The Executive Director, #FixPolitics Africa, Anthony Ubani, has urged the Independent National Electoral Commission to allow political parties to independently collate and publish results from the 2027 elections, even before the overall winner is declared.

Ubani, in a statement, stressed that independent vote counting would not deprive INEC of its sole authority to declare the winner of the elections.

He was reacting to a recent comment by Segun Showunmi, as reported by The Guardian, that the release of results and declaration of winners by anyone other than INEC would be regarded as treason.

According to him, treason is not a word that should be used loosely in a democracy.

“In Nigeria, it carries too much history and too much pain. We have lived through periods when criticism was treated as disloyalty, opposition as subversion, and disagreement as a threat to the state. That is why Segun Showunmi’s recent comments about the 2027 elections deserve a serious response.

“Showunmi is part of President Bola Tinubu’s 2027 campaign communication structure.

“There is a part of that statement that is correct. The INEC has the legal authority to make the formal declaration of election results and return winners through the officials designated by law. Nobody should pretend otherwise.

“But that is not the same thing as saying that Nigerians cannot independently collect, check, compare, analyse or publish authentic election results. Those are different activities, and collapsing them into one dangerous word, treason, creates more confusion than clarity,” he asserted.

Ubani, a leadership and governance expert, said treason had a specific meaning under Nigerian law, covering grave acts against the state, including levying war against it.

“Independently adding up authentic results announced at polling units is nowhere close to that.

“If Showunmi meant that nobody should impersonate INEC or falsely present an unofficial figure as the lawful declaration of a winner, then that is a fair warning. He should say it that way. But if the suggestion is that journalists, political parties, civil society groups or citizens risk treason simply because they independently verify publicly available results, then the claim is both excessive and dangerous. The Electoral Act itself assumes that citizens will have access to election information,” he added.

At polling units, votes are counted publicly. The presiding officer records and announces the results, which are transmitted to INEC’s Results Viewing Portal (IReV). Political party agents are entitled to copies of the results. The law also provides for a National Electronic Register of Election Results and allows individuals and political parties to obtain certified copies of results.

Ubani questioned why such public evidence was made available if nobody was expected to examine it.

“Surely, a political party that receives results from its agents is entitled to add them up. Surely, a newspaper can analyse authentic polling unit figures. Surely, civil society can compare what was announced at polling units with what later appears on IReV or at collation centres. That is not a hostile act against INEC; it is one of the ways public confidence in INEC can be strengthened.

“There is another reason this matters. An election result is not created at the national collation centre; it is built from thousands of polling unit results, each one witnessed by voters, agents and officials. By the time the final figure is announced, there should be a documentary trail that allows the public to follow how the total was reached. That trail is not an inconvenience; it is part of electoral legitimacy,” he said.

Ubani noted that when citizens compared the figures announced at their polling units with those eventually included in the national total, “they are not competing with INEC; they are checking that the system has faithfully carried their vote from one stage to the next.”

He cited the recent Osun governorship election, during which Yiaga Africa independently tracked the process and verified results using its Process and Results Verification for Transparency methodology.

Yiaga Africa’s estimates for the leading candidates, he noted, were very close to the final figures announced by INEC.

“Nobody called Yiaga’s work treason. Nobody suggested that independently checking the arithmetic was an attempt to overthrow INEC. In fact, this is exactly the sort of outside confirmation a confident electoral commission should welcome.

“So, the obvious question is this: if independent verification was useful in Osun, why should Nigerians be made nervous about it when the presidency is at stake?” he said.