Human rights activist and politician Omoyele Sowore on Wednesday claimed that most elected officials in Nigeria would lose their seats if elections were conducted transparently.
Reacting to the Senate’s recent amendment of the Electoral Act, which permits electronic transmission of results but retains manual collation in areas with poor internet connectivity, Sowore argued that lawmakers deliberately resist reforms that could expose electoral malpractice.
“This excuse that there is no network in some states is just another balloon air on the part of these guys. They don’t want transparent elections because if elections are transparent, 90 per cent of them will not make it to the National Assembly and of course the presidency and other elected positions, they know that,” he said during an interview on Channels Television’s The Morning Brief.
He described the manual collation clause as “clever by half,” insisting it was designed to preserve what he called the “hardcoded way of reporting elections,” which has eroded public trust.
Sowore also criticized the Independent National Electoral Commission’s (INEC) IREV system as outdated, urging Nigeria to adopt electronic voting similar to India’s model. “India has 900 million registered voters and they use electronic voting as their own way of expressing the wishes of the people and those are almost foolproof. We have only 90 million here, we should be able to go for electronic voting,” he said.
He questioned why Nigerians cannot vote electronically from home when they already conduct confidential digital transactions daily, stressing that genuine reforms are needed to restore credibility to the electoral process.
