By Festus Ogwuche
There are moments in a constitutional system when a single issue becomes more than itself. It stops being a discrete allegation and begins to function as a diagnostic test of the entire legal order. In Nigeria’s Electoral Act 2026, the treatment of certificate forgery appears to occupy precisely that position. It is not merely about documents or misconduct.
It is about whether the electoral framework still answers, in a coherent and enforceable way, to the demands of constitutional supremacy.
At first glance, the law appears to narrow the space within which certificate forgery may be raised in post-election litigation. This is often justified on familiar grounds on the need for finality, the need to stabilise electoral outcomes, and to prevent election petitions from degenerating into wholesale inquiries into every aspect of a candidate’s past.
Election law, it is argued, is sui generis; it must be swift, contained, and decisive. But, the difficulty begins where procedural containment begins to touch substantive accountability.
Certificate forgery is not an incidental irregularity. It is not a peripheral electoral complaint. It is, in its legal essence, a question of qualification and standing within the electoral space itself. A candidate who allegedly secures office on the basis of falsified credentials does not merely offend electoral expectations but also engages the foundational legality of candidacy. It, therefore, sits at the intersection of electoral law and general criminal law, where consequences are not merely political but also penal.
Under the Criminal Code Act and Penal Code Act, forgery remains a serious criminal offence. That position is unaffected by electoral legislation. No electoral statute, however detailed, can validly extinguish the criminal character of forgery. The offence survives independently of electoral outcomes. The real question, therefore, is not whether forgery is still a crime – it definitely is and remains a crime! The question is whether the electoral law can, by narrowing the avenues of challenge, effectively insulate or constrict the consequences of that crime from timely electoral accountability.
This is where the tension becomes constitutional rather than procedural.
The Electoral Act 2026, by limiting the extent to which certificate forgery may be ventilated within election petitions, does not expressly decriminalise the conduct.
Instead, it alters its jurisdictional visibility within the electoral dispute framework.
The result is a legal environment in which the same act may remain criminal in theory, yet become procedurally inaccessible in the decisive electoral forum once certain timelines have lapsed or once office has been assumed.
When this is combined with constitutional immunity under section 308 of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria (1999) (as amended), the structure becomes more complex. Criminal prosecution may be suspended during tenure. Electoral challenges may be time-barred or procedurally excluded. What remains is a situation in which a potentially disqualifying act exists in law but is not always capable of immediate institutional resolution.
This is not necessarily unlawful, but however, structurally consequential.
Comparative constitutional practice shows that systems resolve this tension in different ways. Some jurisdictions allow continuous judicial scrutiny of qualification issues even during tenure, ensuring that allegations touching on foundational eligibility remain justiciable regardless of office. Others separate criminal liability from electoral validity but maintain robust mechanisms for pre-election verification, ensuring that qualification defects are resolved before assumption of office becomes irreversible. In those systems, the aim is not merely to punish wrongdoing but to prevent the institutional entrenchment of contested legitimacy.
Nigeria’s model, as reflected in the Electoral Act 2026, appears to lean more heavily toward procedural closure after elections, combined with deferred criminal accountability and constitutionally protected immunity during tenure. The consequence of this sequencing is that certificate forgery, though legally condemned in the abstract, may not always translate into immediate electoral consequences once institutional thresholds are crossed.
It is at this point that the constitutional question becomes unavoidable. The issue is no longer whether forgery is criminal, a question already settled in the annals of jurisprudence. It is whether the electoral framework, as presently structured, sufficiently preserves the ability of the legal system to act on such criminality in a manner that aligns with the principle of constitutional supremacy.
That principle does not merely assert hierarchy among laws; it demands that no statutory arrangement, however procedurally efficient, should produce a practical outcome in which illegality becomes insulated from meaningful consequence.
The doctrine of constitutional supremacy, properly understood, does not require every issue to be resolved instantly. However, it does require that no issue of foundational legal significance be rendered structurally unreachable or inchoate.Where procedural design creates persistent gaps between wrongdoing, adjudication, and consequence, the legitimacy of the system begins to depend not only on what the law says, but on when and how the law is allowed to speak.
Certificate forgery, in this sense, becomes more than an electoral offence. It becomes a test case for whether Nigeria’s constitutional order can still integrate criminal law, electoral law, and constitutional principles into a coherent whole. If the system allows such conduct to exist in a milieu of delayed or fragmented accountability, then the question is not whether the law is silent. It is whether the law is speaking in a unified voice.
A rethinking of the electoral framework, therefore, cannot proceed by treating certificate forgery as a marginal, extraneous, or technical issue. It must be recognised as a central axis around which questions of eligibility, legitimacy, and constitutional fidelity revolve. Any reform that strengthens procedural efficiency while weakening substantive accountability at this point risks producing not legal clarity but constitutional fragmentation.
The ultimate measure of an electoral system is not only how quickly it produces winners but how convincingly it answers the question of whether those winners were always legally entitled to stand. On that question, certificate forgery is not peripherally a side issue.
It is the test – the real challenge to status and electoral eligibility.
Dr Ogwuche is an expert in international law and president of the Campaign for Social Justice and Constitutional Democracy in Africa and based in Port Harcourt.
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