Former Minister of Education and founder of #FixPolitics, Dr. Obiageli “Oby” Ezekwesili, has warned that Nigeria cannot conduct credible general elections in 2027 under the current leadership of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC).

Citing recent high-level confessions from INEC’s own Directorate of Information and Communication Technology (ICT), Ezekwesili warned that the foundational document of Nigeria’s democracy—the preliminary register of voters—has been compromised from within through the injection of AI-generated photographs and duplicate records.

Invoking her role as an “Occupant of the Office of the Citizen,” Ezekwesili in an open memo called for the immediate constitution of an independent Caretaker Electoral Rescue Team, backed by a National Assembly emergency law under a “Doctrine of Necessity,” to strip INEC of its sole custody over the voter register clean-up.

The open memo stems from alarming disclosures made on October 30 and November 1, 2026, by Dr. Lawrence Bayode, INEC’s Director of ICT.

Bayode revealed on national television that registration officers across several states used their official login credentials to compromise the preliminary voter register.

According to Dr. Bayode, the breach was not an external hack or a technical glitch, but calculated insider sabotage. Most damningly, the INEC official confessed that “the trust is on ground zero.”

Ezekwesili slammed INEC’s handling of the crisis, pointing out that nearly a week after the discovery, the commission has failed to name the implicated states, local governments, or rogue officers, or confirm whether any suspensions or police handovers have occurred.

“This is sabotage from within the very institution to which the Nigerian people entrusted the register of our sovereignty,” Ezekwesili wrote. “The people paid to protect the list of citizens manufactured phantom citizens… INEC cannot investigate INEC. Impossible.”

Arguing that trust cannot be rebuilt simply by repeating the word, Ezekwesili asserted that an internal INEC inquiry will only result in a compromised preliminary register being certified into a poisoned final voter list ahead of 2027.

To avert a national disaster, she proposed an independent Caretaker Electoral Rescue Team composed of non-partisan experts including independent Nigerian and international data, cybersecurity, and biometric professionals to audit access logs and image files, representatives from civil society, the Nigerian Bar Association, ICT and accounting professional bodies, and academia as well as faith leaders and traditional institutions.

The memo explicitly bars any serving or former INEC official, political officeholder, candidate, or party official from sitting on the team.

Ezekwesili called on the National Assembly to act urgently—moving past historical legislative inertia—to pass emergency legislation establishing the team under a Doctrine of Necessity. (Daily Trust)