*Refuses Request To Produce Documents For Audit Of The Electoral Process
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The Electoral Committee of the Nigerian Bar Association has filed its Reply and Answer to the election petition brought by Mr Lateef Omoyemi Akangbe, SAN, challenging the outcome of the July 18, 2026, election to the office of President of the Nigerian Bar Association.
The reply, dated August 3, 2026, was settled by High Chief Aikhunegbe A. Malik, SAN, leading Eko Ejembi Eko, SAN, Chris E. Agbiti, Esq., Henry C. Ibe, Esq., Osaheni N. Ekunwe, Esq., Homa O. Ihunwo, Esq., Edward I. Ajaba, Esq., David E. Ohaekwusi, Esq., and Odunayo E. Idowu, Esq., of A.A. Malik, SAN & Co.
Before responding to the substance, the ECNBA gave notice that it will urge the Committee to strike out or dismiss the petition in its entirety.
The Committee’s first and most striking objection is that the petition is founded on the wrong constitution.
“The Petition is predicated on, presented upon and contended under a non-existent, abrogated and otiose law, that is, the NBA Constitution 2015 (as amended in 2021),” the ECNBA stated, contending that the applicable instrument is the NBA Constitution 2015 (as amended in 2025).
The ECNBA’s second objection concerns the parties named. The petition lists as respondents “Incorporated Trustees of the Nigerian Bar Association,” “Electoral Committee of the Nigerian,” “Bar Association,” and “Mrs Oyinkansola Badejo-Okunsanya, SAN.”
The ECNBA contends that “Electoral Committee of the Nigerian” and “Bar Association,” joined as 2nd and 3rd Respondents, “are not juristic entities known to or recognised by the NBA Constitution or any statute or regulation whatsoever.”
It further notes that the Petitioner, “by himself and in his own hand,” described the 3rd Respondent, “The Bar Association,” as “my co-contestant for the office of the President of the Association.”
“In the election of 18th July, 2026 which it conducted, the entity listed as the 3rd Respondent in the Petition was not a candidate or co-contestant to the Petitioner. It is also not the person declared as the winner of the election,” the ECNBA stated.
Consequently, when responding to the allegation of a “precise geometric progression of the votes at the top of each hour” for the 3rd Respondent, the ECNBA replied that the allegation “exists only as a figment of the Petitioner’s imagination.”
The ECNBA also objects that the Petitioner “failed, refused or neglected to join to the Petition, the Electoral Committee of the Nigerian Bar Association (ECNBA), which conducted the elections, and thus a statutory respondent by dint of Paragraph 3, Part X, 2nd Schedule to the NBA Constitution.”
“The non-joinder of statutory respondents to the Petition, on the one hand, and the joinder of unknown and non-juristic entities, on the other hand, contrary to the mandatory statutory prescription of the NBA Constitution, fatally impacts the jurisdiction of the esteemed Committee to entertain it,” it stated.
The Committee further contends that “the solitary ground of the Petition and the reliefs sought by the Petitioner are mutually exclusive and at variance with each other. Whereas the ground of the Petition speaks to alleged non-compliance, the reliefs are predicated on irregularities.”
It adds that the witness statement on oath is incompetent, “same having been strangely constituted under different parties that are otherwise alien or are not parties to the main Petition,” and that the reliefs are “essentially vague, nebulous, amorphous and opaque.”
“The Petition is largely speculative, founded on conjectures, assumptions, hypothesis and anticipated facts. Viewed from every prism, therefore, the Petition discloses no cause or reasonable cause of action,” the ECNBA stated.
“The current ECNBA conducted the 2026 national elections on 18th July, 2026 in a free, fair, transparent and credible manner. In particular, the ECNBA states that it carried out its functions completely devoid of any external control and influence,” the reply states.
“For the entire duration of the election process, the ECNBA maintained openness, truthfulness and honesty in all its activities. It performed its functions in a manner that was strictly impartial, non-partisan and politically neutral.”
The Committee pleads that “the election was observed by an array of election monitors from different local and international organisations, notably INEC, YIAGA Africa, etc.”
The ECNBA disputes the Petitioner’s arithmetic.
“Contrary to the Petitioner’s claim that there were a total of 82,213 eligible voters and that only 26,106 of this figure actually voted, the ECNBA states that in all, a total of 26,184 unique voters (representing 31.86% of the total registered voters of 82,172) spread across all the branches of the Association, participated in the election,” the reply states.
On the central allegation of mass disenfranchisement, the ECNBA’s answer is direct.
“The allegation that over 56,107 voters were unable to vote is untrue. Whilst the ECNBA is not in a position to determine where and how the Petitioner arrived at or manufactured this figure, the correct statement is that the figure may very well represent verified voters who voluntarily elected to exercise their right not to participate in the election process,” it stated.
“Given the percentage of those who voted in comparison to the total number of names on the voters’ register, it is safe and convenient to describe the situation as ‘low voters’ turnout’ or ‘voters’ apathy’ which has nothing to do with the credibility of the election. Accordingly, it is incorrect to equate low voter turnout with disenfranchisement. They are not one and the same,” the ECNBA stated.
It added: “It is not within the remit of the ECNBA to speculate on what the eventual outcome or outlook of the election would have been if the 56,107 members had participated.”
The ECNBA declined the Petitioner’s request for the more than thirty categories of documents and data sought for audit purposes.
“With respect to the Petitioner’s request for the documents listed in paragraph 9(iv)(c) of the Petition, the ECNBA states that most of the documents relate to and or concern members’ data which are protected by the Data Protection Act. The ECNBA is a law-abiding entity which has an obligation to respect and comply with the provisions of the Data Protection Act. Accordingly, and having regard to the data sensitive nature of the requested documents, the ECNBA rejects or is unable to accede to the request,” the reply states.
It adds, without prejudice, that “a good number of the documents have previously been made available to the Petitioner,” that “in some cases, the documents are held by third parties and, therefore, not within the control of the ECNBA,” and that “the Petitioner is at liberty to approach the custodians.”
The ECNBA lists what it says was supplied: the Final Voters’ List used for the election, the Final Declaration (Final Result Sheet), the List of Actual Voters on a branch basis, System Performance and Reconciliation Data, and other relevant documents.
The reply gives the fullest official account yet of the events of the early hours of July 18.
The Committee lists the causes as: failure of database connection “due to significant compression of the final deployment and testing schedule”; continued deployment of authentication changes immediately before the opening of polls; “instability within the original production server environment, due to suspected intruders”; an application-level authentication verification defect affecting a subset of users; and final correction of misspelt candidate names and non-display of some candidates’ photographs.
On the attack itself, the ECNBA pleads specific technical evidence.
“Cloudflare’s own logs confirm the platform was targeted by outside scanning during this same period. Thirty-four automated requests, hunting for exposed configuration files and probing an admin upload endpoint, arrived from four different source addresses between roughly 01:40 and 05:29 WAT on 18 July, 2026, right in the middle of the deployment crisis,” the reply states.
“Automated security controls implemented by Cloudflare successfully blocked external reconnaissance activity, but also inadvertently prevented authorised technical personnel from completing corrective deployment activities during the critical remediation window.”
In a disclosure not previously made public, the ECNBA attributes part of the failure to the detention of a key official.
The initial hiccups were “due to the late release of the Data Protection Officer who was arrested and held between 15th and 17th of July, 2026, but who was expected to be on ground before the deployment of any data could be done in line with data protection laws.”
The ECNBA states that “prior to the time the ECNBA officially shut down the platform and, thereafter, announced the suspension of voting on 18.07.2026, no single vote had been successfully cast.”
The Committee’s account of the domains directly contradicts the Petitioner’s.
The ECNBA states that it had published https://ecnbaovs.org.ng as the voting site at 00:00 hours on July 18, and that after the attack it migrated to “a new official domain https://www.ecnba.org.ng/vote/ecnba-ovs-main” with voting resuming at 07:35.
“Apart from the official voting domain sent to all members during the attack to vote on (https://www.ecnba.org.ng/vote/ecnba-ovs-main), at no time did ECNBA advise the Petitioner or members of migration of the voting platform to any website by the address or id www.ecnbaovs.org.ng, as erroneously claimed by the Petitioner,” the reply states.
On the authority for the migration, the Committee is unequivocal.
“The ECNBA was set up by the National Executive Council (NEC) of the NBA and given the mandate to organise the elections. It was never required to revert to or seek approval of NBA-NEC or any other body within the value chain of the NBA for election domain or domain migration as these are steps or processes within the legitimate expectation of the contracted service delivery package,” it stated.
It further contends that no fresh demonstration was owed to the candidates because “the migration from the attacked server to the new, heavily secured and well protected platform involved the same application, the same database and the same audit trail that was demonstrated to the candidates, including the Petitioner, and agreed upon long before the election.”
The ECNBA characterises the Petitioner’s 2:15 a.m. call for suspension as “only but an expression of the alarmist disposition of the Petitioner who was not physically on ground, having been represented by an agent, who alongside other agents, were physically present and followed the event on ground without any rancour.”
On the OTP failures, the ECNBA offers a different explanation.
“On Time Password (OTP) were successfully sent and delivered to voters who correctly followed the instructions,” it states, noting that members had been advised to ensure “Do Not Disturb” mode was deactivated and to capitalise the three alphabets preceding their enrolment numbers.
It attributes the later delays to volume: “As the election or voting progressed, the voting domain witnessed an unusual upsurge of voters, intent on exercising their voting right. This development naturally occasioned a frenzy on the voting platform with the sustained traffic resulting in delayed response time for the delivery of OTPs.”
The reply addresses the Petitioner’s assertion that he could not vote for himself in pointed terms.
“The Petitioner’s claim that he was unable to vote for himself is not an issue over which the ECNBA has control. His reasons for his inability are, perhaps, personal to him and chances are that he voted for one of his opponents in the election,” the ECNBA stated.
On the claim that over 25,000 of the Petitioner’s supporters were unable to vote, the ECNBA demands identification.
“The claim of over ‘25,000 voters’ who were prepared to vote for him, but were unable to vote owing to OTP related issues is peculiar to the Petitioner who failed to disclose the identities of the said ‘over twenty-five thousand voters’ to enable the ECNBA or anyone verify whether the so-called 25,000 voters truly exist in the official voters’ register or whether they even logged into the voting portal at all,” it stated.
It accused the Petitioner of bandying figures “in order to engender undue sensationalism,” and observed that complaints should have gone to the dedicated help desk: “To the best of its knowledge, the Petitioner was not the electoral umpire and, therefore, was not in any position to receive official complaints.”
The ECNBA’s rebuttal of the pre-programming allegation is its most technical.
“What the presidential candidates’ scores showed throughout, particularly on each refresh, was a decay curve and not a progression, let alone a geometric progression. From the live feeds, especially with about 10-second refresh, it was evidently clear to everybody present that voting peaked in the first full hour and then declined steadily through the day to an overnight trough, before a dawn rise on 19.07.2026,” it stated.
“Hour-over-hour, the total votes for each candidate mostly fell, together or uniformly with a ratio ranging 0.36 to 1.66, after the opening spike. A geometric progression which the Petitioner alleges means or implies that the votes multiplied by a constant each step and grew steadily upward. This was not the case in the election.”
The ECNBA’s sharpest point concerns the Petitioner’s own expert evidence.
“A cursory perusal of the Petitioner’s ICT expert’s technical report which accompanies the Petition shows beyond any equivocation that the Petitioner’s claim in his Petition and Statement on Oath tell lies against his ICT Consultant. This alone casts a debilitating slur on the Petitioner’s case. The Petitioner’s ICT consultant unambiguously admits in his report that no evidence exists to establish any irregularities and process breaches which are the grounds on which the Petition is anchored,” the ECNBA stated.
The Committee states that voting ran from 07:35 on July 18 to 07:34 on July 19, a full continuous 24 hours, and that “the start and end time of the voting process was programmed in such a way that at exactly the cut-off time, the platform automatically terminated and became inaccessible.”
“The delay did not, by any stretch of imagination, impact the right of any voter nor did it shorten anyone’s opportunity to vote,” it stated.
The ECNBA pleads a structural point with potential consequences for the relief sought.
“Voting in the elections for all the available positions were held simultaneously, with the use of a single electronic ballot paper by each voter. In other words, the elections were a common mechanical and electronic process, one not separated, segregated or detached from the other,” it stated.
“The Results of the polls as they concern all the available positions were declared or announced by the ECNBA in one fell swoop, using a single result sheet, otherwise known as the Final Declaration.”
It then notes: “The complaints embodied in the Petition and the reliefs sought by the Petitioner relate only to the election or voting for the office of President.”
The ECNBA observes that “of the three candidates which contested the office of President NBA, only the Petitioner herein is aggrieved about the outcome and has thus presented the Petition.”
“WHEREOF the ECNBA prays the Committee to refuse all the reliefs sought by the Petitioner and consequentially, dismiss the Petition as lacking in merit and substance, same having been substantially founded on the Petitioner’s ego trip to smear and degrade the entire election exercise and architecture, the leadership of the Nigerian Bar Association, all on account of emotionalism and personal prejudices.”
The reply is for service on the Petitioner at 7th Floor, St Nicholas House, Catholic Mission Street, Lagos, care of Hanafi & Associates, Abuja; on the 1st Respondent at NBA House, Central Business District, Abuja; and on the 3rd Respondent at 15 Military Street, Onikan, Lagos.
The petition remains pending before the Nigerian Bar Association National Officers Election Appeal Committee, holden at Abuja.
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