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Nigeria’s Independent National Electoral Commission has issued its sharpest warning to date about the threat posed by intra-party disputes and their attendant litigation to the country’s 2027 general election preparations, as it convened a technical workshop in Akwa Ibom State to undertake a clause-by-clause review of its political party regulations for the first time since 2022, an exercise the commission described as the most consequential institutional reform it would carry out ahead of the next electoral cycle.
INEC chairman Professor Joash Amupitan told participants at the Technical Workshop on the Revision of INEC Regulations and Guidelines for Political Parties, held in Ikot Ekpene and organised in partnership with the Westminster Foundation for Democracy, that the commission had been joined as a defendant in scores of suits arising from internal party disputes during the last electoral cycle, cases he said could have been entirely avoided had the parties in question adhered to their own constitutions.
“Our collective commitment is being challenged by leadership squabbles and judicialised politics. In the last cycle alone, INEC was joined in scores of suits that could have been avoided by simple adherence to party constitutions. As an independent body, we remain neutral, but we are no longer passive observers,” he said.
The specific financial cost of defending those suits was not disclosed, but Amupitan characterised the expenditure as running into billions of naira, resources that could have been directed toward the operational priorities of election administration. The deeper cost, in his framing, was institutional: every working day spent in court defending a dispute that originated in a contested party primary or an irregular national executive committee meeting was a day not spent planning logistics, training election officials, or rolling out technology for the 2027 cycle. The commission has previously noted that voter turnout has declined progressively from 53.7 per cent in 2011 to 26.7 per cent in 2023, a deterioration it has partially attributed to declining public confidence in the integrity of the candidate selection processes that precede elections.
Amupitan’s address coincided with an especially acute phase of intra-party dysfunction across Nigeria’s political landscape. The Peoples Democratic Party has been convulsed by a factional dispute between camps aligned to Nyesom Wike and Iyorchia Ayu that produced conflicting correspondence to INEC and legal proceedings that reached the Federal High Court. The All Progressives Congress has faced parallel challenges from state-level executive disputes in at least four states. Smaller parties with representation in state assemblies have in several instances been unable to transmit valid candidate nominations to the commission because internal disputes over who constituted the party’s legitimate leadership remained unresolved at the point of filing.
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The workshop in Ikot Ekpene represents the commission’s formal response to that landscape. Its central output will be a revised edition of the Regulations and Guidelines for Political Parties, the document that governs party registration, statutory compliance, administration, conduct, and monitoring — updated for the first time since 2022 and aligned to the Electoral Act 2026, which was passed and assented to earlier this year. Westminster Foundation for Democracy country director Adebowale Olorunmola told participants that the 2022 regulations had served their purpose adequately for the 2023 elections but that “current realities are no longer what they were four years ago.”
The 2026 Act introduces changes to party administration obligations, candidate nomination processes, compliance requirements, and dispute resolution mechanisms that the existing regulations did not anticipate.
INEC Resident Electoral Commissioner in Akwa Ibom State Obo Efanga said the timing of the review was not coincidental. The political party regulations were the first in the commission’s framework to be revised because they govern the upstream end of the electoral pipeline, the processes by which parties select their candidates, manage their finances, and maintain their membership registers. Weaknesses at that stage transmit directly into the quality of the general elections that follow. Amupitan had made the same point in February at the commission’s first consultative meeting with political parties for 2026, at which he described the quality of internal party democracy as having a “direct bearing on the secondary election conducted by INEC.”
Several structural changes under consideration in the revised guidelines address the primary window that opens on April 23 and closes May 30, 2026, the period during which parties will conduct primaries to select their candidates for the Ekiti governorship election on June 20, the Osun governorship election on August 8, and the various state assembly by-elections scheduled across the year. Amupitan said the commission intended to enforce a level playing field during that window and that parties found to have conducted irregular primaries would face consequences in the certification of their candidates. The commission’s monitoring and compliance infrastructure would be empowered to act on observed violations rather than merely document them.
On financial accountability, the revised guidelines are expected to include stronger reporting obligations and enhanced benchmarks for the representation of women, youth, and persons with disabilities within party structures — areas in which Nigeria’s parties have historically recorded poor performance relative to constitutional provisions. The Westminster Foundation is providing comparative international benchmarks from its work in other Commonwealth democracies alongside Nigerian legal and electoral experts.
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Following the Ikot Ekpene workshop, a consolidated draft of the revised regulations will undergo internal institutional validation before the commission convenes an engagement with the Inter-Party Advisory Council and all registered political parties as part of formal implementation consultations. No date was given for the completion of that process, but INEC officials indicated the revised guidelines needed to be in force before the April 23 primary window opened.
