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The Digital Rights Lawyers Initiative sued Nigeria’s electoral commission at the Federal High Court in Yenagoa on Thursday, seeking a court order compelling the commission to publish a privacy policy explaining how it handles the personal data of millions of registered voters.
The suit, filed under Case No. FHC/YNG/CS/148/2026, names the Incorporated Trustees of the Digital Rights Lawyers Initiative and Solomon Etisang as applicants, with the Independent National Electoral Commission as the sole respondent. Counsel for the applicants, Dr. Olumide Babalola, argues that INEC’s official website, wp1.inecnigeria.org, carries no privacy policy disclosing how personal data belonging to website users, voters, and other data subjects is collected, processed, stored, shared, or protected.
INEC maintains one of Nigeria’s largest repositories of personal information, holding biometric and demographic records for millions of registered voters nationwide.
At the center of the case is Section 24(1)(a) of the Nigeria Data Protection Act, 2023, which requires data controllers to provide transparent information on how they process personal data. The applicants contend INEC’s failure to publish a privacy policy breaches that provision outright. They further argue the omission violates the constitutional right to privacy under Section 37 of the 1999 Constitution as amended.
Beyond the core transparency claim, the suit raises two additional statutory breaches. The applicants argue INEC has failed its duty of care under Section 24(3) of the Act, and separately failed to meet its obligation under Section 27(1) to supply data subjects with relevant information about how their data is used.
The reliefs sought are specific. The applicants are asking the court to declare that INEC’s failure to publish a privacy policy breaches its statutory transparency obligations, and to compel the commission to immediately publish a comprehensive privacy policy covering how personal data is collected, processed, retained, disclosed, and safeguarded. They are also seeking an order requiring INEC to file an affidavit of compliance within seven days of satisfying any judgment issued against it.
No date has been fixed for hearing, and INEC had not filed a public response to the suit as of the time of this report.
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The case joins a growing docket of public interest litigation testing enforcement of the Nigeria Data Protection Act since the law took effect in 2023. Digital rights advocates in Nigeria have increasingly turned to the courts rather than regulatory complaint processes to compel compliance from public institutions and private organizations, a shift that has accelerated amid what advocates describe as weak enforcement capacity at the Nigeria Data Protection Commission, the agency established under the Act to oversee compliance.
The Nigeria Data Protection Act itself replaced a patchwork of sector-specific rules and a prior regulatory framework issued by the National Information Technology Development Agency, consolidating data protection obligations into a single statute with its own dedicated enforcement body. Since passage, the law has been cited in a series of actions against government agencies and private companies, though judicial interpretation of several of its transparency and consent provisions remains in its early stages, with few reported judgments so far testing how courts will apply Sections 24 and 27 specifically to public institutions.
That gap is what makes the Yenagoa suit significant beyond its immediate parties. INEC is not a private data controller processing customer information for commercial purposes; it is a constitutional body whose data-handling practices touch nearly every adult Nigerian who has registered to vote, given the scale of its biometric voter database. A ruling that finds INEC in breach of its transparency duties could establish a precedent applied against other public institutions operating large citizen databases, including agencies handling national identification, tax records, or social registers, none of which currently face the same scrutiny under the two-year-old law.
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Dr. Babalola’s involvement adds a further data point: he has been named in past reporting as counsel in similar data protection enforcement actions, part of a small cohort of Nigerian lawyers building case law around the NDPA’s early years. The seven-day compliance affidavit requested in this suit is a mechanism that has appeared in comparable cases, designed to give courts a fast, verifiable check on whether a respondent institution has actually acted on a judgment rather than treating it as symbolic.
Whether INEC contests the suit on procedural or substantive grounds, or moves to publish a privacy policy ahead of a scheduled hearing, will determine how quickly this specific dispute resolves. The broader question the case poses, on the extent to which Nigeria’s public institutions are legally bound to disclose their data practices, remains unresolved until a court rules.
