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The Socio-Economic Rights and Accountability Project sued Nigeria’s electoral commission at the Federal High Court in Abuja last week, seeking a court order compelling an investigation into allegations that All Progressives Congress governors diverted 800 billion naira in federal allocations toward President Bola Tinubu’s 2027 re-election campaign.
SERAP’s Deputy Director, Kolawole Oluwadare, disclosed the suit in a Sunday statement, identifying it as Case No. FHC/ABJ/CS/1426/2026, filed against the Independent National Electoral Commission over its alleged failure to act on the diversion claims.
The allegations rest on media reporting rather than SERAP’s own independent findings. The organization attached a May 17, 2026, Premium Times opinion column by Festus Adedayo as Exhibit A3, citing the article’s claim that APC governors have been making monthly deductions from their Federation Account Allocation Committee allocations into a dedicated campaign fund supporting Tinubu’s re-election bid.
SERAP is asking the court for three separate orders of mandamus. The first would compel INEC to investigate the underlying allegations. The second would direct the commission to demand full disclosure from the governors and the APC regarding any contributions made to a campaign fund, including donor names and the lawful origin of the money. The third would require INEC to initiate a formal review of compliance with Section 91 of the Electoral Act by all political parties and candidates, with particular attention to the sources and scale of campaign financing in the current cycle.
The suit, filed on SERAP’s behalf by Oluwadare and lawyer Kehinde Oyewumi, argues that the alleged diversion or opaque handling of public funds poses what the organization called a threat to the integrity of the 2027 general elections. SERAP contends that the scale of the public fiscal flows involved, combined with weak transparency and oversight mechanisms, gives INEC sufficient grounds to exercise its constitutional and statutory powers.
Section 91 of the Electoral Act underpins SERAP’s legal argument. The provision empowers INEC to set limits on political donations, require disclosure of contributions and their sources, and enforce sanctions against violators. Under the section, a political party that exceeds the prescribed donation limit faces a fine of up to 10 million naira in addition to forfeiture of the excess amount, while an individual donor who exceeds the limit is liable to a fine equal to five times the excess contributed.
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SERAP argues that where allegations touch on the possible use of state-derived or publicly controlled funds for political activity, INEC carries a constitutional and statutory duty to investigate and monitor, rather than wait for a complaint to be independently substantiated elsewhere. The organization further contends that INEC’s alleged inaction on campaign finance enforcement undermines public confidence in the electoral process and Nigerians’ constitutional right to participate freely in government.
No date has been fixed for the hearing.
The case adds a campaign-finance dimension to a broader pattern of SERAP litigation aimed at compelling Nigerian public institutions to act on transparency and accountability obligations, an approach the organization has used repeatedly against federal agencies, state governments, and now the electoral commission itself. SERAP’s core argument, that INEC possesses underused investigative authority over political financing, tests a provision of the Electoral Act that has seen limited judicial interpretation since the law’s more recent amendments, leaving unsettled how a court might weigh INEC’s discretion to investigate against a mandamus order compelling it to do so.
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The allegations, if substantiated, would implicate a channel of political financing distinct from the individual campaign contributions Section 91 was primarily designed to regulate: state-level public revenue allocated through the federal government’s monthly disbursement to states, rather than private or corporate donations to a political party. FAAC allocations are constitutionally earmarked for the federal, state, and local government tiers to fund public expenditure, and diversion of those funds toward a political campaign, if proven, would raise separate questions under public finance law beyond the Electoral Act provisions SERAP has cited.
Neither INEC nor the APC had issued a public response to the allegations or the suit as of the time of SERAP’s Sunday statement. The named state governors accused of participating in the alleged fund have not been identified individually in SERAP’s public filing summary, and the organization’s case rests on the Premium Times column rather than on financial records or a named whistleblower.
