By Kunle Somorin
A peculiar form of divination is practised by the Nigerian state, one that does not involve the consultation of Ifa priests or the reading of kola nuts, but rather the cold arithmetic of budgetary projections.
It is what happened when the Federal Government set aside N135 billion for election-related litigation in the forthcoming 2027 electoral cycle. This, to me, looks like a confession disguised as fiscal planning.
In a country where the entire 2024 budget for the Universal Basic Education Commission hovers around N160 billion, and where the Teaching Hospital in Lagos operates with leaky roofs and broken dialysis machines for want of a fraction of that sum, the allocation speaks in tongues.
It simply announces, with the candour that comes only from bureaucratic routine, that the next general election will not produce outcomes accepted by those who participate in it; that the ballot box has become, not a vessel for the people’s will, but a delivery mechanism for disputes that will be settled, finally, in the marbled corridors of the Appeal Court.
To budget for disagreement before conversation has begun is to treat democracy not as a deliberative process but as a forensic battlefield. It is to acknowledge that the Nigerian polity has advanced beyond the crude thuggery of the 1960s, when electoral officers simply fled with the ballot boxes, into a more sophisticated era of legalised uncertainty.
The N135 billion is not contingency planning; it is pre‑commitment to conflict, a wager placed by the Treasury on the certainty that the Independent National Electoral Commission will fail to deliver results credible enough to forestall judicial challenge.
In Ghana, where election disputes are resolved over chilled bottles of Star beer in less time than it takes a Nigerian tribunal to hear preliminary objections, litigation funds are modest insurance against aberration. In Nigeria, they have become the principal budget line of electoral administration, suggesting that the courts, rather than the polling booth, are the true Electoral College where power is consecrated.
This allocation sits at the centre of what one might call the institutionalisation of distrust – a system so thoroughly corroded by anticipation of malpractice that the state now funds the legal architecture of its own illegitimacy.
When the budget for argument exceeds the budget for administration, when the cost of forensic contestation dwarfs the cost of securing the ballots themselves, the election has already become a ritual rather than a choice. We are witnessing the triumph of what the Yoruba call oju oore – the eye that expects betrayal – and preparing to pay for the privilege of our own suspicion.
To understand how we arrived at this point – where the judiciary is budgeted for more generously than the security of ballot boxes – one must examine the slow unravelling of INEC’s authority, which has entered its most precarious phase since the democratic restoration of 1999.
The commission, never quite the independent arbiter its name suggests, has recently demonstrated a disquieting agility in transforming judicial ambiguity into administrative partisanship. The case of the African Democratic Congress offers a textbook study in this metamorphosis, a parable of how the umpire becomes a player.
When INEC derecognised the faction led by Nafiu Bala Gombe in favour of the David Mark‑led alternative, it did so, citing court orders obtained through processes that the Gombe faction contests as procedurally irregular. The commission found itself not merely enforcing electoral law but adjudicating intra‑party warfare, picking winners in a family quarrel where neutrality was always going to be read as alignment.
This is the trap into which INEC has fallen: in seeking to obey the courts, it has become subject to them; in attempting to avoid the appearance of bias, it has delivered the reality of it. As Nnamdi, my friends told me, an Igbo proverb warns, “When a blind man carries a lame man on his shoulders, both must watch their step,” – yet INEC stumbles forward, claiming to navigate by a justice it cannot see.
The hurried Electoral Act of 2026, with its compressed timelines and its insistence on direct primaries or consensus – a contradiction in terms that only Nigerian legislation could achieve – has left the commission with discretion so broad that every exercise of it appears arbitrary.
When the umpire becomes a combatant, the match is discredited before kickoff; yet INEC persists in the performance of neutrality even as its actions increasingly resemble the strategic manoeuvres of a godfather determining who gets the party ticket.
The Osun State crisis illuminates this theatre of the absurd with particular clarity.
There, the State Assembly has raised alarms over what it terms the systematic redeployment of electoral officials familiar with local terrain – a reshuffling that coincides ominously with the approach of electoral season.
In Nigerian politics, there is a specific gravity to the movement of electoral officers; it recalls the wetie crisis of the 1960s Western Region, when the manipulation of electoral personnel preceded the fires that consumed the First Republic. The accusation is not merely of incompetence but of pre‑election scripting – the movement of referees to ensure that the field tilts in predetermined directions, that the palm wine flows only toward certain calabashes.
INEC’s response has been to cite administrative necessity while simultaneously announcing progressive initiatives: voter registration drives for persons with disabilities, technological upgrades to the BVAS system, and inclusion programmes that suggest a commission committed to democratic expansion.
This dissonance – between the commission’s progressive technocratic face and its politically compromised administrative body – creates the peculiar vertigo of contemporary Nigerian politics. It is possible, indeed it is characteristic of late‑democratic regimes, for a system to enhance its accessibility while corrupting its integrity; to bring more voters to the polls while ensuring that their choices matter less.
INEC has mastered this ambidextrous skill, expanding the franchise while constraining its meaningful exercise, like a host who invites guests to a feast but controls the ladle.
Yet even these contradictions pale beside the suspicions now swirling around the institution. The PDP’s allegations that inducements of land and cash were offered to INEC officials by powerful figures, and the resurfacing of partisan tweets linked to Chairman Joash Amupitan, deepen the shadows of distrust. These do not form the basis of the challenge to 2027’s credibility, but they add troubling layers to an already fragile edifice.
When inducements are alleged, and the chairman’s past words echo partisan loyalties, the litigation fund risks being seen not only as preparation for disputes but as a purse for defending compromised neutrality.
Amupitan’s tweets – “Victory is sure” in response to an APC boast, “Asiwaju” in celebration of Tinubu – may be dismissed as private expressions, but when resurrected in the context of his chairmanship, they acquire the weight of institutional bias.
INEC has denied the authenticity of the account, but denial alone cannot erase the impression. In politics, perception often matters more than fact, and perception here corrodes trust. The N135 billion, already a monument to suspicion, becomes doubly suspect when the umpires themselves are accused of playing the game.
The judicialisation of Nigerian politics, which the N135 billion litigation fund both symptomatises and accelerates, represents a fundamental shift in how power is transferred. Where once elections were settled by counting, they are now settled by recounting – not of ballots but of legal arguments, procedural technicalities, and the interpretive ingenuity of judges who increasingly find themselves the final electors of the republic.
This is not merely an institutional failure; it is a philosophical inversion. Democracy, in its classical conception, requires that the people be the authors of their own governance; when governance is determined by judicial review of the electoral process, the people become characters in a narrative written by Senior Advocates, their sovereignty mediated through the hermeneutics of statutory interpretation and the geography of forum shopping.
Historical precedents are instructive and ominous. In the Western Region crisis of 1965, the electoral commission’s loss of credibility provided the dry tinder for conflagration. In 1983, the judicial ratification of manifestly fraudulent results delegitimised the entire Second Republic, paving the way for military intervention.
What distinguishes our present moment is the sophistication of the machinery. Where previous electoral robberies were crude affairs – ballot stuffing, open theft – the contemporary model is juridical, bureaucratic, almost elegant in its deployment of procedural delay and technical objection. The violence is no longer primarily physical; it is archival, a matter of affidavits sworn before commissioners for oaths in Jigawa and originating summonses filed in Abuja.
This litigious turn has created a perverse incentive structure that shapes political behaviour long before campaigns begin. Parties no longer optimise for voter persuasion but for evidentiary preservation; campaign strategy becomes litigation strategy; polling agents are selected not for their ability to mobilise turnout but for their capacity to serve as witnesses in post‑election tribunals.
The result is what one might term forensic democracy – a system in which the active citizenry is not the electorate but the legal profession, and where the deliberative space of politics has been colonised by the adversarial space of the courtroom. We are building a republic of Senior Advocates, where the SANs rule and the people applaud from the gallery.
One must ask, with the seriousness that attends questions of constitutional mortality, whether a democracy that budgets for its own disputes at this magnitude can still be called a democracy at all.
The N135.22 billion in the 2026 budget specifically for “Electoral Adjudication and Post-Election Provision” is not merely an expenditure; it is an admission of bankruptcy, a confession that the mechanisms of collective decision‑making have so far broken down that the state must prepare for civil war by other means. It is the ransom paid by a republic to its own contradictions, the egunje offered to the gods of litigation to prevent them from unleashing chaos.
And yet, and yet. There is something almost admirable in the candour of the appropriation. At least the state is no longer pretending; at least the pretence of seamless democratic transition has been abandoned in favour of honest preparation for fracture.
This is the peculiar Nigerian genius for successful failure – the ability to achieve precisely the opposite of stated intentions while maintaining the institutional forms that camouflage the achievement. We have succeeded, magnificently, in creating a system that reproduces conflict while promising resolution; that generates litigation while aspiring to consensus; that spends billions to avoid the simple arithmetic of counting votes, like a student who hires ten tutors to avoid sitting for the exam.
The philosopher in the street – that endangered species who persists in asking inconvenient questions – might inquire whether clarity or confusion is being achieved by all this motion. The answer, unsatisfying but true, is that we have achieved clarity about confusion itself.
We know now, with the certainty that comes from budgetary revelation, that 2027 will be contested not between parties but between lawyers; not in polling units but in tribunals; not by the force of argument but by the argument of force. The N135 billion is the architecture of distrust made concrete – the steel reinforcement of a building designed to collapse slowly, room by room, judgment by judgment.
The suspicions surrounding inducements to INEC officials and the partisan echoes of its chairman’s past tweets do not, by themselves, determine the fate of the 2027 elections. But they thicken the atmosphere of distrust, like smoke gathering before a fire.
They remind us that the litigation fund may not only underwrite disputes between parties but also subsidise the defence of compromised neutrality. They remind us that perception, in politics, is often more corrosive than fact. And they remind us that when the guardians of democracy are themselves suspected of partisanship, the architecture of distrust becomes complete.
The Nigerian state has chosen to insure itself not against accident but against inevitability. It has budgeted not for the possibility of conflict but for its certainty. In doing so, it has revealed the true nature of our democracy: not a system of popular sovereignty but a theatre of managed suspicion, where the people vote, the lawyers argue, and the judges decide. The ballot box has become a prop, the tribunal the stage, and the litigation fund the ticket price for admission.
When the calabash floats on such turbulent waters, one does not ask whether it will reach shore, but rather what shore it is approaching, and whether the destination resembles the point of departure.
In budgeting for litigation before the first vote is cast, Nigeria has revealed its democratic aspiration to be not the expression of popular will but its management through institutional delay. The architecture is complete; the chambers are ready; the only question remaining is who will occupy them when the arguments conclude, and whether the silence that follows will be that of peace – or that of a tomb.
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