Nigeria’s broadband penetration crossed 50 per cent in 2025, with over 148 million Internet subscribers and millions of citizens banking, working, shopping and creating online, indicating vast coverage across the country. Also, a joint technical committee of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) and the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) has found that mobile networks adequately cover 93 per cent of Nigeria’s polling units, with full nationwide coverage well within technical reach. Yet, in 2026, the National Assembly insists that Nigeria is too offline to transmit election results electronically.

Nigeria’s last presidential election in 2023 recorded its lowest voter turnout since the return to democracy in 1999, with less than three in ten Nigerians with Permanent Voter Cards (PVCs) turning up at the polls. Of the 87.2 million Nigerians who had PVCs and were eligible to vote, data from the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) shows that only 24.97 million voted, equivalent to 28.63 per cent. That was a significant drop from the 35 per cent and 43.7 per cent recorded in the 2019 and 2015 presidential elections, respectively.

Electoral observers have blamed the apathy on widespread belief that votes do not count. One of the clearest and most widely accepted reforms proposed after the election was mandatory real-time electronic transmission of results to INEC’s Result Viewing Portal (IReV), to prevent manipulation of result sheets during manual collation. The logic was straightforward: remove potential human manipulation from the most sensitive part of the electoral process.

Instead, lawmakers chose compromise over clarity. The National Assembly approved electronic transmission of results but retained manual collation as a fallback, a clause President Bola Tinubu signed into law on Wednesday, February 18. The problem is not electronic transmission itself, but the discretion introduced by its fallback. Without clear technical thresholds for declaring digital transmission “failed,” officials can revert to manual processes at critical points, recreating the vulnerabilities technology is meant to eliminate.

To defend themselves, lawmakers, including Senate President Godswill Akpabio and Senate Leader Opeyemi Bamidele, have offered strange justifications for their actions. Akpabio warned that in “over nine states, where networks are not working because of insecurity,” real-time transmission would invalidate results, and that a national grid collapse would cripple the process nationwide. The source of this data is unclear, and no public technical assessment supports his claims.

Even if true, these figures do not negate INEC’s own technical assessment that mobile networks cover 93 per cent of polling units, with the capacity to service the uncovered regions. Telecommunications operators have also pushed back against lawmakers’ claims. Gbenga Adebayo, Chairman of the Association of Licensed Telecom Operators in Nigeria (ALTON), has noted that over 70 per cent of the country is covered by 3G and 4G, with 5G expanding and the rest on 2G. Even 2G, he said, is sufficient to transmit election results electronically. In other words, the technical barrier is far lower than lawmakers suggest.

To be clear, infrastructural challenges are real. Never mind that they are the responsibilities of the same lawmakers using them as excuses against progress. But they are not unique to Nigeria. Countries with uneven connectivity — such as Kenya, Ghana and India — have deployed electronic transmission systems precisely to reduce human interference in result collation. 

For example, Kenya’s internet penetration is about 49%. Yet, the country’s Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC), as part of reforms instituted following the controversial 2007 elections, compulsorily uses the Kenya Integrated Election Management System (KIEMS) to transmit election results to a public portal to ensure transparency. Similarly, in Brazil, a developing country like Nigeria, electronic voting machines have been used for elections for decades without any evidence of fraud. Despite the country boasting a greater Internet penetration than Nigeria, its voting system, the Brazilian Urna Eletrônica, doesn’t rely on the Internet to deliver transparent, trustworthy outcomes.

The lesson from these countries is that democracies rarely wait for perfect conditions to improve transparency; they create and use imperfect systems to limit discretion and increase trust. The debate, therefore, is not primarily technical. It is political. Manual collation concentrates power in human hands — presiding officers, collation officers, party agents — at the very moment transparency matters most. Electronic transmission, even if imperfect, constrains that discretion. A manual fallback restores it.

Moreover, the argument that Nigeria is too offline to transmit election results electronically is not supported by available evidence. The infrastructure exists, the technical assessments are clear, and comparable countries have moved ahead with similar constraints. What the manual collation fallback clause ultimately does is preserve discretion in a system that desperately needs less of it. In reality, Nigeria is too online for everything except elections, not because the technology does not exist, but because the political will does not.

With President Tinubu already signing the latest Electoral Act amendment, the golden chance for a more transparent and trustworthy election has been missed ahead of the 2027 general election. But there’s a chance to rise above backward justifications for the future and create unique systems that increase voters’ confidence in the electoral system. Technology continues to advance and make our lives easier at home, at work, and everywhere we find ourselves. We shouldn’t be scared of it; we should embrace and take advantage of it to make our country a better place.