*Says “You Don’t Change the Rules Mid-Game, You Don’t Shift the Goalpost in the Middle of the Match”
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Senior Advocate of Nigeria and NBA presidential candidate, Mr Lateef Omoyemi Akangbe, has said the dust is “far from settled” on the July 18, 2026, Nigerian Bar Association presidential election, arguing that the winner secured the mandate of only 14 per cent of eligible voters, that the number of disenfranchised members was substantial enough to affect the outcome, and that the election is therefore inconclusive as a matter of settled Nigerian law.
He spoke on Channels Television, yesterday days after filing his petition before the NBA National Officers Election Appeal Committee.
Akangbe’s central legal argument rested on the arithmetic of the mandate.
“You need to have the majority of the members elect a president. And what we have is that the number of members who were disenfranchised is so substantial enough that it can affect the outcome of the election. And when you have that, the election is inconclusive. The law is settled on that in Nigeria, that once you have a number of disenfranchised members that is substantial enough to affect the outcome, therefore, you cannot say this is the winner,” he stated.
“She scored 14 per cent of the members of the eligible voters. So what it means is that you have a president who, out of 82,000 members, only had the mandate of 12,000 people,” Akangbe stated.
He then set the figures against previous cycles.
“If you combine the entire votes in that election, which is about 26,000, the previous two elections, this outgoing president, he alone scored 20,000 votes in his election, almost the total number of the entire voters in this election. The previous one scored 22,000, 4,000 short of the aggregate number of voters in this election,” he stated.
“I am saying for the image of the Nigerian Bar Association, for people looking at us, we can’t call this an election,” Akangbe stated.
Asked whether he wants the result set aside and himself declared winner, he was explicit: “No, no, it’s inconclusive. A rerun is what we’re asking for. A fresh election.”
On the portal, Akangbe gave a detailed chronology.
“Election commenced. Within 10 minutes of the commencement of the election, what happened was that the server went down. The portal went down. The advertised portal went down. That was at 12 midnight,” he stated.
“By 2:09 a.m., I had written a letter to the Electoral Committee to inform them to suspend this election given what had happened. They claimed there was a cyberattack, an unverified cyberattack, an unverified claim,” Akangbe stated.
“In any civil environment, the moment this server goes down, shuts down, the election should be suspended. You go back to the drawing board and look at things properly,” he said.
Akangbe described what followed as the core constitutional breach.
“By 7:35, we heard that another portal had been created, developed in three, four hours. They said miraculously we created another portal,” he stated.
“Now, what does the Constitution say about an electoral portal? There are safeguards in the Constitution that must be complied with. Twenty-one days before, things must be done, this must be done, that must be done. All of that was not done,” Akangbe stated.
Pressed on whether the Electoral Committee was entitled to exercise discretion, he drew the boundary: “You should not exercise discretion that takes you outside the Constitution and the guidelines. You have discretion within the bounds.”
He specified the requirements: “There are specifics that say that before the portal can be used for an election, there must be an integrity test. There must be a stress test. Same thing must be done 21 days before. It must be done in a particular manner. All that was not done.”
“Now, you go into an election, middle of the game, you’re changing the portal in the middle of the game. You don’t change the rules mid-game. You don’t do that. You don’t shift the goalpost in the middle of the game. There’s an advertised portal. It has gone down. Then there are certain constitutional safeguards that have to be met before that,” Akangbe stated.
Akangbe offered two possible explanations for the migration.
“All of that points to one or two things. One is that either you migrate into a different portal, which was not supposed to be, either that was done because of a calculated attempt to have a controlled outcome, a predetermined outcome. Or lack of competence and capacity, because in an election of this sort, it is not unforeseen that you would have cyberattacks. You build firewalls to be able to defend these things,” he stated.
He recalled that the warning had been given in advance: “We forewarned you. We warned you about the choice of the service provider, that he didn’t have the competence to carry out this election.”
Akangbe said the agreement on IT monitoring was not honoured.
“We agreed that all the participants, all the contestants would have their IT technical experts in the situation room to look at the process, look at the programs, look at the algorithm, make sure everything is well done. As at 10:00 p.m. that night, I was still calling the Chairman of the ECNBA and the President of the association to say my technical experts are here. Can you allow them to come into the situation room and carry out the inspection?” he stated.
Akangbe recounted an exchange with the NBA President on election day.
“I contacted the President of the Bar and I said to him, the 2025 class, a whole class of lawyers cannot vote. What is going on? They’ve been disenfranchised. And what he said to me was that, oh, there’s a problem with their Supreme Court Number, and I should call an NBA ICT member to rectify that for them, and they can vote,” he stated.
Akangbe placed the current dispute within a longer institutional failure.
“For too long the NBA has been an institution that is not accountable. Ever since we started electronic voting in 2016, we’ve never had an audit of the electoral process. I lead a generation of lawyers who are saying that we’re resolute, we are determined to ensure that there’s accountability in the electoral process,” he stated.
He drew the comparison with the national electoral body: “I do election petitions and I can tell you for free that even INEC post-election will allow an audit where parties will go in, get all the documents, look at all the electoral forms, both the sensitive and non-sensitive materials. But in the NBA, you’ve never had an election where there’s a postmortem to say, okay, it’s electronic. Where are the logs? What are the voting patterns? What about the program that was used? What about the algorithms? That hasn’t even been done before.”
Akangbe argued that the consequence of accepting the result extends beyond the association.
“When you marry that with the sham that happened in this shambolic election, you know that we just cannot, because what it means is that we would have lost the moral right tomorrow to call anyone to question. We’re talking about election irregularities, an election that does not comply with the guidelines of the Constitution of the association,” he stated.
Akangbe recounted an incident he said occurred shortly before the interview.
“Just before I came into the studio, the Pakistan Bar president was addressing members and they were talking about the nature of their elections in the past, which used to be acrimonious, used to be bitter, and they sat together to say, how can we find a way forward? They looked at foreign institutions. They looked at the NBA and they said, oh, that cannot work. Then they looked at ICAN and followed the ICAN model,” he stated.
“That should be troubling to any member of the association. The association that’s supposed to be the conscience of the nation, the moral compass, Pakistan has looked at our setup and said, no, we can’t follow this model. It doesn’t work. Let’s follow ICAN. That is troubling to me, very troubling,” Akangbe stated.
Asked whether he believed there were complicit actors, underhand dealings or corruption of the process, Akangbe answered: “Of course. For too long that’s been the case in the NBA.”
Akangbe filed his petition before the NBA National Officers Election Appeal Committee, naming the Incorporated Trustees of the NBA, the ECNBA and Mrs Oyinkansola Badejo-Okusanya, SAN, as respondents, and demanding more than thirty categories of election data including full server and application logs, network traffic logs, complete database records, voter authentication attempt logs, voting timestamps, IP and MAC address metadata, OTP delivery status records, and documentation of the transfer of data between platforms.
Fellow candidate Olumuyiwa Akinboro, SAN, has separately confirmed that he is pursuing an independent forensic audit.
The ECNBA announced Badejo-Okusanya as winner with 12,317 votes, ahead of Akangbe with 7,934 and Akinboro with 5,855, from 26,106 votes cast out of 82,213 registered voters.
The interview was conducted by Seun Okinbaloye on Channels Television.
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