The Independent National Electoral Commission says it will no longer wait until election day to secure the ballot, and will instead build protection for voters, staff and materials long before any ballot paper leaves its stores. INEC Chairman, Prof. Joash Amupitan SAN, unveiled the intelligence-led framework on Tuesday in Gombe while opening the North-East Zonal Interactive Meeting with Staff and Readiness Assessment for the 2027 General Election. He also warned that anyone who threatens the commission’s ad hoc staff, National Youth Service Corps members or permanent personnel would be hunted down and prosecuted.
The clock is short. Presidential and National Assembly elections will hold on Saturday, January 16, 2027, less than three months away, while governorship and State Houses of Assembly polls follow on February 6. INEC brought both dates forward from February 20 and March 6 after President Bola Tinubu signed the Electoral Act 2026 in February.
At the centre of the new approach is what the commission calls the “ICCES Tentacle”. Amupitan said INEC had restructured its work with the Police, the Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps, the Department of State Services, the Armed Forces and other agencies under the Inter-Agency Consultative Committee on Election Security. Coordination, he explained, will now reach beyond national and state headquarters into the most remote Local Government Areas and Registration Area Centres.
The plan rests on three pillars. Under “Map and Mitigate”, INEC will use Electoral Risk Management tools to spot flashpoints, seasonal threats and local weak points early enough for security agencies to act. “Ensure Safety” covers personnel, Bimodal Voter Accreditation System devices, server infrastructure and voters, while “Guarantee Access” aims to keep each of the 176,846 polling units safe regardless of how remote or troubled the area is. The commission says it has also procured 57,000 new BVAS devices for the polls.
Amupitan said the arrangement had already yielded results. According to him, joint operations led by the DSS uncovered a covert plot by criminal kingpins targeting ad hoc staff and corps members, and the principal organisers were arrested and are now being prosecuted. INEC did not name the suspects, where the plot was uncovered or the court handling the case. “Let me send a clear message from Gombe,” Amupitan said, before warning that offenders would face the full weight of the law.
The commission’s concern is grounded in its own records. INEC documented 50 attacks on its offices across 15 states between 2019 and 2022, with the highest number, 22, recorded in 2020. Unknown gunmen accounted for 20 of those incidents and vandalism during the #EndSARS protests for 18, with Imo the worst affected state at 11.
Independent data paint a grimmer picture. The Armed Conflict Location and Event Data project counted at least 134 incidents involving INEC offices and staff over the same period, a gap INEC’s figures partly explain because they excluded attacks on election duty officials. In December 2022, barely two months before the last general election, three attacks on INEC facilities in Imo left five people dead.
The stakes are also larger this time. Amupitan said earlier this month that the national register had passed 103 million after a three-phase Continuous Voter Registration exercise captured more than 10.6 million new applicants. That is roughly 10 per cent above the 93,469,008 voters registered for the 2023 elections.
The North-East alone holds 13,965,475 registered voters, or 13.51 per cent of the national total, according to INEC. Bauchi leads with 3,012,547 voters, more than a fifth of the zone, followed by Borno with 2,765,165, Adamawa with 2,431,146, Taraba with 2,254,380, Gombe with 1,768,566 and Yobe with 1,733,671. Amupitan acknowledged the zone’s peculiar difficulties, citing desert terrain, riverine stretches along the Benue trough, remote farming communities and vast distances between settlements.
Gombe was the fourth stop on a nationwide readiness tour that began in Lagos on September 7, moved to Kaduna on September 28 and Enugu on October 20. Speaking for the six North-East Resident Electoral Commissioners, Gombe REC Alhaji Umar Muktar Gajiram said the zone was prepared and that directives on voter register display, logistics audits and technology testing would be carried out in full. He pledged that none of the zone’s 13.96 million voters would be disenfranchised.
The next test of the framework will come in Abuja, where INEC plans to convene a National Election Security Conference to finalise state-specific protocols for high-risk zones. The commission has yet to announce a date. Amupitan described security as “the bedrock of electoral integrity”, adding: “Insecurity may pose a challenge, but our collective constitutional resolve is far stronger.”