With 21 days remaining to the statutory deadline for the release of election funds, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has not received money for the conduct of the 2027 general elections. The funding concerns are coming on the back of INEC’s proposal of N873 billion for the conduct of 2027 elections.
The development comes as the electoral umpire also disclosed plans to conduct mock presidential election exercises to test its technology infrastructure ahead of the 2027 elections, while assuring Nigerians that the controversial glitches that affected the INEC Result Viewing (IReV) portal during the 2023 presidential election would not be repeated.
But as the electoral umpire grapples with preparations for the general elections holding in January and February, all eyes are on INEC as it releases the official access codes to political parties today to enable them upload their nominated candidates to the commission’s portal. The move is expected to end fears of delays by political parties in publishing the names of contestants for various elective positions.
Thus, the question of selection of running mates has continued to haunt the candidates of the front row contesting parties. There is uncertainty surrounding the selection of other flag-bearers, aside from the Nigeria Democratic Congress’ (NDC) choice of presidential candidate, Peter Obi, who picked former Kano State governor, Senator Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso, before he emerged as the party’s standard-bearer.
Parties whose leadership are still a subject of litigation in the courts are also of interest as it is only the faction recognised by INEC that would be given the access codes. Earlier this week, the Minister of the Federal Capital Territory, Nyesom Wike had dared the Tanimu Turaki faction of the party that the authentic PDP faction would be determined on June 26.
The Turaki-led Interim National Working Committee had said INEC on Wednesday validated all the candidates contesting elections on its platform. But Wike, who spoke at the NEC meeting, dared the Turaki group, saying, “June 26 is around the corner. Let’s see who INEC will give access code to upload their nominated candidates. Some of you picked forms out of the wrong place. This is the real place to choose from. “Let’s see what happens on June 26,” he said.
Mohammed Haruna, the INEC National Commissioner and Chairman of the Information and Voter Education Committee, spoke yesterday on preparations for the 2027 elections at a closed-door fireside chat with some journalists organised by the Peering Advocacy and Advancement Centre in Africa (PAACA) in collaboration with Legis360 in Abuja, where he raised serious concerns.
Section 3(3) of the Electoral Act, 2026 provides that election funds due to the commission for any general election shall be released “not later than six months before the next general election”. The six-month deadline is July 16, 2026, just 21 days before the legal threshold is crossed, with the presidential and National Assembly elections scheduled for January 16, 2027.
The statutory timeline has not yet been broken, but Haruna warned that waiting until the final day allowed could greatly limit preparations for a vote expected to be one of Nigeria’s most complicated and expensive.
INEC is already under pressure to commence procurement and replacement of critical election materials, most of which require long manufacturing and delivery timelines, the INEC commissioner said. “You cannot just go to the market and buy election materials like ballot boxes, voting cubicles, ballot papers and technology infrastructure,” he explained.
Haruna said INEC had started discussions on the procurement of new Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) machines, lamenting that some of the machines used in previous elections were either damaged, lost or could not be recovered.
The Director of ICT just returned from China on procurement issues because not all the BVAS used in the last general election were recovered. “We’ve got to put in orders and these things take time,” he said.
Indeed, while the Electoral Act allows for election funds to be released up to six months before polling day, election managers argue that contemporary elections require much longer planning horizons, especially in a country with more than 176,000 polling units and one of the world’s largest electorates.
However, the worry is similar to arrangements ahead of the 2023 elections when funding for the elections was released much earlier, allowing the commission to start procurement and planning much earlier than scheduled.
The commission told the National Assembly in February that the planned spending of N873 billion would cover election operations, administration, election technology, capital projects and other miscellaneous requirements for holding nationwide polls.
But Haruna said public debates tend to focus on the headline figure without considering the realities of election management.
“Six dollars per voter is reasonable for a country like Nigeria,” he said, “This N800 billion plus sounds humongous but when you calculate the average cost per voter it is about six dollars per voter which is reasonable for a country like Nigeria. People forget that almost everything we use is imported. The BVAS devices are imported. Many election materials are imported. Costs are also affected by exchange rate fluctuations,” he said.
Reacting, Executive Director of PAACA, Ezenwa Nwagwu, cautioned that the delay in the release of election funds could create avoidable crises that can undermine electoral integrity. Late funding, he said, often leads to rushed decisions and compromises established procedures.
Meanwhile, Haruna acknowledged the public concerns that persisted after the 2023 Presidential election, particularly the technical problems that hindered the uploading of results on the IReV portal, but insisted that the commission has learned vital lessons and is determined to prevent a recurrence. He revealed that INEC is considering conducting mock presidential election exercises in preparation for the 2027 polls, especially to test the robustness of its systems under conditions similar to nationwide voting.
He said the challenge during the presidential poll differed from other elections because of the huge volume of data and simultaneous transmissions.
The commissioner also pointed to what he called increasing judicial interference in election administration with conflicting court orders and last-minute judgments.
The commission has become increasingly concerned by judicial decisions to change election arrangements close to polls, forcing it to make last-minute adjustments to logistics, technology and ballot design, Haruna said. On how to tackle the problem, he disclosed that INEC has lined up meetings with the judicial officers starting with the Supreme Court.
In some cases, the commission had to alter ballot layouts close to the election day because of court orders, which Haruna said created operational headaches. He said election management is a complex process of planning, procurement and systems configuration that requires certainty and predictability.
The ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), which has the incumbent, President Bola Tinubu, as its defending champion for the 2027 poll, trailed by the PDP, the Labour Party (LP), the New Nigeria Peoples Party (NNPP) and the Social Democratic Party (SDP) by the vote tally of the 2023 presidential election.
However, in the build-up to next year’s presidential election, almost all the presidential aspirants who participated in the 2023 ballot except President Tinubu and Adebayo Adewole of the SDP have changed platforms.
APC/Tinubu: Doubting Shettima
THE ruling party has not made any comments on whether President Tinubu will retain his vice, Senator Kashim Shettima, as his running mate for the 2027 presidential election, especially after the controversy resulted in the departure of the party’s former national chairman, Dr Abdullahi Umar Ganduje, last year.
The offence of Ganduje was the North East consultative meeting debacle where stakeholders were mobilized to Gombe State to endorse President Tinubu’s second term. On that fateful June 15, 2025, when the then zonal chairman, Mustapha Saliu mounted the rostrum and announced the endorsement of Tinubu without mentioning the name of the Vice President, stakeholders from Shettima’s home state of Borno protested.
The Deputy National Chairman (North), Bukar Dalori, made an attempt to correct the error by endorsing both Tinubu and Shettima for a joint presidential return ticket, but the boos and fisticuffs that ensued made the Borno delegates to think that the cat had been let out of the bag of the clandestine plot to substitute the former Borno State governor, Shettima.
But Nigeria’s fortunes took a turn for the worse when the U.S. Senate adopted a motion that tagged Nigeria a Country of Particular Concern for religious intolerance. The US lawmakers cited the same faith ticket of Tinubu and Shettima as a proof of persecution of Christians in the country.
Furthermore, as the U.S. President, Donald Trump, expressed his intention to protect Christians in Nigeria, there were renewed speculations that the former Chief of Defence Staff, General Christopher Musa, was being considered to replace Shettima as President Tinubu’s running mate in order to achieve religious balance on the APC ticket.
The subsequent appointment of Musa, from the North-West state of Kaduna, as Defence Minister, gave added flesh of authenticity to his speculated possible nomination as presidential running mate, just as insiders in the Tinubu Presidency explained that the former CDS was being brought in to be groomed in the ways of politics and governance as a minister.
The names would be uploaded and the window for substitution would close before anyone knows who would deputise President Tinubu on the APC ballot, just a few insiders and the president himself.
ADC/Atiku: Amaechi’s strange choice
THE ADC faces numerous challenges including leadership disputes and parallel structures. The faction loyal to Gombe has nominated Anambra’s self-acclaimed political godfather, Chris Uba as its presidential candidate while the faction loyal to the party’s 2023 presidential candidate, Dumebi Kachikwu has retained him as presidential contender.
As the various litigations challenging Senator David Mark-led National Working Committee (NWC) are still at trial and appellate levels, the Mark leadership held the party’s Presidential primary that threw up the former Vice President, Atiku Abubakar as winner amidst complaints from his rivals.
The stakeholders of the party prevailed on the former Transportation Minister, Barrister Chibuike Rotimi Amaechi and Banker, Mohammed Hayatu-Deen who were also ADC presidential aspirants to accept to be his running mate in a bid to contain the grievances by the other two aspirants who had objected to be a presidential sparring partner.
Amaechi, who also contested the APC presidential ticket against Tinubu, churned out some conditionalities to guarantee his acceptance as the vice-presidential runner, to ensure that he was not rendered redundant in the scheme of things.
They (Atiku’s supporters) began to fly the kite of a possible substitution of Amaechi on the presidential ballot, affronted by what Atiku’s inner men called cheekiness. Amaechi’s supporters persuaded him to go ahead with a court case against the ADC presidential primary to checkmate that move. By June 27, he was not uploaded on the INEC portal.
Problems of the running mate selection
For long, the selection of governorship and presidential running mates has always been a bone of contention during elections. In 2023, the failure of former Vice President Atiku Abubakar to nominate the runner-up in the PDP presidential primary as a balm for the wounds that factionalised the party, led to another damning defeat by the APC.
Religion and zonal balances sometimes dictate who and from where a running should be sourced for the flagbearer. At any rate, a key consideration always is the electoral weight of the possible candidate and other factors of funding capacity, easy name and face recognition.
PDP Governorship candidate for Adamawa, Dr Maurice Vunobolki, who has not yet selected his running mate, said in an interview that in the search for his deputy, “it is very important that my running mate should be transparent, must have a good pedigree, must be energetic, must be well educated and exposed, someone that is reliable, that we can rely on, and also has the acceptability of people.”
It was not his sole choice, but the stakeholders of the party must be involved in the selection of a running mate, he said, even as he maintained that his input is also necessary to “an extent that the running mate must also come in with quite a lot of transparency, pedigree, experience and exposure.”
His words: “Well, I know that it is the duty of the flag bearer to get his running mate but then, party structures are involved in getting running mates. Now, because you can’t just go and say I’m going to pick somebody who has no input in what the political fortunes are going to be like. So you’ve got to be involved in the choice of a running mate, but the party structures are very important in doing that.
“In all, I think usually they have pencilled like three different nominees, and then, based on what I have mentioned now, the criteria I gave out, we’re able to take a running mate that is on the ground as well. No, not yet, but we have identified some people but not a particular individual. “We have about five that are very good, that have the pedigree, the experience, the exposure that will fit into that office, but the stakeholders will have the final say from these five.
Anxiety, power play over fallout of Ondo APC primaries
IN Ondo state, aspirants who contested the Senate and House of Representatives tickets are in a state of anxiety as the party moves to upload the list of candidates on the portal today. While the fate of most of the aspirants remains uncertain over the unresolved outcomes of the party’s primaries held last month, the various political camps in the state have expressed optimism and hope that their candidates will emerge as the winners.
Ahead of the portal access deadline, the APC is yet to officially release a final list of its standard-bearers for the nine House of Representatives constituencies and three senatorial districts in the state, despite conducting the primaries on May 16 and May 18, 2026.
The delays have been linked to internal squabbles, complaints by aggrieved aspirants and crises that rocked some parts of the states during the primaries, which had allegations and counter-allegations.
Some camps in the party, sources have revealed, have been working underground to ensure that the consensus candidates allegedly favoured by Governor Lucky Aiyedatiwa get into the list, while some other camps are also in a power play to emerge victorious.
The uncertainty was heightened by the earlier disqualification of some aspirants from the House of Representatives race by the party, particularly those allegedly linked to the consensus candidates preferred by the governor. Some of the aspirants, even after being disqualified, were said to have been present at the collation centres, expecting to be declared winners.
The crisis has also created a chaotic scenario with several aspirants in various constituencies independently laying claim to the party’s tickets with incumbent lawmakers and governor-backed candidates engaged in fierce cold battles over who actually won the primaries.
