*Says Abiola’s 1993 Victory Was Projected Without Official Declaration
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Dr. Olisa Agbakoba, SAN, has told political parties that the law already gives them everything they need to challenge an INEC result, and that their habit of going to court to ask for an order compelling the Commission to release results is a confession of their own failure.
“Political parties have been very lazy,” he said. “What they do is they go to court, apply to the justices and say, ‘Can you please release the results?’ But you have the results.”
His central proposition is that a party which has deployed polling agents, as the law entitles it to do, is already holding the primary record of the election, because its own agents signed the polling unit result sheet. On that footing he said a party that cannot assemble its own results has no standing to complain about anybody else’s.
“So any political party that is unable to monitor its results is not qualified to be on the ballot,” he said. “It is your responsibility by law to have 176 polling agents pulling together your results.”
The interview was prompted by a caution from the Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission, Professor Joash Amupitan, who had urged media organisations to use digital forensic tools to verify information ahead of the 2027 general election, and had warned them against announcing results independently on the ground that the Electoral Act gives the Commission the exclusive authority to declare election results.
Dr. Agbakoba’s answer, which he said he had already put to the Chairman in a letter dated 12 October 2026, is that the Commission’s exclusive authority to declare results formally is not a restriction on the right of the public and the press to report results that have already been announced at polling units or that appear in authentic electoral records.
A host put the letter to him in these terms, and asked the two questions that framed the rest of the interview.
“Well, on October 12, 2026, you wrote a letter to the INEC Chairman, in which you were saying that the powers, the authority of INEC under section 25 of the Electoral [Act] should not be read in isolation, should take into account particularly section 39 of the Constitution and the right of the people to express themselves, to inform the public. But the key issue here, because when you go down your statement to the INEC Chairman, you said people can announce results that are already in the public domain as long as they are accurate in their announcement. Now, how do you determine that accuracy?”
(The section number given on air for the Electoral Act, 25, is unverified. Section 39 of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria 1999 as amended is the guarantee of freedom of expression, including the freedom to receive and impart ideas and information without interference.)
The second question was whether his position is an invitation to disorder, given that some parties have announced an intention to set up their own result viewing platforms and declare their own results.
“There are some political parties who have been saying they will set up their own IReV, and also announce their own results. Is that not what you are recommending? Is it not a prescription for chaos, confusion, conflict, while you also acknowledge that INEC has the legal authority to be the person to announce? In fact, the Electoral Act, I think section 65, even says that INEC is the only body that has the power to even review results if such a situation arises. So I see what you were trying to say in that statement, but how do you ensure accuracy, because the INEC Chairman is talking about misinformation, disinformation? Any safeguards, and do you intend to take any consequential steps to defend what you are proposing?”
(The host’s reference to section 65 is also unverified against the Act in force.)
Dr. Agbakoba’s first answer was that he does not intend to take any further steps, because in his view the question is closed.
“No, I don’t, because already in 1984 Mr. Justice Candide Johnson, in the case concerning NUJ and FEDECO, now in[ec], decided exactly what I’m saying, that journalists have a right to publish results.”
The distinction he drew is between declaring a result and publishing one, and he located the confusion squarely there.
“I think the confusion is that we confuse declaration of results. That’s the only power that INEC has exclusively, to declare the results. But as you know, the electoral record in terms of voting goes from the polling unit to the ward, to the local government, to the state, to the national collation, to the final announcement. That is a process.”
From that he drew the consequence for a reporter standing in a polling unit.
“If I’m standing at the polling unit and the presiding officer reads the results, he’s read it. I can broadcast it. He’s read it.”
And he said the same logic carries over to compilation from the Commission’s own portal, which he expects parties to automate.
“And I can tell you that political parties are going to set up AI processes whereby they’ll be able to pick from the IReV the results, because the IReV is simply a compilation of all the results coming from the polling units. So this time I predict we’re going to see speed.”
He then returned to the point he regards as decisive, that announcement and result are not the same thing.
“The real confusion is the doctrinal problem of what INEC can do, which is simply declare the results. The fact that I have announced a result doesn’t mean that that is the result.”
Asked how accuracy is to be policed, he offered an argument from the existence of the offence itself.
“So the question is whether I’m holding all the results in my hand, authenticated, because section 124 warns that if you publish, in fact the punishment for publishing fake results is in the Act. So that tells you that if the Act anticipates that you publish fake, a fake result, it also means that you can publish the result.”
(The section number, 124, is as given on air and is unverified.)
In other words, on his reading, a statute that punishes the publication of a false result must presuppose that publication of a true one is lawful.
He reached for the June 1993 presidential election as his historical illustration, and the point he took from it is that the country has already accepted a result that was never declared.
“Remember that even the famous 1993 free and fairest election in Nigeria, there was no declaration. It was on the board that people saw the results that had been written, and it was from there it was projected that Abiola won.”
“So there’s no question that the media particularly are entitled to publish results. In any event, the matter has been decided. It has not been appealed, and the case is NUJ versus FEDECO, now in[ec]. I think that is the decision that binds everybody including INEC.”
Asked whether verifying artificial intelligence generated results places an unfair burden on the newsroom, and whether INEC itself should build in safeguards so that the public can trust information presented as coming from the Commission, he put the burden back on the broadcaster, but set a single condition.
“It’s up to you. If Arise wishes to set up an AI collation process, the only restriction is that you must publish the results based on what the IReV has said. That’s all. You must source your results. You must say, ‘Based on IReV, I hereby project Dr. [X] winner of the governorship of Lagos State.’ You cannot say, ‘I’m projecting me as winner,’ without attributing. There must be attribution. That’s all.”
He cited American practice as the model.
“If you watch international media, CNN, when CNN projected Obama, I saw that CNN went to the board, ‘we project Obama as the winner based on the outcomes.’ The key here is that you can’t go on a frolic of your own and say here are the results. The results must be results obtained from the process, and INEC has a source of information flowing from EC8A up to EC8E.”
(EC8A is the polling unit result sheet. The EC8 series runs upward through ward, local government, state and national collation.)
A host then pressed the obvious next step. If results taken from IReV are credible enough for a newsroom to project a winner, should they not also be admissible in court in a post-election petition?
Dr. Agbakoba’s first reaction was that this was a different question. When the host persisted, he accepted the extension in full.
“You’re absolutely right. And here, let me just say, political parties have been very lazy.”
That is the passage in which he set out the parties’ own documentary position.
“What they do is they go to court, apply to the justices and say, ‘Can you please release the results?’ But you have the results. Don’t forget that you have party political agents that signed EC8A at the polling units. So any political party that is unable to monitor its results is not qualified to be on the ballot. It is your responsibility by law to have 176 polling agents pulling together your results. So when these parties go to court and say, ‘my lord, can I have results from [INEC],’ I think it’s lazy.”
“So the point you are making is absolutely brilliant. We ought not to depend only on [INEC]. So this point about being able to publish and announce result can be stretched to the issue of proving cases in court.”
(The figure “176” appears in the transcript twice, once as a number of agents and once as a number of polling units. The Commission’s polling unit figure is in the order of 176,000. The desk should treat the on-air figure as truncated and confirm the current number before printing it.)
He returned to the same point when a host argued that the problem is a criminal intent to alter results at the collation stage.
“I think what [the earlier question] was saying ties up with your point. You know, these political parties, I don’t know what’s wrong with them. I don’t know whether they even read the Electoral Act. They have a lot of responsibility to be able to challenge INEC’s results. But what then happens is that everyone is waiting for [INEC] to deliver trucks and trucks of results.”
“If the political parties had structures and they are spread around the 176 [thousand] polling units, they should be able to, in a matter of hours, have authenticated results.”
“So they don’t need to depend on INEC in court. All they need to show is, here are the results produced from the portals of INEC. And I don’t see that the court will say no. But in all of the presidential petitions, this has never been done. And I’m just hoping now that I hear that some political parties are organising to do this, that that would happen.”
The deterrent argument is the one he placed highest.
“But the big thing is this. If [INEC] knows it’s being watched, it’ll be careful. It will be careful. It will know that somebody is putting together an alternative credible result from the same INEC source, and I hope that would make INEC to be a lot more credible, to deliver what is accurate and not to create what you call criminal results. So we’re hoping that 2027 will be the departure from the past.”
A host put the evidential position to him. Election petitions are in a class of their own, the presumption of regularity under section 168 of the Evidence Act operates in INEC’s favour, and if parties cannot produce verifiable results they cannot rebut it. He was asked whether insisting on a challenge without that capacity would not simply create further confusion.
He first corrected the characterisation of his own position, interrupting to say he had not said parties lack the capacity, only that they ought to have it. He then accepted that some will not manage it.
“Well, yeah, because some of the parties won’t be able to even recruit enough polling agents.”
And then he declined to treat that as a problem for the system to solve.
“That’s not my problem. If you [are going to] stand election on a party for presidency and you don’t have the structure, you don’t, then why are you on the ballot? Why are you on the ballot? You must have the structures to defend your mandate, which includes the results. So any party that does not have the capacity to even gather its results, that’s its problem.”
He then stated the evidential conclusion, which is the legal core of the interview.
“Then you go and depend on INEC’s results, you will have no reason to question the presumption of regularity. But if the party that has the equipment and the wherewithal and the heft to have its electoral records intact presents it to the court, then the presumption of regularity that flows in favour of [INEC] is rebuttable. The court will say, ‘Oh, we can see something else that is coming from the same source.'”
His closing words were an instruction to parties rather than to the Commission.
“So the bottom line is parties need to be prepared. That’s the bottom line. If you’re not ready to monitor the elections right across Nigeria, don’t go on the ballot.”
A host completed the sentence with “or don’t complain,” and he did not demur.
One of the hosts, arguing that resistance to independent publication of results is driven by an intention to alter them, asserted that in Rivers State a candidate had won on IReV while a different result was announced. The host also argued that American networks project winners from exit polls, which are less precise than Nigeria’s uploaded polling unit results, and that Nigeria therefore has a stronger evidential base for projection than the networks he was comparing it with.
Dr. Agbakoba did not repeat the Rivers State allegation, did not adopt it, and answered the broader question about collation stage alteration by returning to the parties’ own documentary responsibility. The allegation is reported here as having been made on air. It is not a finding, and the desk should not carry it as one.
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