Rigging Starts At The Polling Unit, Not INEC Headquarters, Says Adeleke
Barely four weeks before Osun State returns to the polls, the founder of Adeleke University, Ede, Dr Deji Adeleke, has redrawn the familiar map of Nigeria’s electoral integrity debate, arguing that the corruption that undermines the ballot begins not at the headquarters of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) but in the hands of the young ad hoc officials and security personnel who actually run elections at the polling units.
Addressing graduates on Sunday at the university’s 12th undergraduate and eighth postgraduate convocation ceremonies in Ede, Adeleke said the credibility of the country’s elections depends far less on the competence of the INEC chairman than on the honesty of the thousands of temporary staff, many of them members of the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC), deployed to conduct polls across the country.
“You cannot blame that on the INEC chairman when youth corps members are collecting N50,000 and changing figures at the polling unit,” he said. “Even if the INEC chairman is a spirit, is he going to be at all the polling units in Nigeria?”
He drew directly on the coming Osun contest to press the point. “Very soon we are going to have an election in Osun State. Osun State has 3,763 polling units. Is it humanly possible for the INEC chairman to be at all those polling units at the same time?” he asked, adding that “they have entrusted it to young people like you, and yet they will collect money and change the figures.”
Adeleke, a billionaire businessman, elder brother of the Osun State governor, Ademola Adeleke, and father of the music star David Adeleke, popularly known as Davido, went further, tying the fragility of the process to violence and to the conduct of the courts. “People die, there is violence during elections. They have killed young people like you graduating today who might become adult staff of INEC, changing figures,” he said. He also faulted what he described as “the ignorance of judges perverting justice,” warning that “Nigeria will continue to regret it if it doesn’t change immediately,” even as he insisted that “it’s never too late to start all over.”
His intervention lands at a charged moment. The Osun governorship election, an off cycle poll, is fixed for August 15, 2026, after INEC shifted it from an earlier date of August 8. According to figures released by the commission, the state has 3,763 polling units and about 2.3 million registered voters, put by the commission at 2,339,233, with 14 political parties cleared to contest.
The race pits Governor Ademola Adeleke, who has since left the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) for the Accord Party, against the All Progressives Congress (APC) candidate, Munirudeen Bola Oyebamiji, popularly called AMBO, in what many observers regard as a tight two horse contest, with the African Democratic Congress (ADC) candidate, Najeem Salaam, also in the field. Notably, both the PDP and the Labour Party, which fielded candidates in the last governorship election, did not present candidates this time. The governor won the 2022 poll on the PDP platform, polling 403,371 votes to defeat the then incumbent, Adegboyega Oyetola of the APC.
Adeleke’s focus on ad hoc officials touches the operational heart of Nigeria’s election machinery. INEC lacks the permanent workforce to staff hundreds of thousands of polling units nationwide, and so leans heavily on corps members and other temporary recruits to serve as presiding and poll officers on election day. Ahead of the Osun poll, the NYSC deployed roughly 3,000 corps members to the state, and the governor himself, through his representatives, has on more than one occasion urged them to remain apolitical, professional and resistant to inducement.
The vulnerability he describes is well documented. Since the 2023 general election, INEC has deployed the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) and the INEC Result Viewing Portal (IReV) in an effort to curb the inflation of figures at accreditation and improve transparency. Yet the manipulation of results at the point of ward and local government collation, where handwritten figures are transferred onto result sheets, has remained one of the most persistent complaints in Nigerian elections, and it is precisely at that human stage that Adeleke locates the problem.
The record on holding offenders to account is sobering. Following the 2023 general election, the Nigeria Police said more than 700 suspects were arrested for electoral offences. INEC later confirmed it received 215 case files covering 774 alleged offenders, comprising 52 files involving 238 suspects from the presidential and National Assembly elections and 163 files for 536 suspects from the governorship and state assembly polls. The offences ranged from dereliction of duty and criminal conspiracy to snatching of materials, vote buying and electoral violence, and some of those charged were INEC officials. Because the commission has few in house lawyers, it engaged the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) under Section 145 of the Electoral Act 2022 to prosecute the cases pro bono. Even so, nearly two years on, convictions remained scarce, recorded in only a handful of states such as Kebbi and Kogi.
The difficulty of securing convictions is captured by the case of Mfon Uduk, a returning officer in Akwa Ibom State during the 2019 general election, whose successful prosecution took close to six years to achieve at the trial court. Such delays, reform advocates have long argued, blunt the deterrent effect of the law and embolden the field officials Adeleke singled out. The slow pace of INEC’s internal discipline has drawn similar scrutiny, including instances where errant resident electoral commissioners were suspended for more than a year before their removal could be completed through the combined action of the President and the National Assembly.
Osun itself is no stranger to disputed outcomes. The 2018 governorship election was settled by a controversial supplementary poll that returned Oyetola in circumstances the PDP contested for years, while the 2022 election that brought Ademola Adeleke to power was dragged through the election petition tribunals before it was upheld. That history lends added weight to anxieties about the conduct of officials when the state votes again in August.
Beyond the ballot, Adeleke framed electoral malpractice as an economic burden, warning that weak adherence to the rule of law and questionable elections discourage investors and accelerate the migration of young Nigerians in search of opportunities abroad. He said the international community would continue to regard the country “as primitive and backward” despite the evident talent of its people, linking credible elections directly to investment, employment and national confidence.
The convocation also served as a moment of institutional stocktaking. The Vice Chancellor, Professor Solomon Adebola, said the 15 year old university graduated 1,375 students, made up of 1,211 at the undergraduate level and 164 postgraduates. Of the undergraduates, he said 190 earned first class honours, 655 finished in the second class upper division, 337 in the second class lower division and 29 with third class honours, while the institution admitted 1,554 students in the 2025/2026 session.
Adebola further announced that the National Universities Commission (NUC) had approved two new professional programmes, Medicine (MBBS) and Pharmacy (Pharm.D), into which the university will admit students from the 2026/2027 academic session. He named Ejiofor Onyinyechukwu Sonia of Medical Laboratory Science and Kinosi Victor Oluwagbemiga of Economics as the best graduating undergraduates, each with a perfect cumulative grade point average of 5.00, while Olunlade Joshua Oluwafisayo emerged best Master’s graduate and Ukenyi Chibunna Godspower the overall best PhD graduate.
For now, Adeleke’s remarks have reframed a debate often fixated on the personality and performance of the INEC chairman, redirecting it toward the anonymous thousands who mark ballots, count votes and sign result sheets far from the glare of cameras. Whether that message reaches the corps members preparing for duty in Osun, and whether the safeguards built since 2023 hold at the collation centres, will be tested in earnest when the state goes to the polls on August 15.