ABUJA — Nigeria’s main opposition camp has accused the country’s electoral umpire of working to systematically undermine opposition parties ahead of the 2027 general elections.
In a sharply worded statement released on Monday, the media office of former Vice-President Atiku Abubakar accused the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) of fueling internal leadership crises within opposition ranks to aid President Bola Tinubu’s ruling party.
The dispute centers on the African Democratic Congress (ADC), one of Nigeria’s prominent minority parties, which has been locked in a bitter internal leadership tussle.
According to the Atiku Media Office, INEC—led by its chairman, Professor Joash Amupitan—secretly granted digital portal access codes to a factional leader, Nafiu Bala Gombe, allowing him to upload a parallel list of election candidates. The Atiku camp insists that a faction led by former Senate President David Mark is the only legally recognized executive body of the ADC.”What INEC has done is a recipe for crisis,” the statement said, alleging that the electoral body is deliberately weakening opposition parties “by creating crisis even where none exists.”
A System of Factions
Leadership fractures are a common feature of Nigerian politics, often resulting in parallel primaries where two different factions claim to have nominated the rightful candidates for the same public office. By law, INEC can only issue one set of digital access codes per political party for the submission of candidate names. The opposition now alleges that INEC is subverting its own guidelines by accommodating a faction that did not hold legally supervised primary elections. The statement further claimed that INEC’s actions fit into a broader “agenda of total state capture” aimed at neutralizing any viable challenge to President Tinubu’s anticipated re-election bid in 2027. INEC has not yet responded to the allegations. The commission has historically maintained that it strictly adheres to court orders when deciding which party factions to recognize during internal disputes.The row intensifies early anxieties surrounding the credibility of Nigeria’s next general election.
Independent observers have frequently warned that deep-seated infighting within the opposition, coupled with controversial regulatory decisions by INEC, threatens to weaken democratic checks and balances in Africa’s most populous nation.
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