By Bode Opeseitan
Alhaji Atiku Abubakar is a master of political manoeuvre who understands that, in Nigerian politics, doubt is a weapon. With the January 2027 contest against President Bola Tinubu looking uphill, he has opened a front against the one institution every candidate must trust: INEC. The question is whether he is pressing for transparency or pre-emptively discrediting an umpire before the whistle blows for the race.
The arithmetic is unkind. Eight years as Vice President under Olusegun Obasanjo left him with a title and a permanent shadow, because Obasanjo, his former principal, has publicly pressed weighty charges of corruption and incompetence against him. In earlier races he ran with governors on his platform, the engine room for vote mobilisation. Today, no serving governor stands on the African Democratic Congress (ADC) platform.
Atiku’s best showing in 2023 came amid strong, plausible permutations that federal might was quietly tilted his way by cabals around President Muhammadu Buhari. That cushion is gone. His candidacy also strains the unwritten convention of rotating the presidency between North and South.
The North itself is telling him to wait. On October 6, SGF George Akume told northern elites at a Sir Ahmadu Bello Memorial Foundation forum that the North is eligible in 2031, not 2027.
Former Borno governor Ali Modu Sheriff has urged him to shelve his ambition, and the Northern Youth Frontiers, led by Sama Musa, say the presidency is rotated among regions, not individuals. Babachir Lawal, a former SGF, warned in September that an Atiku presidency would amount to a “Fulani presidency.” Miyetti Allah Kautal Hore has historically rejected him as well.
So, the contest moves abroad and into the courts. Atiku is litigating, directly and through proxies in Nigeria and the US, over President Tinubu’s records. He also pays for a voice in Washington.
Filings under the Foreign Agents Registration Act show he engaged Von Batten-Montague-York under a $1.2 million (₦1.64 billion), 12-month contract signed in March 2026. Its stated aim includes “perception management” and “counterbalancing” the Nigerian government’s narratives. It means Atiku pays ₦1.64 billion to a Washington firm to project negative narratives about Nigeria. Does this “statesman” not deserve an applause?
On October 4, that same firm urged international lenders to suspend new loans to Nigeria until after the 2027 election. It warned of funds vanishing into campaigns or private wealth, saying, “Given Nigeria’s history of corruption, loans should be paused until Nigerians elect their next leaders.”
The record shows the contract and the statement. It does not show that Atiku dictated the words. But he is the paying client, and the country that would bear the cost is Nigeria: costlier borrowing, delayed projects and shaken lender confidence, all before a single ballot is cast. There is an irony here that deserves to be noticed. A firm retained by a candidate whose own record has drawn corruption allegations, notably from his former principal, is the one insinuating corruption against Nigeria’s leaders. A statesman asks how his country recovers from a hard recent past. A candidate asks how the other side loses.
Then, on October 11, came INEC. Atiku’s ADC Campaign Council questioned the appointments of Mrs Oluyemi Titilayo Adeyemi-Showunmi, now head of Electoral Operations, and Dr Lawrence Bayode, head of ICT. Director Isa Magaji Gum was moved from Electoral Operations to the Voter Registry Department. The ADC went further, claiming a pattern “along ethnic lines” and promising names of officers replaced by South-West staff. Yet the same ADC statement says it is not accusing INEC of “nefarious” plans, and a commentator has noted that redeployments within a civil service are routine. That is a long way from “Yoruba enclave.”
Test the claim against the structure. INEC’s policy body is a board of National Commissioners chaired by Prof. Joash Amupitan, SAN, from Kogi. Its members come from every geopolitical zone: Sam Olumekun and Prof. Kunle Ajayi from the South-West, Prof. Rhoda Gumus and May Agbamuche-Mbu from the South-South, Prof. Sunday Aja and Dr Ken Ukeagu from the South-East, Mohammed Haruna from the North-Central, Abdulrazaq Tukur Yusuf from the North-West, and Rear Admiral Jamila Malafa from the North-East. The South-West holds two of ten seats, and one of nine once Ajayi’s tenure ends.
Four seats are vacant because five-year tenures expired, and filling them is the President’s job, not INEC’s. Execution sits elsewhere. INEC’s 23 departments and directorates, 37 Resident Electoral Commissioners (RECs) and Electoral Officers in 774 local government areas (LGAs) are run as one programme. Every state and the FCT has a REC, and RECs are never posted to their home states.
The headquarters departments tell the same story. Election and Party Monitoring is led by Director Joan Arabs, Drafting and Clearance by Nkechi Abuh, and Legal Services by Al-Hassan Umar, SAN. Planning and Monitoring is under Mrs Helen Ajayi. The Secretary to the Commission, Dr Rose Oriaran-Anthony, holds the administrative seal. Reports say INEC has assigned new responsibilities to three senior officials, two of them from the South-West. The rest of the Commission’s departments were unchanged. An enclave is not built from two desks out of more than twenty, and neither of those two declares a result.
INEC under Amupitan earned plaudits for the way it conducted the last two off-cycle governorship elections in Ekiti and Osun states. Against that backdrop, claims of institutional capture require more than conjecture and rumour.
Even the counting is insulated. Results are collated and declared by returning officers who are university professors and vice-chancellors from outside INEC.
The ADC itself acknowledges this, asking only that INEC publish the list of proposed collation and returning officers in advance. An opposition that demands transparency inside the existing model concedes that the model exists.
The printing allegation is the most serious and the most hedged. Atiku’s ADC asked INEC to confirm or deny whether Hitech, a company linked to the Chagoury family, or any associate, holds a printing contract. The ADC said more than half of the sensitive materials, including presidential ballot assets, “might have been allocated” to an undisclosed firm believed to be in France.
The ADC Council cited reports that the Nigerian Security Printing and Minting Plc was printing for only 15 to 17 states. Each claim is framed as a rumour, a belief or a request, and the party concludes that INEC “must say so clearly” if no such contract exists. That is a demand that INEC disprove a rumour, not proof of a rigging mechanism.
Now weigh the demand Atiku’s team attaches to it: that INEC publish the names of its printers. The Mint can be named, because it is a state-run facility with a security ring built to deter attack.
Many private local printers have no such ring. Publish their names and locations, and each factory becomes a target for arson, armed theft or intimidation of staff. It also hands counterfeiters the roadmap to compromise workers or clone the paper stock. A ballot factory can be raided before polling day if its address is public.
That is why INEC, as I understand it, did not publish a named list of its private printers before the 2023 elections, even as it announced the first fully domestic print run since 1979.
The opposition’s underlying worry is fair, because secrecy can hide conflicts of interest. Public trust in electoral bodies depends not merely on neutrality but on the appearance of neutrality. INEC must therefore spare no effort in ensuring transparency, fair internal appointments and credible procurement processes. The burden of preserving confidence in the electoral process rests first with the electoral commission itself.
Yet INEC has a better answer than a public directory: a closed chain of custody. The Mint anchors the work, and private printers must clear security vetting.
After delivery to the secured vaults of the Central Bank of Nigeria, party agents, observers and the media can inspect the materials and match serial numbers before deployment. That model, already in practice, protects both integrity and security. It asks the opposition for verification where Atiku’s team asks for exposure. A demand that could expose the country’s most sensitive print run to sabotage, in the name of stopping a rigging plot nobody has evidenced, is reckless, whatever the intent behind it. And a grievance pressed through insinuation corrodes public confidence faster than any contract could.
So, the pattern is clear. A candidate’s party without governors or overwhelming northern backing for their flag bearer is indicting the umpire on the strength of two redeployed desks and a rumour.
Against this allegation stand a national board, a field force barred from its home states, and a count supervised by professors from outside INEC. The evidence does not corroborate the charge. It contradicts it. If INEC explains its postings, and opens the printed materials to inspection by party agents, observers and the media at the Central Bank vaults, the allegations lose their force. If Atiku and the ADC go on repeating them anyway, the aim is no longer transparency. It is a second narrative, drafted in advance, that a defeat in 2027 was never legitimate.
Is that a threat to Nigeria’s stability? As a route to power, it fails. As an erosion of trust in the one institution that must stand between 2027 and chaos, it carries real risk.
Democracies survive flawed elections more often than they survive elections nobody believes in. Atiku, who has contested and disputed past elections, should know better. The saving grace is that Nigerians are too sophisticated to be moved like pieces on someone else’s board.
