The Independent National Electoral Commission has asked the Federal Government to release the balance of its 2026 budget without delay, warning that the preparations for the 2027 general elections cannot stay on track unless the money arrives on time.
INEC Chairman, Prof Joash Amupitan, made the appeal in Abuja on Tuesday at a World Press Conference and National Stakeholders’ Meeting held ahead of the polls. He said the commission had made considerable progress, but that the remaining funds were needed to keep that momentum going.
“Executing a national election of this magnitude requires robust financial backing and fiscal discipline,” Amupitan said. He credited the government with keeping up its statutory budgetary allocations under what he described as a framework of transparent fiscal management.
According to the chairman, the releases so far have allowed INEC to settle international vendor obligations, fund the production of election technology, upgrade infrastructure and sustain operations across the country. What is now outstanding, he said, is the portion needed to run the remaining activities without disruption.
The timing of the appeal is significant. The presidential and National Assembly elections are fixed for Saturday, 16 January 2027, with governorship and state assembly polls following on 6 February. That January date, set under the Electoral Act 2026 which President Bola Tinubu signed in February this year, is the earliest a presidential election has been held since Nigeria returned to civil rule in 1999, and it leaves the commission a tighter runway than in any previous cycle.
The scale of the task is laid out in INEC’s own figures. When Amupitan defended the commission’s estimates before the National Assembly Joint Committee on Electoral Matters in February, he put the cost of the 2027 general elections at about N873.78bn, separate from the N171bn proposed for routine operations in 2026.
That election budget breaks down into roughly N379.75bn for operations, N209.21bn for technology, N154.91bn for capital spending, N92.32bn for administration and N42.61bn for miscellaneous items. For the 2026 operational budget, the Ministry of Finance set a ceiling of N140bn, while the commission proposed N171bn to cover its obligations.
Set against the past, the sums are steep. The 2023 general elections were run on about N313.4bn, which means the 2027 projection is close to three times that amount in naira terms, though much of the gap reflects inflation and the collapse in the value of the naira over the period rather than real growth in activity alone.
The funding question has shadowed these preparations for most of the year. The Electoral Act 2026 requires that money due to INEC be released at least six months before a general election, which placed the deadline for the January 2027 polls around July 2026. As recently as June, the commission said it was yet to receive allocations earmarked specifically for the 2027 elections, even as it insisted that work was continuing in line with the timetable.
On the ground, Amupitan said procurement and other preparations were already under way. He listed the purchase of 57,000 new Bimodal Voter Accreditation System devices, additional voting cubicles and new operational vehicles among the items being acquired.
The chairman added that the commission was building dedicated storage facilities for the BVAS machines, renovating offices nationwide and upgrading its information and communications technology. Beyond money, he named logistics, electoral materials and security as the other critical pieces that must come together for the elections to hold smoothly.
The reliance on technology explains why so large a share of the budget, the N209.21bn technology line, sits apart from ordinary operations. The BVAS, used to accredit voters by fingerprint and facial recognition and to upload results, has been central to INEC’s conduct of recent elections, and keeping tens of thousands of the devices maintained and deployed across more than 170,000 polling units is among the commission’s heaviest recurring costs.
What remains unresolved is how much of the outstanding money has actually been released and how quickly the balance will follow. Amupitan did not put a figure on the shortfall, and the government has not publicly stated how much of the 2026 allocation is still pending. Until those numbers are clear, the commission’s repeated appeals are the main public measure of where the funding stands.
The next few weeks will test whether the early calendar can be met. With the presidential vote now less than four months away, the pace of fund releases, procurement and deployment through the rest of 2026 will show whether INEC’s confidence in its own timetable is matched by the resources to deliver it.