, and create small loopholes to favour themselves, because it looks like that is what all of them are doing. So if there is one thing you want people to learn from this, what would it be?

Kolade: What I want everyone to learn is that knowledge of the law that governs elections, of what we expect during the election, should inform the candidates people vote for, and what to expect during the elections, and what to expect from candidates. If you know how the election will be, based on the guiding law, then you will be able to know. It would even be a motivating factor to really get to know what a particular party is doing. How are they choosing their candidate? What is INEC doing? Just generally having more information to make an informed decision. And then to manage expectations.

Kolade: And if one is informed enough to have the expectations, then Nigerians can adequately prepare ahead of the tenure of whoever wins. For example, knowledge of all of these exploitable loopholes, these increased spendings, then as a Nigerian you just know that if this person wins [inaudible], and you just know how to make decisions for your own life. So I think that is where this knowledge can empower whoever gets to know what the Electoral Act says. And then maybe looking forward also to what judgments in election petitions will say too, because that is also part of what decides the election.

Kolade: So what I just want people to get, basically, is to be informed enough to know what can come up in elections, what they have to expect at the outcome of the election, what they have to expect in the tenure of whoever wins, and how they can properly position themselves accordingly in the light of that knowledge, to prevent surprises springing up.

Jii: Thank you very much. I really do hope, for the sake of the public, you write part two, or a continuation of this, however many parts, before the election. And like you rightly said, be informed. I will say, read. There are no stupid questions, ask questions. And let us not think about ourselves alone. It is so easy to do that, but the benefits we get from thinking about how it helps everybody is more than being selfish or self-centred. Think about the back end of how an election works, the Electoral Act, and make up your mind from your own informed opinions and conclusions.

Kolade: Informed opinions and conclusions.

Jii: Thank you very much for writing this and going through it with me.

Kolade: You are welcome.

Jii: We are looking forward to the next episode, where we talk to Sifon about the decline of voter participation. Interesting research, looking at the decline from 2015. Sifon and I talked, and now talking to you, and then all three of us will come together to talk and look at it.

Kolade: I can already look forward to that.

Jii: Thank you again. This is an Inskriba Conversation, How We Live. Hope you have gotten something from this. Ask questions, read, and make your own opinions. See you next week or some other time.

Kolade: Thank you. This was a very refreshing conversation.

Jii: Same here. Bye bye.