Electoral Reform in Nigeria: 25 Years, 176,000 Polling Units, and Still No Trust
Editor’s note: In this piece, Lekan Olayiwola, policy analyst, digs into Nigeria’s electoral reform debate, asking why every new change feels temporary and what could finally make elections feel real to citizens.
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If Nigeria’s electoral debates feel perennially unresolved, it is because they are rarely about what truly undermines trust. Technology dominates the conversation, but memory shapes the reaction. For many citizens, amendments to the Electoral Act do not read as reform, but as another moment where institutions speak the language of progress without confronting the history that makes that language suspect.
A discussion of electoral reform must acknowledge that public anger is not irrational but cumulative. For over half a century of electoral experimentation (military- and civilian-supervised), Nigeria has struggled less with the idea of elections than with the infrastructure of credibility that makes elections less contentious.
The narrow frame that keeps repeating itself
Nigeria’s electoral conversation has become fixated on a narrow set of questions, including vote counting, result transmission, and post-election litigation. These matters, but they have crowded out a more fundamental inquiry: Why, after two decades of elections, does Nigeria still lack a comprehensive, publicly available map of its polling units’ logistical and technological realities? This goes to the heart of why every reform cycle feels improvised and every legal amendment feels discretionary.
Nigeria operates roughly 176,000 polling units. Over at least 25 years of uninterrupted electoral cycles, the state has accumulated enormous operational experience: which units lack electricity, which have no mobile coverage, which are hard to reach, which are consistently disrupted by insecurity, which suffer late arrival of materials, and which function smoothly year after year. Yet this data rarely shapes public law or policy.
Instead, Nigerians are repeatedly told that “some polling units lack network” or “infrastructure is uneven” — statements that are true but too insipid to inspire reform. When uncertainty is perpetual, discretion begins to look arbitrary. And in a country with a history of electoral manipulation, arbitrariness is indistinguishable from intent.
The real progress Nigeria has not made
True reform would not begin with mandating or resisting real-time electronic transmission. It would begin with institutional self-knowledge. Why, for instance, has Nigeria not conducted and published a nationwide polling-unit infrastructure audit, classifying each unit by power availability, network strength, accessibility, security risk, and historical performance?
Why is this audit not updated after every election cycle, tracking improvement, stagnation, or regression? Why not use this data to draft targeted electoral laws, not blanket permissions or prohibitions, but differentiated obligations based on verified conditions? Modern governance should be moving from general claims to specific applications.
Without this, leaving electronic transmission to discretion, however technically defensible, feels to citizens like yet another retreat into opacity. Not because discretion is inherently wrong, but because it is unsupported by visible evidence.
Polling units as disposable sites, not democratic assets
Another blind spot in Nigeria’s electoral imagination is the way polling units are treated as temporary sites, activated once every four years and then abandoned. In serious democracies, and Nigeria could choose to lead here, polling units are not merely points of voting. They are civic infrastructure.
Why should a polling unit not be mapped, powered, secured, connected, and gradually upgraded over time? Why should local and international election observation focus almost exclusively on whether an election was “free and fair”, while billions are spent cycle after cycle without corresponding investment in the physical and technological foundations of elections?
If Nigeria is serious about credibility, then election monitoring must evolve beyond post-hoc judgment into electoral infrastructure development. Donors, civil society organisations, and international partners should be asking not only “Was the election credible?” but “What capacity was built?” beyond training of personnel and advocacy.
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Technology is being asked to do too much
The current fixation on electronic transmission risks turning technology into a moral substitute for trust. But technology does not operate in a vacuum. Electronic transmission cannot compensate for compromised electoral officials, voter intimidation, poverty that makes vote-buying effective, insecurity that prevents participation, or weak accountability within the electoral bureaucracy.
To debate transmission while ignoring these ancillaries is to treat symptoms while avoiding causes. Indeed, some of the most sophisticated rigging globally has occurred within technologically advanced systems, while some credible elections have occurred with slower, manual processes backed by strong institutional integrity. The real question is not how fast results move, but how credible the entire chain is from recruitment of officials to security, logistics, collation, and adjudication.
Why do citizens feel talked down to
One reason recent debates have inflamed rather than reassured is language. Citizens are told, often patiently but condescendingly, that reforms must be “gradual”, that infrastructure is “uneven,” and that trust should be extended.
What they are rarely told iswhat has been learned from past failures, what has measurably improved, what has not, and who is accountable for stagnation. When governments speak in abstractions, citizens fill the silence with memory. And Nigeria’s memory is not neutral.
A missed opportunity for leadership
Ironically, Nigeria could turn this moment into leadership not by mimicking Western models, but by innovating beyond them. Few countries have attempted a longitudinal electoral infrastructure mapping project. Nigeria could pioneer one integrating election management, digital infrastructure, security planning, and civic development into a single, transparent framework.
Such a project would remove ambiguity from future legal debates, reduce suspicion around discretion, allow targeted investment, and shift electoral reform from crisis management to long-term statecraft. That would be reform worthy of public trust.
Reframing the debate honestly
So what is missing in the current uproar is not passion, but precision. Citizens are right to distrust systems that have failed them before. Institutions are right to warn against mandates that exceed capacity. But both sides are speaking past a deeper failure that Nigeria has not institutionalised learning from its own elections.
Until polling units are understood not just as disposable voting points but as evolving democratic infrastructure, every reform will feel provisional, every discretion suspicious, and every innovation contested. It is time to start looking beyond the cycle of suspicion. Citizens are not asking for perfection. They are asking to stop being asked to trust in the dark. Progress begins when the state turns the light on — not just on results, but on the system itself.
Nigeria’s electoral legitimacy will not be secured by technology alone, nor by legal caution alone. It will be secured when the unknowns are reduced, when data replaces ambiguity, and when reform is visible not just in laws but in terrain, power supply, connectivity, security, and personnel integrity.
Lekan Olayiwola is a public-facing peace & conflict researcher/policy analyst focused on leadership, ethics, governance, and political legitimacy in fragile states.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Legit.ng.
Source: Legit.ng
