Turning courtrooms to war rooms
As Nigeria edges closer to the 2027 general election, a familiar chorus has returned to the airwaves and opinion pages: that the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) is somehow compromised, that it is doing the bidding of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu and the All Progressives Congress (APC).
It also added that the flood of litigation currently engulfing opposition parties is proof of a grand design to clear the field for the ruling party. It is a seductive narrative. It is also, on the evidence, a lazy one.
Look closely at what is actually happening in Nigeria’s courtrooms in this election cycle, and a very different picture emerges, not of an electoral umpire manipulating the game.
The issue is about the opposition parties that cannot keep their own houses in order, and who then turn around and blame the referee when the walls they built on sand come crashing down.
The evidence in the court dockets is clear and compelling. Consider the African Democratic Congress (ADC), which entered 2026 as the great coalition hope of the opposition, anchored by political heavyweights such as Atiku Abubakar, David Mark and Rauf Aregbesola.
Within months, that coalition had fractured, with prominent figures including Peter Obi and Rabiu Kwankwaso defecting to form a new platform, the National Democratic Coalition (NDC).
What followed for the ADC was not a story of INEC sabotage but of rival factions dragging each other before the Federal High Court and the Court of Appeal, each side claiming to be the legitimate national leadership of the party.
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INEC did not create that fight. It did not appoint a caretaker committee that a court would later find had exceeded its constitutional authority. It did not order state chairmen to challenge that committee’s congresses.
Aggrieved ADC members themselves, ordinary party stakeholders, went to court, and it was the judiciary, not INEC, that eventually ruled the caretaker-organised congresses and national convention null and void, going so far as to fine the party ten million naira in costs for defying a standing court order.
That is not regulatory capture, but a party failing to manage its own internal democracy, and the courts stepping in, as they are constitutionally empowered to do, to settle the resulting mess.
The pattern repeats itself almost mechanically across the opposition landscape. The Labour Party (LP) spent much of the past year paralysed by the rivalry between the Julius Abure and Nenadi Usman factions.
It was a dispute so entrenched that INEC was forced to withhold nomination access codes from the party for an area council election simply because it could not determine, amid competing court filings, which was actually authorised to speak for the party.
The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) has had its own leadership turbulence. The New Nigeria Peoples Party (NNPP) has likewise been consumed by internal wrangling.
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In each case, the common denominator is not INEC overreach; it is opposition parties that have failed to build durable internal structures, resolve succession disputes through their own constitutions, or conduct primaries that their own members accept as credible.
INEC’s compliance with rule of law
What is INEC supposed to do in the circumstance? Critics ask why INEC does not simply “stay out of it” when party crises land in its lap. But that framing misunderstands INEC’s constitutional role.
The Commission is legally required to determine who has authority to submit candidate names, access codes and nomination documents on behalf of a registered party.
When two factions of the same party both claim that authority, INEC cannot simply shrug and accept both submissions; that would itself invite litigation and chaos on election day. It has little choice but to look to the courts, or to the most recent unchallenged judicial pronouncement, for guidance on which faction is validly constituted.
Legal analysts who have studied this dynamics closely have made a similar point: court involvement in party disputes does not, by itself, mean INEC has ceded its independence. Judicial review is a normal feature of Nigeria’s electoral architecture, and litigation can arise at any stage of the process wherever constitutional or statutory violations are alleged.
INEC responding to those rulings is not a betrayal of impartiality; it is compliance with the rule of law, the very thing INEC’s critics claim to want more of.
It is worth noting, too, that INEC has not applied its hand only against opposition figures. When the Court of Appeal ordered the removal of certain ADC leaders from the nomination portal earlier this year, INEC complied, and when the Supreme Court later intervened and reinstated them, INEC complied with that too.
That is not the behaviour of a captured institution picking winners. It is the behaviour of an administrative body following the highest available judicial authority at each stage, even when the rulings reverse each other and leave the Commission looking, unfairly, like the villain of the story.
Commission’s chair lamentation
INEC’s own leadership has been candid about the toll this is taking on the electoral process. The Commission’s chairman has publicly lamented the surge of intra-party court cases, describing them as unnecessary distractions from the far more important work of preparing credible elections.
He has appealed directly to political parties to resolve their leadership disputes quickly, conduct transparent primaries, and stop treating litigation as a substitute for internal party democracy.
That is not the language of an institution trying to hide its own misconduct. It is the language of a referee exhausted by players who keep bringing their locker-room fights onto the pitch.
The real story unravelling is that of a governing party that did its homework well.
There is an uncomfortable truth buried beneath the opposition’s grievances, and it is this: the APC, whatever its critics say about it, has largely managed to keep its own succession and candidate-nomination processes out of the courtroom this cycle. That is not luck. It is organisation at its best.
A party that resolves its leadership questions internally, that conducts primaries its members can live with, and that maintains clear chains of authority does not need INEC to adjudicate who its “real” leadership is, because there is no dispute for INEC, or a judge, to referee in the first place.
Contrast that with an opposition landscape where a coalition party’s top leadership can splinter within months of formation, where a party’s flagship platform can be captured by a caretaker committee whose legal authority is later voided by an appellate court, and where simultaneous, competing national conventions have been held by rival factions of the same party.
These are not the symptoms of an unfair electoral system. They are the symptoms of parties built hastily around personalities rather than institutions, parties that treat coalition-building as a press event rather than a constitutional process, and parties whose internal democracy is, in practice, whoever shouts loudest and files first.
What ought to prevail is a call for honesty, not conspiracy as alleged. None of this is to say INEC is beyond scrutiny, or that every one of its administrative judgment calls has been perfect.
Reasonable observers can and do disagree about whether the Commission has always applied a fully consistent standard when choosing which court rulings to act on first. That is a fair conversation to have.
But there is a meaningful difference between scrutinising an institution’s judgment calls and accusing it, without evidence, of conspiring with the presidency to sabotage named opposition figures. The latter claim requires more than pattern-matching and grievance; it requires proof, and so far, none of INEC’s critics have produced any.
What Nigerians are actually witnessing in the run-up to the 2027 cycle is an electoral umpire doing an unglamorous, thankless job of trying to keep the nomination process moving forward on schedule while opposition parties, one after another, brought their internal wars to its doorstep and then complained when the doorstep got crowded.
Tinubu’s administration deserves credit, not only for not interfering in INEC’s activities but also for allowing the Commission the institutional space to apply the law even-handedly, even when doing so produced outcomes that were politically inconvenient for the APC itself, such as reinstating opposition figures after Supreme Court intervention.
If Nigeria’s opposition parties want an electoral process less encumbered by litigation, the remedy is not a loud accusation against INEC. It is internal discipline.
Onaiyekan’s concern
The concerns being raised by critics, including Archbishop John Onaiyekan, therefore deserve to be heard, but they should also be subjected to the same standard of scrutiny expected of the electoral commission itself. Concern about the credibility of Nigeria’s elections is legitimate; turning that concern into an assumption that INEC is an extension of the presidency is another matter entirely. The distinction is important.
An electoral commission can be criticised, challenged and even corrected without being branded a puppet. Indeed, the strength of an electoral institution lies partly in its willingness to operate within the law, accept judicial review and implement decisions even when the outcome does not favour those in power.
Political factor
There is also a larger political contradiction that Nigerians should confront. Politicians write the laws that govern elections, negotiate and amend the rules of the political game, exploit every legal loophole available to them, manipulate party structures, influence electoral officials, induce voters with money and material incentives, and sometimes openly buy votes—only to turn around after an election and blame INEC for every outcome they dislike. That is an inversion of responsibility.
The umpire cannot be held solely responsible for a game in which the players themselves routinely bend the rules, bribe the officials, buy the spectators and then protest the scoreline.
If Nigeria is serious about electoral reform, the conversation must therefore move beyond the convenient habit of making INEC the scapegoat for every political failure. Political parties must reform themselves. Candidates must respect their own constitutions and electoral laws.
Weaponising litigation
Politicians must stop weaponising litigation as an extension of internal party warfare. Voters must reject the culture of vote-buying. And the political class must accept that electoral credibility is not something that can be demanded from INEC while simultaneously undermining the very laws and institutions designed to produce it.
The most responsible position, then, is neither to worship INEC nor to demonise it. It is to demand evidence, transparency and accountability from the Commission while demanding equal accountability from the politicians and political parties whose decisions generate many of the disputes INEC is subsequently compelled to manage.
Onaiyekan and other critics are right to insist that Nigerians deserve elections they can trust. But trust cannot be built by assigning every political failure to the electoral umpire. All political actors, including INEC, the courts, political parties, candidates and voters, should therefore accept responsibility for the success and failure of our elections.
The opposition may continue to blame INEC because it is politically easier than confronting its own organisational failures.
But the harder and more honest question is this: If politicians make the rules, fight over the rules, violate the rules, buy votes and manipulate party structures, why should the referee alone carry the blame when the match descends into chaos? Nigeria’s democracy deserves a better answer.
And until that answer is found, the loudest accusations against INEC may say far more about the state of Nigeria’s opposition politics than they do about the independence of the electoral umpire.
It is therefore important to place Onaiyekan’s criticism in its proper context. The archbishop has consistently raised serious concerns about the state of Nigeria’s democracy, the credibility of elections and the conduct of those in political power.
In fact, his recent assessment offers an important qualification to the attempt to make the present crisis the exclusive responsibility of the Tinubu administration.
In a 2026 interview, Onaiyekan acknowledged that the deterioration of Nigeria’s political institutions “did not happen in one day” and “obviously” did not begin with Tinubu. He traced the problem to a much longer decline in public confidence in the electoral system and the conduct of politics.
That distinction matters. The archbishop is right to speak truth to power, and his warning about declining public confidence deserves serious attention. But if the objective is to restore Nigerian democracy, the diagnosis cannot stop at the Presidency or at INEC.
Onaiyekan himself has, on several occasions, warned that many politicians were less interested in democracy than in securing power by whatever means necessary.
He has spoken against politicians who manipulate the system, twist electoral processes and use money and influence to secure outcomes that voters did not freely give them.
Indeed, Onaiyekan’s criticism should ultimately strengthen, rather than weaken, the case for holding politicians accountable. His argument that Nigeria’s political deterioration predates the present administration means that the country must resist the temptation to reduce a systemic problem to one president, one party or one electoral commission. The rot is deeper than that.
It is embedded in a political culture in which winning has too often become more important than playing by the rules, and in which politicians who manipulate institutions frequently present themselves as victims when those same institutions produce consequences they dislike.
The archbishop’s intervention is part of the democratic conversation Nigeria needs. But neither should his concerns be appropriated as evidence that INEC is necessarily acting as an instrument of the Presidency.
Onaiyekan has himself warned that politicians manipulate the system in pursuit of power. That warning should apply across the political spectrum.
If Nigeria is to have credible elections in 2027, the question must not simply be whether INEC is independent; it must also be whether Nigeria’s politicians are prepared to behave democratically when their personal and partisan interests are at stake.
The ultimate responsibility, therefore, is shared. INEC must be transparent, impartial and accountable. The courts must remain independent. The government must respect the autonomy of electoral institutions.
But political parties and their leaders must also stop manufacturing crises, manipulating their own rules, buying influence and then outsourcing responsibility for the resulting chaos to INEC.
A referee can be criticised for a bad call; he cannot reasonably be blamed for players who refuse to obey the rules of the game.
Until Nigeria’s political class accepts that distinction, the country will continue to mistake the symptoms of its political dysfunction for the cause, and no amount of condemnation of INEC will cure that disease.
