A presidential candidate in the 2026 Nigerian Bar Association National Elections, Lateef Omoyemi Akangbe, SAN, FCIArb, has described the election as “shambolic” and “a shame to the Bar,” alleging that thousands of willing lawyers were disenfranchised by platform failure, authentication problems and what he called an electoral process that was not ready.
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In a post-election statement titled “Thank You” and dated July 19, 2026, Akangbe thanked lawyers who, according to him, stayed awake for two nights attempting to cast a single vote despite repeated portal failures, failed authentication, timeouts and other technical obstacles.
He said many lawyers refreshed what he described as a broken portal at 1 a.m., 3 a.m. and 5 a.m., tried to vote on phones, laptops and borrowed devices, and sent screenshots to branch WhatsApp groups documenting every error.
According to him, some lawyers succeeded in voting, but the “vast majority” did not, not because of apathy, but because of what he described as infrastructural failure.
“You were disenfranchised not by choice but by infrastructure. Not by apathy but by failure,” he said.
Akangbe said the NBA branches across the country, including those in remote areas, showed commitment by mobilising members and holding them together through what he described as “a night of chaos.”
He said the events of the election amounted to “an act of defiance against a system that made it as hard as possible” for lawyers to be heard.
The former NBA Lagos Branch Chairman questioned what he called the rush to conduct the election, alleging that the ECNBA moved the NEC-approved election date from July 20 to July 18, 2026, without NEC approval.
He further alleged that at a meeting held on July 15, 2026, in the presence of the Attorney-General of the Federation and the Chairman of the Body of Benchers, there was an agreement to postpone the election by one week to allow proper sensitisation on the new SMS-based voting mechanism.
Akangbe said the agreement was not honoured.
According to him, the ECNBA changed the verification method from email to SMS on July 16, but still insisted that the election proceed two days later, thereby expecting more than 82,000 lawyers to use a new authentication system they had not tested.
He said the platform collapsed within its first hour, after which the ECNBA attributed the problem to a “deliberate, coordinated, and sustained cyberattack.”
Akangbe said that whether the cyberattack claim was true or not, it remained unverified by any independent authority and did not answer the key question of why the attack succeeded.
He argued that a cyberattack on an election platform in 2026 should be treated as a foreseeable risk and that any serious election platform should have undergone rigorous stress testing and ethical hacking before election day.
“A platform built to withstand an attack would have degraded under pressure. This one did not degrade. It disappeared,” he said.
Akangbe also disclosed that he, as a presidential candidate, was unable to vote in the election.
According to him, the ECNBA Chairman and the NBA President personally sent him more than five separate links to access the voting portal, but none of them worked.
“If the Chairman and the President of the Association cannot get the system to work for a candidate they are personally assisting to access the voting portal, what happened to the ordinary member in Jalingo or Ado-Ekiti who had no one highly placed to call?” he asked.
Akangbe compared the 2026 turnout with previous NBA elections, stating that in 2022, 58.61 per cent of eligible voters cast their ballots, while in 2024, about 56.4 per cent voted, with the current NBA President, Mazi Afam Osigwe, SAN, scoring about 20,435 votes.
He said in the 2026 election, with 82,164 accredited voters, the ECNBA’s own reported figures suggested that only about 27 per cent of eligible voters cast their ballots.
According to him, “not even a third of the profession voted,” adding that the total number of lawyers who managed to vote in the entire 2026 election was roughly the same as the number of votes a single candidate received in 2024.
He described the development as a “catastrophic regression.”
Akangbe insisted that the low turnout did not reflect voter apathy but voter suppression, which he attributed to systemic failure, platform collapse, untested authentication changes and the insistence on proceeding with an election that, according to him, stakeholders knew was not ready.
He further alleged that there were credible and documented reports of voters who were able to cast their ballots more than once on the same platform.
He said if the system permitted double voting, then the integrity of every ballot was in question.
“One member, one vote is not a slogan. It is a constitutional guarantee. If the platform could not enforce it, the platform was not fit for purpose, and the results it produced are tainted at source,” he stated.
Akangbe also criticised what he described as defects on the presidential ballot, alleging that the ballot displayed one candidate’s photograph and not the others, a defect he said was not corrected until after voting had commenced and after candidates raised alarm.
He said the NBA, as the body that demands accountability, transparency and rule of law from public institutions, must be able to conduct its own internal affairs with integrity.
According to him, if the Bar cannot conduct its own election credibly, its moral authority to speak on the conduct of Nigeria’s 2027 general elections may be weakened.
He said he would not, in the statement, discuss outcomes, numbers or declarations, but insisted that an election where thousands of eligible and willing voters were prevented from voting by a platform that was not fit for purpose could not be treated as producing the unimpeachable will of the profession.
Akangbe disclosed that he was reviewing all options with his team and would communicate a comprehensive and principled position on the next steps.
He said every screenshot, failed authentication and locked-out voter was being documented, catalogued and preserved.
“Accountability is not optional. It is coming,” he said.
Akangbe maintained that his campaign was never about one man but about building a better, transparent and accountable NBA.
He said his mission to “Elevate the Bar” did not begin with the election and would not end with it.
“The Bar is bigger than any single election, any single candidate, and any single result. The work continues. The fight for a Bar that is transparent, accountable, and worthy of the profession it represents continues. And I am not going anywhere,” he said.
The statement was signed by Lateef Omoyemi Akangbe, SAN, FCIArb, Candidate for President, Nigerian Bar Association.
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