The trust and confidence of many Nigerians in the commission has waned considerably, if not lost completely. Its antecedents and recent actions have left many disillusioned with politics and governance as they no longer believe it is capable of conducting credible polls. For a commission that has not been entirely open and forthright about its dealings and activities, it is hard to believe that Emeka Ike was the only person whose data was retrieved and exposed by this account.
When Lere Olayinka shared the voter card information and data page of Nollywood actor, Emeka Ike from the backend of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), he did it to mock and belittle the political ambition of the thespian who was seeking to secure the Nigerian Democratic Congress (NDC) ticket to represent one of the constituencies in the federal capital territory in the House of Representatives. However, it did not take long for what he thought to be an innocuous cheap shot to score a political point and denigrate the actor to become a scandalous miscalculation.
Olayinka’s revelation of Ike’s voter registration information from INEC’s backend was supposed to be a jab at what he felt was the latter’s political misadventure but it revealed something deeply disturbing and damning, particularly for an organisation that is grappling with serious erosion of public trust and reputational damage. The outrage and condemnation were swift and intense. With outrage comes one big question: How did a lowly media aide of the FCT minister, Nyesom Wike, have access to INEC’s database that should ideally only be accessible to a few top brass of the commission’s information technology (IT) department its figures in the top echelon of its administrative department.
If the outing of the INEC chairman, Joash Amupitan, as an apologist of the ruling party and staunch supporter of president Bola Tinubu last month via his digital footprint on X raised serious questions about his legitimacy, the optics of his continued stay in the position and his ability to conduct a free, fair, and credible election, then the unfettered access to the database of voter by the media aide of Wike — the henchman of the president, a man that has acquired a reputation for perverting democracy and violently subverting the will of the people — has cleared the doubt as to where INEC allegiance truly lies and also shattered whatever tinge of hope many had that INEC is an independent arbiter capable of conducting credible polls.
Expectedly, following the widespread reproach that greeted Lere’s action, the commission, like it did last month during the scandal that rocked it over its chairman’s affiliation with the APC, issued a tame, weak and perfunctory press release on Tuesday. The commission confirmed that the voter information was accessed using valid staff details and subsequently released without authorisation. It assured the public that there was no external hacking or breaching, no system-wide compromise, and that the incident concerned only one specific voter record.
But that reassurance elicited more questions than it answered. The critical question INEC has not answered is this: how many other voter records and information did the user account in question access and subsequently release to Olayinka and others? The commission’s statement identifies a specific user account through its audit trail and confirms that authorised INEC registration officers were provided with controlled access to certain elements of the CVR system to process registrations, transfers, and updates.
That access is elaborate and strikes at the heart of data protection which has become a controversial subject in recent years. If a single authorised account could pull up Ike’s application number, VIN, registration centre, profile photograph, and date of application — all the personal information displayed in the screenshots — what other information does it have access to and to whom is he or she providing it? It is not enough for INEC to tell us that only one voter was affected by the egregious betrayal of public trust, it has to show it.
The trust and confidence of many Nigerians in the commission has waned considerably. Its antecedents and recent actions have left many disillusioned with politics and governance as they no longer believe it is capable of conducting credible polls. For a commission that has not been entirely open and forthright about its dealings and activities, it is hard to believe that Emeka Ike was the only person whose data was retrieved and exposed by this account. In fact, the consensus among many Nigerians, particularly opposition members, is that if Ike Data information can be accessed by Olayinka, then the ruling party has unrestricted access to the data of millions of Nigerian voters.
This is not an insignificant oversight or a negligible administrative lapse. It is an issue that goes to the core of INEC’s credibility and public confidence. Nigeria’s data protection framework, under the Nigeria Data Protection Act 2023, imposes obligations on data controllers and processors. INEC is a data controller. The unlawful disclosure of a registered voter’s personal information — and its continued public availability — demands a response beyond an internal audit.
The questions that need answers are pretty simple and straightforward: Was the purported user account suspended immediately upon identification? Was access to the CVR portal by non-INEC personnel — including political appointees and their staff — ever formally authorised, and under what authority? And critically, will INEC publish the full scope of what was accessed from that account, not just the one record it has admitted to?
A voter database is among the most sensitive and critical central storage of citizen data a government can have. Its integrity is not merely a technical matter, it is a democratic one. INEC’s statement, as it stands, tells Nigerians what did not happen. What they need to know is the full account of what happened. This saga is the latest in the growing list of episodes of troubling incidents at INEC that further deepens many Nigerians’ distrust of the commission. If anything, many now see the body as an appendage of the ruling party.
