The Nigeria Democratic Congress says it wants ordinary Nigerians, not wealthy financiers, to pay for its 2027 campaign, a proposition that will be tested against an electoral law that now permits a single donor to give as much as N500m.
Speaking on Arise News’ Prime Time on Wednesday, the party’s national leader, Senator Seriake Dickson, said contributions as small as N1,000 would be welcome. “We want a process by which Nigerians, ordinary Nigerians, can contribute N1,000, N2,000, as it happens all over the world,” he said, according to a Vanguard report of the interview. He also described the NDC as the only political party in Nigeria that does not receive funding from the government treasury.
That last claim requires context. Direct public funding of political parties in Nigeria was abolished by the Electoral Act of 2010, following years of concern about the abuse of government grants. Section 228(c) of the 1999 Constitution still permits the National Assembly to provide for an annual grant to the Independent National Electoral Commission for disbursement to parties, but no subsisting law activates that provision. In strict legal terms, therefore, no registered party currently draws a statutory subvention from the treasury. Dickson’s argument, read against his other remarks, appears directed at the informal advantages he says accrue to parties in government rather than at any budget line, a distinction the interview did not spell out.
His broader complaint was about concentration of political money. “You cannot allow your democracy to be funded by moneybags and billionaires who are now trillionaires using government resources. You will continue to be oppressed,” Dickson said, adding that Nigerians must be helped to “break loose from the oppressors.” The allegation that state resources are being converted into party funding is his characterisation and has not been established by any regulatory finding cited in the interview.
The numbers behind the small donor idea are unforgiving. President Bola Tinubu signed the Electoral Act 2026 into law on 18 February, after the National Assembly harmonised the bill the previous day. Under Section 92 of the new Act, a presidential candidate may spend up to N10bn, double the N5bn ceiling in the repealed Electoral Act 2022. Governorship spending rose from N1bn to N3bn, Senate from N100m to N500m, House of Representatives from N70m to N250m, and state assembly and area council chairmanship contests from N30m to N100m each.
The donation ceiling moved furthest. The maximum a single individual or entity may give jumped from N50m to N500m, a tenfold increase. Set beside Dickson’s figures, one lawful maximum donation of N500m equals half a million contributions of N1,000. Filling the entire N10bn presidential ceiling from N1,000 gifts alone would require about ten million separate donors, roughly comparable to the number of votes that decided recent presidential contests. Twenty maximum donors could do the same work.
The disclosure rules moved in the opposite direction from transparency. The Policy and Legal Advocacy Centre noted in a February factsheet that the threshold at which parties must identify and record donors rose from N1m to N100m under the 2026 Act, while the 2022 requirement obliging parties to disclose the source of any contribution above N50m to INEC was dropped. PLAC warned that raising the donor identification bar narrows the disclosure net at precisely the point where much political money enters the system. Parties remain obliged under Section 225(2) of the Constitution to file annual statements of their sources of funds and expenditure with INEC, and the three month post election reporting duty carried over into Section 94(5) of the new Act. Section 225(3) continues to bar parties from holding funds outside Nigeria, and Section 221 bars associations other than parties from contributing to party funds or candidates’ expenses.
Whether the NDC’s fundraising model gets a live test at all depends partly on litigation still before the courts. The party’s route to the ballot has been unusual. Dickson has said the NDC first applied for registration in 2017, revived the application when INEC reopened the process in 2025, and was refused over the similarity of its proposed logo to that of an existing party. On 10 December 2025, Justice Isah Dashen of the Federal High Court in Lokoja ordered INEC to register it. On 5 February 2026, INEC chairman Professor Joash Amupitan announced the registration of two parties, the Democratic Leadership Alliance on merit and the NDC in compliance with the court order in suit FHC/LKJ/CS/49/2025, taking the number of registered parties to 21.
On 26 June, the same court set that judgment aside after the Peace Movement Party argued that it had submitted the disputed two finger logo to INEC first and had not been joined in the original suit. Justice Dashen ordered a return to the position before the December judgment and directed that the case begin afresh with INEC, the PMP and the NDC all joined. The NDC rejected the ruling, said no order for deregistration had been made, and instructed its lawyers to appeal. The substantive case has not been decided. Reports on Thursday said a Federal High Court in Abuja, presided over by Justice J. O. Abdulmalik, directed INEC to recognise a modified NDC logo drawn from the party’s constitution.
The stakes are considerable because the NDC is now the platform of two prominent opposition figures. Dickson confirmed in the same interview that Peter Obi is the party’s presidential candidate and Rabiu Kwankwaso his running mate, while distancing himself from the Obidient and Kwankwasiyya support movements. “I’m not a member of Kwankwasiyya. I’m not a member of Obedient. I am NDC,” he said. He added that the party had settled its candidate selection and was consulting on its presidential campaign council, which would be announced soon, remarking that the NDC did not intend to publish a list and then withdraw it as another party had done. Separately, the party has denied allegations that Dickson collected money from aspirants during candidate selection.
Dickson closed with an appeal to the referees. He urged INEC, security agencies and other relevant institutions to guarantee a free, fair and credible 2027 poll, saying every vote would be contested.