By The NBA election—the Nigerian Bar Association’s 2026 election—has been dogged by controversy, with hours of complaints from lawyers nationwide over technical failures on the voting portal, even as live results show Senior Advocate of Nigeria, Oyinkansola Badejo-Okusanya, building a commanding and widening lead over her rivals.
Candidate demanded suspension within hours of polls opening
The election, scheduled to begin at 12:00am on Saturday, had barely been underway for two hours before presidential candidate Lateef Omoyemi Akangbe (SAN) fired off an emergency letter to the Electoral Committee of the NBA (ECNBA), demanding its immediate suspension. Sent at 2:15am and copied to the NBA President, the General Secretary, the Attorney-General of the Federation, the Chairman of the Body of Benchers, past NBA presidents, and his fellow candidates, the letter described what Akangbe called a “catastrophic structural and technical collapse” that rendered the election’s continuation “indefensible.”
Akangbe cited three grounds. First, he said the e-voting portal was, as of 2:09am, entirely inaccessible to the vast majority of the roughly 82,000 accredited voters, and that the ECNBA had informally indicated votes cast during the outage would simply be “cancelled” and the process restarted, a claim he said raised deeper questions about who had back-end access to a platform the public could not enter, and whether any “cancellation” could be verified as complete rather than a cosmetic reset. Second, he alleged that the ECNBA’s own Revised Electronic Voting Guidelines, published just two days earlier on July 16, had committed to delivering OTPs “strictly via SMS” specifically to close a vulnerability tied to a 2018 case in which the EFCC charged individuals over the manipulation of voters’ email addresses, yet voters were, within the first two hours, already reporting receiving OTPs by email instead. Third, he said the live presidential ballot displayed the photograph of only one of the three cleared candidates, with his own and the third candidate’s images either missing or failing to render, a defect he argued should have been caught during a mock voting exercise on July 11 and a final systems audit on July 13.
He demanded the ECNBA immediately take the portal offline, preserve all voting and access logs from midnight onward for independent audit, commission a third-party technical review, explain the failures in writing, and postpone the election within the life of the current NBA executive. He warned that any result declared under the prevailing conditions would carry “a crisis of legitimacy” the Association could not afford.
Voting appears to have continued regardless. By the time results began emerging later that morning, the ECNBA had not publicly responded to Akangbe’s letter, and the count proceeded through the day.
According to the Electoral Committee of the NBA’s (ECNBA) live results dashboard, as of 3:39pm on Saturday, Badejo-Okusanya had polled 8,663 votes, representing 44.99 percent of the 19,254 votes counted so far for the presidential race. Her closest rival, Lateef Omoyemi Akangbe (SAN), followed with 6,024 votes (31.29 per cent), while Aare Olumuyiwa Akinboro (SAN) trailed in third with 4,567 votes, or 23.72 per cent.
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The figures mark a widening of her lead compared to earlier results reported around 11:33am, when she held 41.77 per cent of 11,600 votes counted, against Akangbe’s 33.10 per cent and Akinboro’s 25.13 per cent. Her margin over Akangbe grew from roughly 8.7 percentage points in the morning to nearly 14 points by mid-afternoon.
Lawyers report being locked out, disenfranchised
The results have unfolded against a backdrop of sustained complaints from members of the Bar who said they could not vote at all. On X, lawyer Najib Adamu Usman alleged a “systematic disenfranchisement of many voters,” saying most people were not receiving the one-time passcodes (OTPs) needed to authenticate their votes. Screenshots he shared showed the portal repeatedly returning error messages such as “the authentication session is invalid” and “unable to send the authentication code at the moment.”
Other lawyers described similar experiences. Ridwan Oke said thousands of colleagues were hit with “access denied” errors, with half the lawyers in his firm unable to vote for hours. Sucygold Esq. said she tried voting from three separate devices without success, while Bolade Akinlawon posted a screenshot showing six different OTP codes sent to his phone in quick succession, none of which the portal would accept.
A separate strand of complaints centred on the accuracy of voter records rather than OTP delivery. A lawyer using the handle “The Law of Ekiti” said the phone number tied to his Supreme Court Number (SCN) on the voter portal was completely unfamiliar, leaving him unable to regularize his details in time to vote. Another user, “Lawyer to the Bad Boys,” said several lawyers who raised similar complaints discovered that the “wrong” phone numbers listed against their names were identical across unrelated profiles, sharing screenshots of two lawyers in different states, both listed with numbers ending in the same digits.
There were also reports suggesting the opposite failure, a system too permissive rather than too restrictive. Lawyer Akin Ifeanyi Agunbiade said that after completing his vote, the platform redirected him to the start of the process, sent him a new OTP, and let him view the candidate list again, raising questions about whether the system could allow multiple voting.
Reacting to suggestions that the glitches stemmed from a cyberattack, lawyer and commentator Festus Ogun argued that isolated attacks do not by themselves indicate absent safeguards since even secure infrastructure can face politically motivated intrusions and commended the Electoral Committee for pushing through what he called “minor setbacks.” Others disagreed; lawyer Chukwuma Onyekwelu argued the recurring failures pointed to a fundamental lack of capacity to conduct the election.
Candidate had flagged safeguard concerns before polls opened
The disputes trace back to before voting began. Days earlier, Akinboro released a signed statement titled “A Season of Too Many Lies, Deceits and Half Truths; My Position,” accusing NBA President Afam Osigwe (SAN) of manipulating the electoral process. He said he and fellow candidate Akangbe had raised concerns, including the “unconstitutional” appointment of the ECNBA, the opaque selection of election service providers, and the committee’s plan to retain an email-based authentication system, both of which candidates considered “porous.”
According to Akinboro, a meeting convened by Osigwe on July 15, attended by the Attorney-General of the Federation, Prince Lateef Fagbemi (SAN), the Chairman of the Body of Benchers, and all three presidential candidates, produced an agreement to switch voter authentication to National Identification Numbers and phone numbers, cap voting at one vote per device, and postpone the election by a week to allow the changes to be implemented and voters sensitized. He alleged the NBA leadership subsequently reversed course at a virtual National Executive Committee meeting, proceeding with the original July 18 date and abandoning the agreed safeguards, a move he described as a betrayal of that consensus. He said he remained in the race, insisting on an election free of manipulation.
Osigwe, addressing journalists in Abuja on Friday, denied any attempt to rig or interfere with the election, insisting the Electoral Committee operated independently of his office and took no directives from him. He dismissed claims that he was backing a preferred candidate as politically motivated and unsupported by evidence, adding that allegations that NBA elections had historically been manipulated had never been proven in court.
Where things stand
With final, certified results still awaited, the current trend on the ECNBA dashboard shows Badejo-Okusanya’s lead growing rather than narrowing as more votes are counted, even as questions persist over the voter-authentication issues, the accuracy of contact records tied to lawyers’ profiles, and whether the safeguards candidates say were agreed on July 15 were, in fact, implemented before polling began. It remains unclear how many outstanding votes are yet to be tallied or whether the reported technical failures affected turnout.
