Angry Nigerian protesters confronted the Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission, Prof. Joash Amupitan, outside Chatham House in London on Thursday, demanding his resignation over what they described as deep flaws in the preliminary voters register being prepared for the 2027 general election.
The demonstrators, drawn largely from the Nigerian diaspora, surrounded the vehicle conveying Amupitan as he arrived for a panel discussion on the country’s election preparations. They accused the commission of partiality towards President Bola Tinubu and the ruling All Progressives Congress, branded it a criminal organisation, and pointed to duplicate registrations, suspected artificial intelligence photographs and questionable polling units as proof of a register they said could not be trusted.
The protest is the latest flashpoint in a controversy that has been building since late October, when the commission published its preliminary register online and admitted that some voter photographs appeared to have been generated or manipulated using artificial intelligence. INEC has since traced many of the irregularities to its own registration officers, who hold authorised access to the national database. Its director of information and communication technology, Lawrence Bayode, said the commission’s biometric system had flagged 268 records for individual review, separating images created entirely by AI from genuine photographs merely enhanced with phone based tools.
On 9 November, Amupitan announced that the commission had removed 1,609,553 records from the register, made up of 1,608,660 confirmed invalid registrations and 873 entries belonging to verified deceased persons. He said INEC had harvested 11,088,238 records from the three phases of the 2025 and 2026 Continuous Voter Registration exercise before screening. Fifty-four officials across ten states were identified as allegedly complicit in the irregularities, and the commission said they would face disciplinary action, including possible prosecution.
The commission has been careful to stress that not all the disputed entries originate from the current exercise. It said some of the questionable records circulating on social media date back to earlier registration drives, and Amupitan noted that the national register has grown through successive exercises since 2011, carrying forward duplications that cleaning the latest phase alone cannot resolve. The final register is due for certification on 15 December.
Opposition figures have seized on the disclosures. Atiku Abubakar, the former Vice President now in the African Democratic Congress, has demanded a forensic audit and the prosecution of those responsible, claiming that more than 20 million AI generated images may have entered the database, a figure the commission has not confirmed and which it says relates to the preliminary rather than the final list. Earlier in the year, opposition leaders including Atiku, Peter Obi and Rabiu Kwankwaso staged an Occupy INEC protest in Abuja, and fresh anger followed the resurfacing of a disputed social media post said to link the chairman to the APC, which the commission dismissed as the work of a fake account created to frame him.
The London protest has also revived questions about the independence of the electoral umpire. Those concerns deepened after Amupitan’s predecessor, Prof. Mahmood Yakubu, who led the commission from 2015, accepted a diplomatic posting on leaving office. Yakubu was among 32 ambassadorial nominees sent to the Senate by Tinubu in November 2025 and was later designated Nigeria’s non-career ambassador to Qatar. Pressed on the matter at Chatham House, Amupitan pledged to turn down any appointment after his tenure, saying he would accept nothing from anyone “because coming to serve here is based on trust.”
A professor of law and senior advocate who was sworn in only in October 2025 as the first INEC chairman from Kogi State, Amupitan has staked his credibility on cleaning the register before the polls. He told the London audience that the commission was adding technical safeguards to stop inaccurate results from being uploaded to its result viewing portal during the 2027 elections. With certification of the final register weeks away, and civil society groups including the Socio-Economic Rights and Accountability Project pressing for a transparent forensic review, the integrity of the list looks set to remain one of the earliest and most contentious questions of the 2027 campaign.