On February 25, 2023, Nigeria staged what was meant to be its most credible presidential election ever. For the first time, results from every one of the country’s 176,846 polling units were supposed to be uploaded in real time to a public portal. Nigerians stayed glued to their phones, watching the numbers climb, believing – many for the first time – that the vote could not be rigged.
By the next morning, the portal had become the crime scene.
It wasn’t just three states – Rivers, Lagos, Benue – that supplied the most dramatic distortions. But the tampering was never confined to three states. It was national, methodical, and merciless.
In Rivers, as the BBC Africa Eye investigation later proved, more than 106,000 votes were added to Bola Tinubu’s column and 50,000 shaved from Peter Obi’s while result sheets sat on INEC’s own server showing the opposite. In Lagos, Tinubu’s political fortress, thousands of Obi votes simply evaporated between polling units and the state collation centre; Kosofe, Eti-Osa, Amuwo-Odofin, and Surulere all saw their numbers rewritten. In Benue, a state that should have been a dead heat became a 2,000-vote Tinubu “win” after over-voting, unuploaded sheets, and open vote-buying tilted the scale.
But travel farther and the same pattern repeats.
In Imo and Abia, Labour Party strongholds in the South-East, result sheets were either never uploaded or appeared days later with completely different figures. In Kano, Nigeria’s most populous state, the early lead Obi built in metropolitan wards vanished overnight as rural collation centres – many without electricity or internet – declared impossible 95–100 % turnouts for the APC. In Kaduna, Governor Nasir El-Rufai’s state, Christian-dominated southern districts that voted overwhelmingly for Obi recorded turnout figures 30–40 % lower than neighbouring Muslim areas, a statistical miracle no one bothered to explain.
In Plateau, BVAS machines “failed” selectively in Obi strongholds while working perfectly in APC zones. In Enugu, the returning officer was forced at gunpoint to announce fabricated results. In Edo, APC agents openly tore up result sheets in broad daylight. In Ondo and Ekiti, Tinubu was credited with vote totals that exceeded the number of accredited voters. In Borno and Yobe, turnout soared above 70 % in areas where insurgency had kept voters away for years – yet the same machines that supposedly worked there failed spectacularly in cosmopolitan Lagos and Port Harcourt.
The Centre for Democracy and Development documented over 400 incidents of violence and intimidation on election day, almost all targeted at opposition strongholds. Yiaga Africa’s parallel vote tabulation found discrepancies in 17 of 36 states severe enough to change local outcomes. The European Union Observer Mission described the process as suffering from “systemic failings” and a “lack of transparency” that “undermined trust.” Even the usually cautious U.S. State Department noted “serious logistical shortcomings and isolated violent incidents that marred the process.”
INEC’s own portal – the great promise of 2023 – became the perfect alibi. When citizens pointed to the original polling-unit sheets showing Obi ahead, officials claimed the uploaded images were “blurry,” “wrongly filed,” or “not certified.” When petitioners brought printouts to court, judges ruled the evidence inadmissible because it had not been “front-loaded” months earlier. When journalists asked why 40 % of polling-unit results from the South-East were still missing a year later, INEC blamed “glitches.”
The national numbers tell the final lie. Tinubu was declared winner with 8.79 million votes – 36.6 % of the total – in an election with historically low turnout of 27 %. In 2019, with higher turnout, Muhammadu Buhari had needed 15 million votes to win. In 2023, Tinubu somehow secured the presidency with six million fewer votes, while the opposition vote was fragmented and suppressed just enough to keep any challenger from reaching the constitutional 25 % threshold in two-thirds of the states.
Two years on, the architects of the operation govern unchallenged. Tinubu occupies Aso Rock. Wike rules the Federal Capital Territory. The young people who believed their phones and their votes could change Nigeria have gone quiet – some out of exhaustion, others out of fear.
Democracy did not collapse in Nigeria with a bang. It was unplugged, one polling unit at a time, while the world watched the server and saw exactly what the fixers wanted it to see.
The evidence is still there – scattered across INEC’s half-functioning portal, frozen in thousands of photographs, preserved in the memories of millions who queued in the sun and went home with nothing.
One day, a country tired of being lied to may finally decide to look.