ADC Says It Will Not Trust INEC With Its Votes in 2027, Plans Independent Collation

Reported by: Ijeoma G | Edited by: Oravbiere Osayomore Promise.

The African Democratic Congress has declared that it will not trust the Independent National Electoral Commission to protect its votes in the 2027 general elections, with the party's National Publicity Secretary, Mallam Bolaji Abdullahi, saying the party has learned a bitter lesson from its experience in 2023 and will now take direct responsibility for collating and guarding its own results. Abdullahi made the declaration on Monday, September 21, 2026, during an interview on Channels Television's Politics Today, in a statement that captures the deepening mistrust between Nigeria's opposition parties and the electoral body ahead of the next general elections.

Abdullahi anchored his position in the lived experience of the 2023 elections, when INEC promised that results would be transmitted automatically to the IReV portal but failed to deliver on that promise. "Don't forget that I ran for Senate in the 2023 election," he said. "What many of us did, and not only myself, was that we trusted INEC when they told us there would be automatic transmission of results to the IReV. Then what happened afterwards? They said that, due to some technical glitch, the results could not be transmitted automatically to the IReV." He described the experience as a lesson the party would not forget. "So we have been beaten by that, and we are now twice shy. We say we will not allow it to happen again. We are no longer naive."

The ADC spokesman's statement was not a passive complaint. It was a declaration of intent. "We can no longer trust INEC to protect our votes for us," he said. "We are saying that we will vigilantly guard our own votes. We will protect our own votes." He made it clear that the party would accept results that reflected the true votes cast at polling units, but would reject any outcome that did not. "If the results at the end of the day reflect the true votes that came from the polling units, we will accept them. But if they do not, we are not going to accept them. We are making provisions to collate our own votes."

The ADC's position is not new. In July 2026, Abdullahi had already signalled the party's shift away from reliance on INEC, telling journalists in Ilorin that while some officials within the commission remained committed to credible elections, the party would not base its strategy on trust. "With due respect, INEC still has people that are committed to doing the right thing, but we are not going to run our election based on trust," he said at the time. "We know what they are capable of doing. We trusted them in 2023 and we saw what happened. We are not going to trust them with our votes this time around." When asked how the party intended to protect its votes, Abdullahi was deliberately evasive. "We are not going to tell you, but that is what we are going to do if we must win this election," he said.

The relationship between the ADC and INEC has been fraught with tension for much of 2026. In April, the commission announced that it would cease recognising the David Mark-led leadership of the ADC following a Court of Appeal order, a decision the party condemned as unlawful and partisan. The ADC accused INEC of deliberate misinterpretation of the court judgment and demanded the resignation of the commission's chairman, Professor Joash Amupitan. The party said the commission had "left no one in doubt that it is complicit in undermining Nigeria's democracy and can no longer be trusted". The dispute, which centred on the party's leadership crisis, escalated to the point where the ADC accused INEC of working to install a one-party rule in Nigeria. The commission defended its actions as obedience to the court's directive, but the episode deepened the distrust that now frames the party's approach to 2027.

The ADC's decision to plan its own collation system raises significant questions about the integrity of the electoral process. Nigeria's electoral framework vests the responsibility for collation and declaration of results in INEC, and parallel collation efforts by political parties, while not illegal, can create confusion and competing narratives if the official results are disputed. The ADC's move is a reflection of a broader crisis of confidence in INEC, one that has been building since the 2023 elections and shows no sign of abating. The commission has acknowledged the problem. In October 2025, Amupitan pledged to conduct an audit of the IReV portal to address the glitches that undermined public confidence in the 2023 elections. But for the ADC, audits and promises are no substitute for action. The party's position is clear: it will not leave its fate in the hands of an institution it no longer trusts.

The implications for the 2027 elections are profound. If opposition parties follow the ADC's lead and establish their own collation mechanisms, the official results announced by INEC may be contested by parallel tallies. The resulting disputes could undermine public confidence in the outcome and, in the worst-case scenario, trigger the kind of post-election violence that Nigeria has seen in the past. The ADC's stance is a warning shot. It signals that the opposition is preparing for a fight over the credibility of the 2027 elections, and that it will not accept a result it believes to be fraudulent. Whether INEC can rebuild trust in time to prevent that fight remains the central question of Nigeria's electoral politics.

For Abdullahi and the ADC, the message to INEC and the ruling party is unmistakable: the era of blind trust is over. The party will guard its votes, collate its results, and accept only what it believes to be the true verdict of the electorate. Whether that position leads to a more credible election or a more contested one depends on what INEC does next. The commission has four months until the general elections. It has the opportunity to demonstrate that it has learned from 2023 and that it is capable of conducting a free, fair and transparent election. If it fails to do so, the ADC's words will become a self-fulfilling prophecy, and the 2027 elections will be remembered not for their outcome but for their disputes.

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