Festus Okoye Has Named The Two Things That Will Decide 2027
Abuja · Monday 7 September 2026
Festus Okoye, a former national commissioner at INEC, has warned that vote buying and insecurity could heavily influence the outcome of the 2027 general election. He was speaking on Saturday at a virtual masterclass run by the Lagos chapter of the Society of Nigerian Broadcasters.
The warning is unremarkable. The source is not.
Why it matters who is saying it
Okoye sat on the commission through the 2023 general election and was its public face on results and legal process. When a former commissioner says the two things most likely to distort the next election are money at the polling unit and violence around it, he is not speculating about a system he read about.
The two problems are not the same problem
- Vote buying is a demand problem. It works because a specific amount of cash on election day is worth more to a voter than the abstract value of a vote. That calculation gets easier for the buyer every year that real incomes fall.
- Insecurity is a supply problem. It removes voters from the process entirely, by making the journey to a polling unit dangerous or by making the unit itself impossible to open. Nobody is bribed, and the result still changes.
What is actually being done about either
On vote buying, the practical measures are the ones already in place: phones banned in the voting cubicle, security around the point of accreditation, and prosecution afterwards which almost never happens. On insecurity, the answer is a security deployment that INEC does not control and cannot compel.
The commission is being asked to guarantee an outcome using two levers, and it holds neither of them.
The measurable version of this warning
Turnout by state, and the number of polling units that failed to open. Both figures exist after every Nigerian election and neither gets the attention of the headline result. They are the closest thing to a scorecard on what Okoye is describing.
If turnout falls again in 2027 and the same states account for the drop, the diagnosis was right and nothing was done with it.
Reporting: Vanguard, TheNiche and the Society of Nigerian Broadcasters masterclass.
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