“ If you conduct an election, announce a winner, and ask the nation to accept the result, you cannot disappear when that result is challenged. Yet that, too often, is what has happened in Nigeria.”
An Election Ends Twice
Every election in Nigeria ends twice. The first ending is on election night, when results are announced, supporters celebrate, and losers concede or grumble. The second ending is months later, in a tribunal or court, when those results are either confirmed or overturned. It is in that second ending that our democracy is most fragile, and it is there that a simple, democratic principle has been repeatedly violated: the body that conducted the election has not always stood up to defend it.
I write this not as a lawyer. I am a political scientist. I am not interested here in technicalities of pleadings, rules of evidence, or the fine print of the Electoral Act as a lawyer would read it. I am interested in something more fundamental: power, accountability, legitimacy, and trust. From that standpoint, the argument is straightforward. The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) should be the major defendant in election petitions in Nigeria. Not a nominal party. Not a reluctant witness. Not a bystander that files a token defense and leaves the real fight to the declared winner. The major defendant.
The reason is not legal pedantry. It is democratic logic. INEC is the only institution that organised the election, controlled the materials, deployed the technology, trained the officials, collated the results, and pronounced the outcome. When a petitioner says, “This election was not credible,” the quarrel is, first and foremost, with INEC. The declared winner is a beneficiary of INEC’s process, not its author. To make the winner the principal defender of the election is to confuse the beneficiary with the manager. It is like asking a student who was awarded a first-class degree to defend the integrity of the examination, while the university that set, marked, and moderated the exam stays silent.This article makes that case in full. It begins with the problem as Nigerians have lived it, sets out ten reasons from the perspectives of a political scientist, not just seven, why INEC must be the major defendant, explains what that would mean in practice, answers the objections honestly, places Nigeria in comparative perspective, and ends with a concrete reform agenda for the National Assembly, the judiciary, INEC itself, and citizens
The Problem We Have Lived With
The history is familiar to any Nigerian who has followed elections since 1999. A petitioner goes to the tribunal alleging over-voting, non-compliance with the Electoral
Act and INEC guidelines, manipulation of results at collation, failure to transmit results electronically, or disenfranchisement through malfunctioning accreditation devices. To prove the case, the petitioner needs documents that only INEC has: certified true copies of result sheets (Forms EC8A for polling units, EC8B for wards, EC8C for local governments, EC8D for states, and EC8E for the national collation), the voters’ register, accreditation records, Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) reports, INEC Result
Viewing Portal (IREV) uploads, and other materials generated in the custody of the Commission.
Time and again, petitioners and their counsel have complained publicly and in court that INEC was slow, evasive, or outright unwilling to supply those documents within the time the tribunal allows. Sometimes documents arrived late, incomplete, or in a form that was difficult to use. Sometimes officials who should have testified did not appear, or appeared without the records. Sometimes INEC’s legal team adopted a posture of studied neutrality: it did not oppose the petition, it did not support it, it simply “left it to the tribunal.”
We do not need to resolve every individual allegation to see the structural problem.
When the custodian of evidence is not compelled to defend its own work, the petitioner is forced to fight with one hand tied behind his back, while the institution that could clarify the facts watches from the sidelines. The result is not merely unfair to a candidate. It is corrosive to public trust. Citizens watch the process and conclude, rightly or wrongly, that the system is designed to protect itself rather than to reveal the truth.
What Petitioners Actually Need: and Why Only INEC Can Provide It
It is worth pausing to be concrete, because the abstract phrase “electoral materials” hides how decisive these documents are. A petitioner who alleges over-voting, for example, cannot prove it from his agents’ copies alone. He needs to compare thenumber of accredited voters recorded by BVAS with the number of votes recorded on the EC8A. If BVAS says 180 people were accredited but the result sheet says 350 votes were cast, something is wrong. But only INEC holds the authoritative BVAS accreditation report and the certified EC8A. Without both, the tribunal is left to guess.
Result sheets (EC8 series): the primary evidence of what was recorded at each level, and where figures changed between levels.
BVAS accreditation data: the electronic record of how many voters were actually accredited: the check against inflated votes.
IREV uploads: the scanned result sheets as uploaded from polling units: the check against later alterations.
Voters’ register and PVC collection records: the check on who was entitled to vote, especially now that artificial intelligence voters have populated the voters register
Collation records and incident reports: the explanation for cancellations, corrections, and reruns. When any of these is withheld or delayed, the petitioner’s case is not merely weakened; it is often rendered unprovable within the strict timelines for election petitions. That is why the question of who must produce documents is not a side issue.
It is the issue.
1.2 The Pattern of Refusal and Delay
In election after election, the same complaints have recurred. In some petitions, INEC has been accused of demanding exorbitant fees for certified copies. In others, of supplying documents in dribs and drabs, or supplying them so late that petitioners could not analyse them before the hearing closed. In still others, INEC has been accused of refusing to call the officials who actually conducted the election: the presiding officers and collation officers, leaving a vacuum where explanation should have been.
Again, as a political scientist, I am not adjudicating any single case here. My point is institutional, not personal. Even if every individual INEC official acted in good faith, the incentive structure is wrong. An institution that is not the major defendant has little to lose by delay. An institution that is the major defendant has everything to lose by delay, because delay would weaken its own case. That is the reform we need is to align INEC’s self-interest with the public interest in disclosure.
Ten Reasons INEC Must Be the Major Defendant
From the perspective of political science, the study of how power is exercised, legitimised, and checked, there are at least ten robust reasons for this reform. The firstseven are the core democratic arguments. The last three show why the reform also serves practical, institutional, and even fiscal interests.
Reason 1: You Cannot Separate Authority from Accountability
In democratic theory, authority and accountability are two sides of the same coin. INEC exercises enormous public authority: it determines who is on the ballot, how votes are cast and counted, and who is declared elected. That authority is legitimate only if INEC is prepared to account for how it was used. A tribunal is not an academic seminar; it is the formal moment of accounting. If INEC is not the major defendant, accountability is diluted. The winner defends his mandate, INEC defends its reputation in passing, and no one fully defends the process. Democracy requires that the institution that acted must answer for its actions.
This is not a lawyer’s point about burden of proof. It is a political point about legitimacy.
A government that cannot be questioned is not democratic, even if it was elected. An electoral commission that cannot be made to answer is not independent; it is unaccountable. Independence was meant to free INEC from political interference, not from public scrutiny.
Reason 2: INEC Alone Holds the Evidence
This is the most practical reason, and the most damning. Elections produce a paper and electronic trail. That trail lives with INEC. The petitioner does not have a parallel INEC.
He cannot recreate the voters’ register, the BVAS accreditation data, or the original result sheets from his polling agents alone. When INEC is a peripheral party, it has little incentive to produce documents promptly and completely. When INEC is the major defendant, its own case depends on producing them. The incentive structure flips: withholding evidence would weaken INEC’s own defense. That is precisely what we want. A system should be designed so that the custodian of truth benefits from telling it.
Consider the alternative. We currently ask the person with the least access to evidence to prove the most difficult facts, while the person with the most access is allowed to remain passive. No other public institution is treated this way. If a citizen challenges a tax assessment, the tax authority must produce its records. If a citizen challenges a land allocation, the lands department must produce its file. Why should elections, the most consequential public act of all, be the exception?
Reason 3: The Winner Should Not Defend the Referee
Think of an election as a football match. INEC is the referee. The candidates are the teams. If a team complains that the referee was biased or that the score was wronglyrecorded, we do not ask the team that was awarded victory to defend the referee. We ask the referee to explain his decisions, produce his notebook, and show the match report. In Nigeria, we have inverted this logic. The declared winner, who has the most to lose, is left to hire lawyers, call witnesses, and defend a process he did not run.
Meanwhile, the referee, INEC often watches. That inversion creates a perverse politics:
elections become a contest between two candidates, rather than a public audit of how the state conducted a public act.
The referee analogy also exposes a second distortion. When the winner defends the election, the debate becomes personalised: “Did Candidate A really win?” When INEC defends the election, the debate becomes institutional: “Was the process credible?” The second question is the one democracy needs answered. Personal victories come and go; institutional credibility endures.
Reason 4: It Protects the Winner Too
This article is not anti-winner. It is pro-legitimacy, and legitimacy protects winners.
When a governor, senator, or president wins a petition because INEC robustly defended its own process with documents, data, and officials who can explain what happened at each polling unit, that victory is stronger. It is harder for opponents to dismiss it as a technical escape. By contrast, when a winner survives because the petitioner could not obtain documents from a passive INEC, the victory remains clouded. The public whispers, “He won because the evidence was hidden.” A winner who truly won should want INEC to prove it, openly and completely. Making INEC the major defendant gives genuine winners a cleaner mandate.
This matters for governability. A leader whose mandate is doubted finds it harder to govern, to persuade the opposition to cooperate, and to ask citizens to make sacrifices.
A leader whose mandate has been vindicated by a full, open defense by INEC can govern with greater authority. In this sense, INEC-as-defendant is not a punishment for winners; it is a service to them.
Reason 5: It Deters Malpractice Before It Happens
Institutions behave differently when they know they will have to defend themselves. If INEC officials know that the Commission will be the major defendant in every petition, that its presiding officers, collation officers, and ICT staff may be cross-examined, and that its BVAS and IREV records will be scrutinised, they have a powerful incentive to do the job properly in the first place: to fill forms correctly, to transmit results promptly, to keep the chain of custody intact. Accountability after the election shapes behaviourduring the election. A Commission that expects to be questioned will be more careful than one that expects to be ignored. This is the classic insight of institutional design: ex post accountability creates ex ante discipline. We do not need to assume that INEC officials are dishonest. We need only assume that they are human, working under pressure, with limited resources, in difficult conditions. A system that rewards careful record-keeping, because those records will be needed in court, will produce better record-keeping than a system that treats records as an afterthought.
Reason 6: It Restores Public Trust in the Electoral Process
Political scientists have long argued that legitimacy is not produced by elections alone, but by the belief that elections are fair. In Nigeria, voter turnout has been declining, and cynicism about elections is widespread. Many citizens believe, rightly or wrongly, that “the result is already written.” One reason for that cynicism is the perception that INEC is untouchable: it announces results and then retreats. When INEC stands in the dock, metaphorically, and answers questions, produces documents, and explains discrepancies, citizens see a state that is willing to be checked. That visibility matters.
Trust is not restored by press releases. It is restored by institutions submitting themselves to scrutiny.
Trust, once lost, is not restored by telling citizens to trust more. It is restored by showing them the process. An INEC that defends its elections in the open is an INEC that is teaching citizens, election by election, that their votes are taken seriously enough to be defended.
Reason 7: It Clarifies Who Is Responsible for Electoral Failure
At present, when an election is nullified, blame is diffuse. Was it INEC’s fault? The winner’s fault? The tribunal’s fault? No one knows, because no one was clearly responsible for defending the process. If INEC is the major defendant, responsibility becomes clear. If INEC wins, it has vindicated its process. If it loses because it could not produce credible records, the lesson is clear: reform the Commission, retrain its staff, fix its technology, or sanction those who failed. Clear responsibility is the precondition for reform. Without it, we repeat the same failures every four years and wonder why nothing changes.
Diffuse blame is the enemy of reform. When everyone is responsible, no one is responsible. When INEC is the major defendant, the post-election conversation becomes focused: what did INEC do well, what did it do badly, and what must change before the next election? That focus is itself a democratic gain.
Reason 8: It Reduces the Cost and Distortion of Money in PetitionsElection petitions in Nigeria are extraordinarily expensive. Petitioners and respondents spend vast sums on lawyers, witnesses, and the logistics of obtaining and analysing documents. Much of that cost is driven by the struggle to obtain evidence from INEC.
When INEC is the major defendant with a duty to disclose promptly, the cost of litigation falls for everyone. Petitioners do not need to fight for every document. Respondents do not need to duplicate INEC’s work. The tribunal does not need to spend weeks on interlocutory battles over disclosure.
This has a democratic consequence that is often overlooked. If only the very rich can afford to challenge an election, then the right to petition becomes a privilege of wealth, not a right of citizenship. By lowering the cost of proving a case, by making disclosure
the default, not the prize of a legal battle, we make electoral justice more accessible.
That is not a technical reform; it is an egalitarian one.
Reason 9: It Strengthens INEC as an Institution
Paradoxically, being made to defend itself would make INEC stronger, not weaker.
Institutions that are never tested do not learn. Institutions that are regularly tested, that must produce their records, explain their decisions, and survive cross-examination, develop internal discipline, better archives, better training, and better technology. They learn what works and what does not, not from consultants’ reports, but from the hard discipline of having to prove their work.
Over time, an INEC that defends its elections would become an INEC that conducts better elections. Its staff would know that sloppy collation will be exposed. Its ICT department would know that BVAS and IREV failures will be interrogated. Its legal department would become a repository of institutional memory, not just a litigation unit.
In short, the tribunal would become a school for INEC, a painful school, but a necessary one.
Reason 10: It Aligns Nigeria with Democratic Common Sense Elsewhere
Finally, this reform aligns Nigeria with the democratic common sense that prevails in other systems. Wherever an independent electoral body conducts an election, it is expected to account for it when challenged. The details vary, the procedures, the burden of proof, the timelines, but the principle is the same: the body that ran the election cannot outsource its defense. Nigeria should not be an outlier. We should not have a system in which the electoral commission is the most powerful actor on election day and the least accountable actor in the tribunal.
What “Major Defendant” Should Mean in PracticeTo be clear, I am not advocating that the declared winner should be removed from petitions. He or she has a direct interest and should remain a party. Nor am I arguing that INEC should be presumed guilty. The presumption of regularity should still apply:
INEC’s declared results should be taken as valid unless proven otherwise. What I am arguing for is a shift in posture, burden, and practice, a shift that can be achieved through a combination of legal reform, judicial practice, and INEC’s own institutional culture.
First, INEC should file a substantive defense in every petition, not a generic denial. It should state, polling unit by polling unit where necessary, what happened, what the records show, and why the result it announced is correct. A one-page “we deny everything” is not a defense; it is an abdication.
Second, INEC should be under a clear, enforceable duty to disclose. All relevant documents, certified result sheets, voters’ register extracts, BVAS accreditation reports, IREV records, and collation records should be made available to petitioners within a short, fixed period, with sanctions for unjustified delay. The tribunal should have the power to draw adverse inferences if INEC fails to produce documents in its custody. In plain language: if you hold the evidence and refuse to bring it, the court should be entitled to ask why.
Third, INEC should call its own witnesses. The presiding officers, ward collation officers, and technical staff who handled the election should be available to explain the process.
Their testimony is not a favour to the petitioner or the respondent; it is part of INEC’s duty to the public.
Fourth, INEC’s defence should be led by its own institutional interest, not merely aligned with the winner’s interest. There will be cases where INEC’s records support the winner, and cases where they expose errors. INEC should follow its records, not the winner’s politics. That independence is what “independent” in its name is supposed to mean.
Fifth, INEC should publish its records proactively. The best way to reduce petitions is to make the facts undisputed. If result sheets, BVAS data, and IREV uploads were published promptly, completely, and in machine-readable form, many disputes would be resolved before they reached a tribunal. Disclosure should not wait for a petition; it should be the default.
4. Answering the Objections
Three objections are commonly raised, and each deserves an honest answer. A fourth, that this reform is “too political” deserves an answer too, because it misunderstands what political science is for.“INEC must be neutral, so it cannot take sides.” Neutrality does not mean silence. A referee is neutral, but when his decisions are challenged, he must explain them. INEC’s neutrality is neutrality between candidates, not neutrality between truth and falsehood, or between its own lawful process and a flawed one. Defending its own certified result is not taking a candidate’s side; it is defending the integrity of the institution. Indeed, if INEC’s records show that a petitioner is right, a truly neutral INEC should say so. That is the highest form of neutrality: fidelity to the record, not to a party.
“This will overburden INEC.” It will burden INEC, but it is a burden that comes with the job. INEC already spends billions of naira conducting elections. Spending a fraction of that to defend them properly is not a waste; it is the cost of legitimacy. Moreover, much of the burden would disappear if INEC digitised and published its records proactively. If result sheets and BVAS data were available on IREV in real time and in usable form, many petitions would be resolved faster, because the facts would not be in dispute. The burden is heavy today precisely because disclosure is ad hoc. Systematise disclosure, and the burden falls.
“The winner can defend the election just as well.” He cannot, because he does not have the documents, the officials, or the institutional memory. He has his agents’ copies, which are useful but secondary. Only INEC can speak authoritatively about what its officials did, why a BVAS machine failed, why a result was cancelled, or why a figure changed between collation levels. To ask the winner to do that is to ask him to defend someone else’s work without access to the files.
“This is a legal matter, not a political one.” Election petitions are heard in courts, but they are about the most political act there is: choosing who governs. Lawyers will rightly debate the precise drafting of any amendment. But the question of whether INEC should be the major defendant is, at root, a question about democratic design: who should answer to the people when the people’s choice is disputed? That is a question for political science, for citizens, and for legislators, not only for lawyers. I offer this argument in that spirit, as a citizen and a scholar of politics, not as a legal practitioner.
Nigeria in Comparative Perspective Nigeria is not the only democracy to have wrestled with this question. In Kenya, the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) has been at the centre of presidential petitions, most famously in 2017 when the Supreme Court annulled the presidential election and ordered a rerun. Whatever one thinks of that decision, the process forced the electoral body to account for its technology, its result transmission, and its records in a way that was publicly visible. In Ghana, the Electoral Commission has similarly been a central party in presidential petitions, with its chairperson testifyingand its records scrutinised. In South Africa, the Independent Electoral Commission has defended its processes in court when challenged.
The point is not to copy any one country. Each system has its own rules, timelines, and burdens of proof. The point is that in each of these systems, the electoral commission is not a bystander. It is expected to be present, to produce, and to explain. Nigeria should expect no less of INEC. Indeed, given the scale of our elections — the largest in Africa, with tens of millions of voters, hundreds of thousands of polling units, and enormous logistical complexity, we have even more reason to insist that INEC account for its work in full.
There is also a lesson from countries that have failed to do this. Where electoral bodies are allowed to retreat from scrutiny, conspiracy theories flourish, losers refuse to concede, and citizens disengage. Where electoral bodies submit to scrutiny, even when it is uncomfortable the system learns, reforms, and regains trust. Nigeria has a choice between those two paths. Making INEC the major defendant is a step down the second path.
Beyond the Courtroom: A Democratic Culture
Ultimately, this is not only about tribunals. It is about the kind of democracy we want to be.
In a mature democracy, the electoral commission does not see itself as above scrutiny.
It sees scrutiny as its validation. In Ghana, Kenya, South Africa, and elsewhere, electoral bodies have learned, sometimes painfully, that their credibility depends on their willingness to open their books. Nigeria should learn the same lesson, not through another cycle of disputed elections and street protests, but through deliberate reform.
The National Assembly, in its ongoing constitutional and electoral reform debates, should consider making this principle explicit: INEC is the principal defender of elections it conducts, with a statutory duty of full and timely disclosure. The judiciary, for its part, should use its existing powers to compel production of electoral materials and to treat unjustified withholding as a serious matter. And INEC itself, under its current and future leadership, should embrace this role voluntarily, even before the law compels it. It should publish a clear protocol: what documents petitioners can expect, within how many days, and from whom.
Civil society, the media, and political parties also have a role. They should stop treating petitions as mere extensions of campaigns and start treating them as public audits.
Journalists should ask not only “Who won the petition?” but “Did INEC produce its records? Did its officials testify? Did it explain discrepancies?” Opposition partiesshould demand disclosure, not just victory. Ruling parties should welcome INEC’s defence, not fear it. Citizens should insist that their votes are not just counted, but accounted for.
For the ordinary citizen, the stakes are simple. When you vote, you entrust your voice to INEC. You do not entrust it to a candidate’s lawyers. You entrust it to a public institution that promised to count it fairly. If that institution will not stand up and show that it did, why should you believe it next time? Why should you queue in the sun, risk violence, and wait for results, if the body that counted your vote will not defend it?
That is why, as a political scientist, I insist on this reform. Elections are not private disputes between two politicians. They are public acts by a public institution, on behalf of the public. The public is entitled to a full defence.
Conclusion: Put INEC Where It Belongs
“ If INEC conducted it, INEC must d ef end it. A nythi ng less is an electi on with out an ownerandad emocracywith outaccountability.”
The time has come to put the Commission where it belongs: not on the sidelines of the petition, but at the centre of it. Let INEC bring its documents, bring its officials, bring its data, and let the truth, whatever it is, be established in the open. Only then will Nigerians begin to trust not just the winners that elections produce, but the process that produces them.
This will not solve all of Nigeria’s electoral problems. It will not end rigging, vote-buying, or violence. It will not, by itself, make INEC perfect. But it will fix a basic design flaw: that the institution most responsible for an election is the least responsible for defending it.
Fix that, and we fix the incentive to disclose, the incentive to keep good records, and the incentive to conduct elections that can withstand scrutiny. That is a modest reform with outsized democratic returns. Let us demand it in the National Assembly, in the courts, in
INEC itself, and in the public square. Let us insist that the next time an election is challenged, INEC will not whisper from the sidelines. It will stand, produce, explain, and defend. That is what independence means. That is what accountability requires. That is what democracy deserves.
Dr. Frederick Braimah is a senior lecturer in the Department of Political Science, Elizade University, Ilara-Mokin, Ondo State, Nigeria
Gatekeepers News is not liable for opinions expressed in this article; they’re strictly the writer’s.
