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The registered voters in the Federal Capital Territory went out to vote on the 21st of February, 2026 for the six Chairmen and 62 Councillors of the six Area Councils of Kuje, Bwari, Gwagwalada, Kwali, Abaji, and the Abuja Municipal Area Council (AMAC). The law under which the election was conducted was not known to any voter because till date the purported law used for the election has not been published. There are certain principles of legality, which a law must fulfil if the law can perform the basic function of law which is orderliness in the society.
Lon Fuller noted that to the extent that a definition of law can be given, then, it must include the idea that law’s essential function is to achieve social order through subjecting people’s conduct to the guidance of general rules by which they themselves orient their behaviour. Fuller’s approach to law implies that nothing can count as law unless it is capable of performing law’s essential functions of guiding behaviour, which must satisfy the principle that the rules must be publicly promulgated. The ECOWAS Supplementary Protocol on Democracy and Good Governance, which Nigeria is a signatory to, recommended at least six months minimum before an election to promulgate an electoral law that would be used for election. The FCT municipal election is tangible enough to be given some consideration in the scheme of things.
The election was scheduled long time ago in accordance with the Electoral Act 2022. The National Assembly repealed the Electoral Act, 2022, on the 17th February, 2026 and promulgated Electoral Act, 2026, with some dubious amendments, which President Tinubu signed into law on the 18th February 2026, within 24 hours of its promulgation, and about three days to the election. The gazetted copy of Electoral Act, 2026 was not publicly promulgated before the election of 21st February, 2026, so Nigerians in the FCT went out to vote under an unknown law. This was orchestrated by the All Progressives Congress (APC) lawmakers to create an atmosphere of confusion in which they will surreptitiously manipulate some INEC officials to agree to whatever they intended to do and the officials would do them, not knowing the true position of the law. This offends the rule of law because people must be made to understand what the law is through public promulgation.
Twenty four hours before the election, Nyesom Wike, and Minister of the Federal Capital Territory declared a restriction of movement on the residents of the territory. This injunction is really ridiculous. How can a minister, who ought to encourage people to come out to vote, restrict their movements in utter discouragement from voting. Residents who live in suburbs but who registered to vote in the cities to enjoy proximity to their workplaces simply stayed at home and were disenfranchised from voting.
To make a mockery of the restriction order, Wike was seen roaming about the whole of the FCT interfering with the elections going on in the polling units during the election. He was not a registered member of any polling unit in Abuja. He was not an elected member of any position in Abuja. He is not a member of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), which is expected to be independent in the conduct of the elections in the FCT. He is not above the law. The position of the law is that the command of the security forces is under INEC on the matters of election.
The law by Wike is that anybody who is not concerned with the election should not move around Abuja. Wike was not in anyway concerned with the election, and his movement was illegal. Even if there was a security alert to him as the Minister of the FCT, he was supposed to address the matter on its own merit, not interfere with the election. It could be seen that he was not invited to visit any of the polling units he visited, because there was no security threat in all the places he visited, meaning that he was not there to address any security concerns.
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For a minister who openly vowed to convert FCT to APC, it can be reasonably argued that his moving around was to influence the outcome of the election, and he did. Recall that when the former Prime Minister of Britain, Boris Johnson, decreed that there should be no movement during the COVID-19 era, and when it was found that he moved around, and even celebrated a party where he drank beer during the lockdown, he was asked to step down, among other allegations. Governor Godwin Obaseki was barred from entering JNEC-organised election venues and collation centres during the Edo gubernatorial election where the election was brutally rigged. INEC in the FCT ought to have stopped Wike from marching on from one polling unit to the other, influencing the outcome of elections in Abuja. It can be deemed that having restricted the movements of FCT residents, the election was rigged from the source with the active connivance of INEC which didn’t object to it.
INEC admitted that the materials arrived on time in about 45 per cent of the polling units. This is not a pass mark. If it lagged behind in logistics in such a small election, then it is an indication that the capacity of the Prof Joash Amupitan led INEC to organise the general elections of 2027 is suspect. Violence, vote buying were reported in many places. The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) apprehended about 20 people with large sums of money to purchase the election. We are expecting that the EFCC should ensure that the culprits should be brought to justice. Though with the corrupt influence of APC on the system, it is doubtful that EFCC will live up to this expectation.
Some polling units election results were found to be inflated and mutilated in some places. These results were still used to collate results and fraudulently used to declare winners. This is the reason APC hurriedly amended/repealed the Electoral Act, 2022 and put a proviso that unverified manual polling units results can be used to collate results if electronic transmission fails. Everyone agrees that there’s no area in the FCT that lacks network coverage, yet there were areas where the results were mutilated and inflated. APC and Tinubu must remove the proviso to the mandatory electronic transmission of results which they inserted in the Act to create the room for them to rig elections.
To further underscore the failure of INEC in the just concluded FCT municipal election, some reshuffle was done in the list of people in the polling units, resulting in transferring some people outside the polling units they previously voted in. Some of these transfers were not communicated to the affected people until about 11 am on the election day when they had become frustrated with the stress of not locating their names in their original polling units, and gone home without voting for their preferred candidates. One can assert that this amounted to systematic disenfranchisement of the people of the FCT from voting so that APC will have a field day.
The voter apathy that marred the election lays credence to the faulty nature of the conduct of the FCT municipal election. By INEC admission, only about 15 per cent of the registered voters turned out to vote on the election day. In the AMAC there was about a total of 837, 000 registered voters, and only about a total of 65,000 people voted. This is about 7.7 per cent of the total registered voters. Maybe INEC made up the 15 per cent from the turnout from the rural Area Councils. This low turnout signifies that Nigerians preferred staying at home to voting for the ruling party that has failed them, or opposition parties candidates they do not know about. The opposition parties must up their political game by fielding very popular candidates henceforth and by campaigning for such candidates to ensure greater success in their outing.
It was a mark of incompetence or deceit on INEC to insinuate that there was an improvement in the voter turnout of the 2026 municipal election compared to 2022. The Commission put the number of voter turnout in the 2022 election to be 9.4 per cent, while the 2026 election scored 15 per cent. It is possible that the Commission forgot that 2022 was held under the COVID-19 era’s national and international lockdown. In Nigeria, and indeed around the world, crowds were avoided, people with underlying health challenges were excluded from gatherings. The aged were also shielded from the vagaries of the moment. That accounted for the failure of the exercise. For INEC to compare itself with its performance during the COVID-19 era appears to give Nigerians reasons to argue that the current regime of INEC is suffering from COVID-19 disease that led to its abysmal failure in the conduct of the municipal election.
APC must repeal the worthless proviso that gave it room to manipulate elections. The party must realise that those who make peaceful change impossible, make violent change inevitable. The only survival of democracy that is visible in 2027 is free, fair, credible elections. Tinubu told the world that some military men conducted a coup to overthrow him. He should imagine the consequences of deprived and degraded Nigerian citizens feeling that the government of Tinubu conducted a civilian coup to overthrow the will of the Nigerian people. Some military men may argue that whether civilian or military coup, coup is coup, and may make further attempts to truncate our democracy. People died to fight for this democracy, and the least Tinubu and APC should do is to allow free, fair and credible elections. The starting point should be purging the Electoral Act 2026 of all its impurities.
