Lateef Akangbe (SAN), one of the candidates contesting for the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) Presidency, has called for the immediate suspension of the election amid alleged rigging and sabotage of the online voting portal.
Akangbe made the call in a letter issued on Friday and addressed to the Electoral Committee of the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA).
The legal practitioner alleged that the portal collapsed with the e-voting platform inaccessible as at 2:00am.
“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.
“The ECNBA has reportedly indicated, through informal verbal channels, that because the portal was down, any votes cast so far will be “cancelled” and the process will “recommence.” He said.
Akangbe questioned over the statement which, according to him, raises security concerns.
“This statement, rather than reassuring, raises the gravest possible security concern. If the portal is inaccessible to the general membership, how were any votes cast at all? Who had access to the platform during a window in which the public could not enter? How can the candidates, their agents, or the membership verify that back-end ballot dumping has not already taken place during this period of total opacity?
“What mechanism exists to distinguish a vote cast by a legitimate voter who managed to access the portal before it collapsed from a vote injected into the system by an actor with back-end access?
“And on what technical authority can the ECNBA guarantee that a “cancellation” of early votes will be complete, verifiable, and auditable, rather than a cosmetic reset that leaves compromised data in the system?” He asked.
The NBA presidential candidate further questioned the efficiency of the portal and the integrity of the database.
“The ECNBA cannot answer these questions, because the infrastructure it has deployed is not capable of answering them.
“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.” He said.
Akangbe also alleged breach of the revised voting guidelines as the OTPs were sent on e-mails rather than SMS as stated in the guideline.
“Less than twenty-four hours ago, the ECNBA published its Revised Electronic Voting Guidelines, dated 16 July 2026, in which it announced, with prominent emphasis, a key revision to the voter authentication process.
“The previous position, under which OTPs were delivered to registered email addresses, was replaced with a revised position under which OTPs would be delivered “strictly via SMS to registered mobile number.”
“The ECNBA stated that this revision was adopted “to address perceptions, observed in previous NBA elections, that email-based OTP delivery was susceptible to manipulation.”
“That was yesterday. 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.” Akangbe said.
He labelled the reversal to e-mail usage as a breach of the security architecture.
“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.” He said.