Says “The Hypocrisy Is Further Magnified By The Fact That The NBA President Set Up An Election Monitoring Group For Osun”
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A candidate in the 2026 Nigerian Bar Association presidential election, Lateef Omoyemi Akangbe, SAN, FCIArb, has accused the declared winner of the poll and the outgoing President of the Association of hypocrisy, following the dismissal of his application seeking the release of data from the electronic voting platforms used for the exercise.
Akangbe set out his position in a statement titled “2026 NBA Presidential Election: The Hypocrisy Of The Outgoing And Incoming President Continues,” addressed to colleagues.
“A Comprehensive, Fully Informed And Principled Position”
The senior advocate began by recalling his earlier message to members.
“On 19 July 2026, a day after the shambolic election of national officers of the Nigerian Bar Association organised by the Electoral Committee of the Nigerian Bar Association, under the Chairmanship of Aham Ejelam, SAN, I issued a ‘Thank You’ message to all Nigerian lawyers, expressing my appreciation for the efforts they put into the process despite the demonstrable malpractice and incompetence displayed by the ECNBA,” he wrote.
He continued: “In that press release, I also promised to communicate a comprehensive, fully informed and principled position on the next steps, and I pledged that such next steps would be grounded in evidence, anchored in law and above all, driven by a single objective: the protection of the democratic rights of every member of the Association who was denied their vote and ensuring accountability in our electoral process.”
He said recent developments had made a follow-up necessary, “to highlight the hypocrisy presently on display not just from the proclaimed winner of the shambolic election, Mrs Oyinkansola Badejo-Okusanya, SAN, but also by the NBA President, Mazi Afam Osigwe, SAN.”
The Three Candidates’ Responses
Placing the matter in context, Akangbe recalled how each presidential candidate responded after the poll.
Of the first, he wrote: “Aare Olumuyiwa Akinboro, SAN understandably took the view that the charade that took place on 18 and 19 July 2026 was not an election known to the NBA Constitution and therefore that an appeal to the National Officers Election Appeal Committee of the NBA would amount to legitimising a body whose jurisdiction has not crystallised. Very importantly too, he called for an immediate independent forensic audit of the entire electoral process to determine critical issues relating to the election.”
Of his own course, he wrote: “For the records and for the sake of posterity, I appealed to the National Officers Election Appeal Committee of the NBA in line with the provisions of the NBA Constitution and as a prelude to the next steps that I intend to take, which include exploring all legal remedies under the law to ensure that the NBA as an institution is accountable to its members, and our electoral process is reformed.”
He set out what his interlocutory application sought: “an order directing the ECNBA to immediately release, on a REDACTED BASIS (i.e., with all personal information removed), all critical information, documents and data bases of the electronic voting platforms and domain(s) used for the conduct of the election under the supervision of the Director General of the Nigeria Information Technology and Development Agency to guarantee and verify the integrity of the process.”
“She Pledged To Immediately Resign”
Turning to the declared winner, Akangbe recalled the undertaking she gave publicly after the poll.
“Mrs Oyinkansola Badejo-Okusanya, SAN, in the course of her celebratory media rounds, pledged to submit herself to an audit and IMMEDIATELY RESIGN, if credible proof demonstrates that the election which brought her into office was manipulated in her favour,” he wrote.
He said he had expected her to honour that. “One would have expected that Mrs Badejo-Okusanya, SAN would keep her word and willingly submit to any transparent democratic process that would independently audit the election with a view to ascertaining if indeed the election that brought her into office was manipulated.”
What followed, he said, was the opposite. “Ironically, Mrs Oyinkansola Badejo-Okusanya, SAN refused to acknowledge a message from me, calling for a joint audit and, more importantly, objected to my application for an audit, the essence of which was to ascertain the number of our members who were disenfranchised, on the basis that the release of the information would violate members’ right to privacy and their data.”
The Ruling Of 14 August
Akangbe disclosed the outcome of the application.
“Unsurprisingly, the National Officers Election Appeal Committee of the NBA delivered its ruling on 14 August 2026 and dismissed my application,” he wrote.
He drew the contrast: “In other words, the same Mrs Oyinkansola Badejo-Okusanya, SAN, who pledged to resign if credible evidence indicates election manipulation, turned around to object to an application that sought to examine the process and, if possible, expose the said manipulation.”
“The Hypocrisy Is Further Magnified”
The senior advocate then turned to the conduct of the NBA President in relation to the Osun State governorship election.
“The hypocrisy is further magnified by the fact that the NBA President, Mazi Afam Osigwe, SAN, set up an NBA election monitoring group to monitor the recently held Governorship Election in Osun State,” he wrote.
He noted that the NBA President “also led a delegation to visit the Resident Electoral Commissioner of the Independent National Electoral Commission in Osun State as well as the heads of the security agencies in the State where he ‘secured firm commitments towards the conduct of a free, fair, credible and peaceful election’.”
He quoted the appeal made at that visit, with his own emphasis: the NBA President “called on all institutions and individuals involved in the electoral process, including electoral officials, security agencies, political actors and public office holders, to REMAIN STRICTLY NEUTRAL AND REFRAIN FROM DEPLOYING THEIR OFFICES, POWERS OR INFLUENCE IN FAVOUR OF ANY CANDIDATE OR POLITICAL PARTY.”
“My Campaign Was Never About One Man”
Closing, Akangbe repeated what he said on 19 July.
“My campaign was never about one man. It was about the proposition that the NBA can be better; that it must be better; and that the lawyers of this country deserve an Association that works for them,” he wrote.
He set out two conditions for that. “If we are to actualise this, two things are necessary: first, we must continue to fight to ensure that things, our electoral process is conducted in accordance with our ideals of the rule of law, due process and accountability, are done properly, and second, hypocrisy is not the way to go.”
The statement is signed Lateef Omoyemi Akangbe, SAN, FCIArb, Candidate for President, 2026 NBA Election.
What It Means
The dismissal of the interlocutory application removes, for now, the single step that could have resolved the factual dispute at the heart of this contest. Akangbe’s petition and the replies filed by the Electoral Committee turn on questions that only the platform records can answer: whether the published branch by branch list totalling 25,901 can be reconciled with the 26,184 the Committee declared, why the entire Warri branch is absent from that publication, whether members of the 2025 call set could authenticate at all, and whether the coordinated cyberattack the Committee pleads is borne out by the Cloudflare logs and source addresses it has described but not produced. Without the data, each of those remains a matter of assertion against assertion.
The privacy objection the senior advocate reports is worth examining on its own terms, because it is the ground on which the request was resisted. His application was expressly framed for redacted release, with personal information removed, and under the supervision of the Director General of NITDA, the agency with statutory responsibility for information technology standards. A request drawn in those terms is designed to meet the Nigeria Data Protection Act rather than to breach it, since redaction removes the personal data that the Act protects and independent supervision addresses the custody question. Whether the Appeal Committee accepted the privacy argument or dismissed the application on other grounds cannot be determined from this statement, and the reasons for the ruling have not been published.
The comparison with Osun is rhetorically effective but analytically limited. The Association observing a public election and the Association adjudicating its own is not the same exercise, and a body may be a credible external observer while its internal processes are contested. What the comparison does establish is a standard the Association has itself articulated in public, in its own words, and to which its members are now entitled to hold it. The NBA Election Working Group’s own preliminary report on Osun, published yesterday, recommends comprehensive testing of voting technology, contingency arrangements for technical failure and structured post election review, which is close to what the petitioners in the NBA’s own election have been asking for.
Where the matter goes next is the open question. The statement refers to “next steps” and to “exploring all legal remedies under the law,” which points beyond the Association’s internal machinery. Whether the substantive petition survives, and whether any court is asked to order the production the Appeal Committee declined, will determine whether the discrepancies now in the public record are ever tested.
Editorial notes: The reasons for the Appeal Committee’s ruling of 14 August have not been published, and this account of the objection taken by the declared winner is Akangbe’s own characterisation. Both Mrs Oyinkansola Badejo-Okusanya, SAN, and Mazi Afam Osigwe, SAN, are named and criticised and should be offered a right of reply before publication, as should the Electoral Committee. Obtain a copy of the ruling and of the interlocutory application itself if you intend to describe either in detail. Note that the surname appears in earlier filings as Badejo-Okunsanya and here as Badejo-Okusanya; check against the Final Declaration of Results. The word “shambolic,” and the characterisation of the exercise as a charade, are the candidates’ own and should be carried as quotations rather than adopted in the house voice.
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Authored by Ben Ijeoma Adigwe Esq., ACIarb (UK), LL.M, Dip. in Artificial Intelligence, Director at the Delta State Ministry of Justice, Asaba, Nigeria.
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