One of the candidates in the ongoing Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) Elections, Mr. Yemi Akangbe SAN has demanded immediate suspension of the elections due to alleged irregularities.

In a statement made available to CITY LAWYER, Akangbe set out the grounds to back his demand for immediate suspension of the elections, saying: “I have set out three independent grounds, each of which is sufficient on its own to invalidate this election. In combination, they present a picture of systemic failure so complete that no mid-election patch, no time extension, no informal assurance, and no verbal promise of a “restart” can restore the credibility of the process. I therefore demand, formally, immediately, and on the record, that the ECNBA take the following steps: (a) Suspend the election immediately. The portal must be taken offline, in its entirety, now. No further votes should be accepted, processed, or recorded until the matters set out in this letter have been fully addressed. (b) Preserve and quarantine all data. Every vote cast, every authentication log, every OTP delivery record, and every access log from the period between 12:00 AM and the time of suspension must be preserved in its entirety, without alteration, deletion, or overwriting, and made available for independent audit. (c) Commission an immediate, independent technical audit of the platform, the database, the OTP delivery mechanism, and the ballot interface, conducted by a reputable third-party firm with no prior relationship to the ECNBA or the appointed service providers, before any resumption of voting is contemplated.”

He stated that “One hundred and twenty minutes into the process, the election has suffered a catastrophic structural and technical collapse that renders its continuation, in any form, indefensible.”

Setting out the grounds upon which the elections should be suspended, the senior lawyer stated the “specific grounds on which I demand the immediate suspension and postponement of this election,” adding that “Each ground alone would be sufficient. Together, they present a picture of systemic failure so total that no result declared at the end of this process can carry the confidence of the profession or withstand the scrutiny of any reasonable individual.”

He stated that “As of 2:09 AM WAT, the official e-voting portal was entirely inaccessible to the vast majority of the approximately 82,000 accredited voters. Reports from voters across the country confirm that the platform was returning errors, failing to load, or timing out on authentication. For all practical purposes, the election has not commenced. The portal has collapsed.”

He stated that “A portal that collapses within the first two hours of a national election and then proposes to “restart” is not a portal that can be trusted to deliver a credible result at any point thereafter. The integrity of the database has been compromised from the moment the system failed. No restart can cure that.”

Raising concerns over the “shift” from SMS to email-based receipt of OTPs, Akangbe wrote: “Today, within the first one hundred and twenty minutes of the election, reports are already flooding in from voters across the country that they are receiving OTPs via email, not via SMS. This is not a minor technical glitch. This is a complete and bad-faith breach of the security architecture that the ECNBA itself published, in its own name, to the entire membership, less than a day ago.

“The shift from email to SMS was not a cosmetic change. It was the single most important safeguard adopted for this election, introduced expressly because the email-based system had been compromised in previous elections, most notoriously in 2018 when the EFCC filed a 14-count charge against two individuals for altering the email addresses and phone numbers of over 1,000 voters and fraudulently using their Supreme Court Enrolment Numbers to cast votes.

“If OTPs are being delivered via email, the entire authentication framework is compromised. Every vote authenticated by an email-delivered OTP is a vote that cannot be verified as legitimate under the ECNBA’s own published guidelines. The very vulnerability the revision was designed to eliminate has been reintroduced on the morning of the election. The membership is entitled to know whether this is incompetence or design. Either answer demands the immediate suspension of the process.”

According to the presidential candidate, “Reports confirm that the live presidential ballot interface, as displayed to voters who have managed to access the platform, contains an unpardonable administrative and graphic defect. Of the three cleared presidential candidates, only one candidate’s photograph is displayed on the ballot. The photographs of the remaining candidates, including mine, are either omitted, broken, or failing to render. In an electronic election, the ballot interface is the ballot paper. Its design, layout, and visual presentation must be neutral, complete, and identical for every candidate. A ballot that displays one candidate’s photograph while omitting the others is not a neutral instrument. It is a visual prompt. Whether by negligence or by design, it confers a presentation advantage on the candidate whose image appears and disadvantages every candidate whose image does not. In any jurisdiction, and before any reasonable individual, this would be grounds for the immediate invalidation of every ballot cast on that interface. That this defect exists at all, on a platform that was supposedly subjected to end-to-end testing on 11 July, a mock voting exercise open to all verified voters, and a final systems and security audit on 13 July, raises the most serious questions about the competence and diligence of the Electronic Voting Service Provider and the ECNBA’s oversight of the process. A defect of this nature should have been detected and corrected weeks ago. That it was not detected, or was detected and not corrected, is itself an indictment of the entire testing and audit framework.

“That this defect exists at all, on a platform that was supposedly subjected to end-to-end testing on 11 July, a mock voting exercise open to all verified voters, and a final systems and security audit on 13 July, raises the most serious questions about the competence and diligence of the Electronic Voting Service Provider and the ECNBA’s oversight of the process. A defect of this nature should have been detected and corrected weeks ago. That it was not detected, or was detected and not corrected, is itself an indictment of the entire testing and audit framework.”

In demanding the suspension of the elections among others, Akangbe also asked the electoral committee to “Explain to the membership, in writing and on the record, how a platform that was tested, audited, and certified for deployment collapsed within the first hour, how email OTPs were sent in direct violation of the published guidelines, and how a ballot interface with a candidate’s photograph missing passed the final pre-election review. (e) Postpone the election to a date within the life of this current NBA national executive that allows sufficient time for the audit, the rectification of the identified failures, and the restoration of confidence among the candidates and the membership. No ad-hoc fix applied under the pressure of a live, failed election can substitute for a properly constituted, independently verified, and transparently managed process.”

Concluding, he warned: “I say this plainly and unequivocally: a flawed, rushed election carried out today under these chaotic conditions cannot yield a credible result. Whoever is declared the winner of an election conducted on a collapsed portal, with breached authentication, and on a visually defective ballot, will not lead the Bar with the confidence of the profession. They will inherit a crisis of legitimacy from which neither they nor the Association will easily recover. The Bar has been here before. It cannot afford to be here again. The ECNBA has a choice. It can suspend the election now, investigate, fix, and rebuild, and conduct a credible process that the membership and reasonable individuals will respect. Or it can press on, declare a result that will be immediately and comprehensively challenged, and drag the Association into another cycle of litigation, recrimination, and public disgrace. I urge the Committee, in the strongest terms, to choose the former. The profession is watching. History is watching. And reasonable individuals will be watching. This letter is being delivered simultaneously to the Chairman and all members of the ECNBA, to the NBA President, to the General Secretary, Past Presidents of the NBA, to all presidential candidates, and to the Honourable Attorney-General of the Federation, by all available means. Please treat this as the most urgent correspondence you will receive today.”

The electoral committee is yet to formally respond to the petition which was addressed to the chairman and members of the committee.

(C) CITY LAWYER Magazine. All rights reserved. To join our Channel, click here. Click here to join our WhatsApp chatroom. Contact us at citylawyermag@gmail.com or 081-3838-0083