On Tuesday, October 7, 2025, Professor Mahmood Yakubu officially announced his departure as chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC). He served two terms in office. A feat; an honour.
Not many appointees enjoy the privilege of serving out two terms especially when there is a change of leadership in the Presidency. Yakubu did. For his service, President Bola Tinubu conferred on him the national honour of Commander of the Order of the Niger (CON).
That’s a massive presidential honour for the electoral umpire who was first appointed in November 2015 as the 14th chairman of INEC by the then President Muhammadu Buhari. His initial five-year term was renewed by Buhari in 2020. A renewal that bears only one message: Buhari was impressed by his sterling performance in the 2019 general elections which renewed Buhari’s mandate for another four years. Yakubu followed up the 2019 general elections with the polls of 2023. A historical fortune of having to conduct two general elections as INEC Chair.
Whereas Tinubu has certified Yakubu’s performance as excellent, such badge of honour stands misplaced in the eyes of certain Nigerians. Former President, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, recently described Yakubu as an enemy of Nigerians; a man who polluted the polity and reduced elections to a charade.
In his latest book, Nigeria: Past and Future, which was unveiled early this year, Obasanjo accused Professor Yakubu of polluting the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) to the extent that politicians no longer trust INEC.
Obasanjo who himself was reputed to have conducted a flawed election when he was President, said on page 99 of the book that “politicians do not put much confidence in election which the INEC of Professor Mahmood Yakubu polluted and grossly undermined to make a charade.”
The former President recounted how he visited a state in the north about 10 years after he left office and the governor of the state pointed to a line of six duplex-buildings near the government Guest House all belonging to a judge whom the governor said built the houses from money he made from being chairman of election tribunals.
Obasanjo said there is erosion of confidence in INEC, stating that “most politicians believe in the will of the tribunal judges, court of Appeal judges and Supreme Court judges. No matter what the will of the people may be, the chairman of INEC since after 2015 election has made his will greater and more important than the will of the people.”
He blamed former President Muhammadu Buhari for looking away while INEC and the judges desecrated the electoral processes. He said under Buhari, “there were false declaration of results, making losers winners and winners losers and the victim or the cheated is advised to go to court, which is a court of corruption rather than a court of justice.”
Obasanjo’s perspective reflects the opinion of many Nigerians and those of different local and international groups who monitored the 2023 elections. An ECOWAS election observer even described the 2023 election as a “crime scene,” in apparent reference to the brazen display of violence, vote manipulation and other vices that should never be associated with elections in a democracy.
But are such acts of election rigging peculiar to Yakubu’s INEC alone? Never! Yet, it has to be emphasized that Yakubu scored an own goal. He promised far more than he could deliver. Without anybody nudging him, Yakubu introduced the deployment of the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) with its dual fingerprint and facial biometric accreditation process to ensure that only genuine voters are accredited to vote during election. He made BVAS the only means by which voters will be accredited in the 2023 general election.
He also introduced the INEC Result Viewing (IReV) portal to make result management procedure more transparent than it had been. Ahead of the election, Yakubu toured the nation preaching the gospel of integrity and transparency and insisting that polling unit results would be uploaded in real-time to the IReV portal for public viewing. “The IReV has come to stay and polling unit results will be uploaded to the portal in real-time in the 2023 general election,” he had vowed ahead of the election. But he delivered short on this in the most crucial election in the nation’s history and in a manner that left so much for suspicion. Results of National Assembly election were uploaded but the results of the Presidential election were not uploaded, though both elections held the same day under the same circumstances. Such barefaced cheating. This among other flagrant show of vile and vicious tendencies that should never attend any decent election in a democracy unfortunately defined INEC’s election under Yakubu. It has remained a permanent scar on INEC.
Yet, it has to be said that Yakubu stood out as the most advocacy-driven INEC chairman in Nigeria. Ahead of the election, he moved round the country mobilizing different stakeholders, focus groups, enlightening and preaching the gospel of civil electoral behaviour, electoral purity, public participation and the need for Nigerians to turn up enmasse to elect their leaders. Nigerians listened and turned up to register. The evidence: A record over 80 million registered voters across 176,846 polling units nationwide with 18 political parties contending for honours. The logistics was enormous both in manpower and technical deployment. Further breakdown of the 2023 election showed a list of 15,322 candidates contesting for 1,491 seats (one Presidential, 28 Governorship, 109 Senatorial, 360 House of Representatives and 993 State Assembly constituencies). Huge!
But this is not a justification for the under-performance of INEC under Yakubu whose performance fell short of expectation as did the performance of his predecessors, worst of them being Professor Attahiru Jega whose 2015 election had two manuals. The election was rigged by Jega. He openly set different electoral parameters for different parts of the country. Jega enforced the use of card reader in the south but not in the north for the same election.
Jonathan admitted this much and heavily indicted Jega in his book, My Transition Hours. In Chapter Eight of that book, he wrote: “I had every reason to contest the results, starting from educational qualification for elections and electoral malpractices. These were the facts in my hands…
“Apparently, there were many instances of irregularities. There were series of problems with card readers, resulting from widespread technical hitches leading to non-uniform application throughout the country…”
But no matter, an election is as clean as the polity. The problems that attend elections in Nigeria take their roots from the fact that politicians deliberately foul up the polity, compromising the electorate, security personnel, judiciary and just about any person in sight. This ties the hands of any INEC chairman. This has compromised all elections since Independence, especially in the 4th Republic. Yakubu was just another victim of this streak of electoral duplicity. But nobody can deny the fact that he was the most engaging INEC chairman in terms of advocacy and public enlightenment.
