By Senior Advocate of Nigeria, Oyinkansola Badejo-Okusanya, has been declared the 33rd NBA President, defeating two rivals in an election that survived a cyberattack, hours of portal failures, and a formal demand from one candidate that the entire process be suspended and restarted.
The final result
The Chairman of the Electoral Committee of the NBA (ECNBA), Aham Ejelam (SAN), announced the results of those who contested the office of the NBA president, Vice-President and other offices at the NBA National Secretariat in Abuja on Sunday. Badejo-Okusanya polled 12,317 votes (47.18 per cent) to defeat her closest challenger, Lateef Akangbe (SAN), who secured 7,934 votes (30.39 per cent). The third candidate, Olumuyiwa Akinboro (SAN), polled 5,855 votes (22.43 per cent), out of a total of 26,106 votes recorded. Badejo-Okusanya will serve a two-year term from 2026 to 2028 as the NBA President, becoming only the second woman to lead the association after Priscilla Kuye, who served from 1991 to 1992.
Other declared national officers include Oghenero Okoro as First Vice-President (11,024 votes), Afam Okeke as General Secretary (8,478 votes), Aghogho Gladys as Assistant General Secretary (14,312 votes), and Chinelo Audrey Ofoegbunam as Welfare Secretary (14,911 votes).
Badejo-Okusanya, the newly elected NBA President was absent when the results were announced. A member of her campaign team, Aminu Gadanya (SAN), attributed this to a flight delay and said the president-elect intended to extend a “handshake of friendship” to aggrieved candidates in the interest of Bar unity.
A vote plagued by trouble from the first hour
The declaration brings closure to an election that was in crisis almost from the moment it opened. Voting was scheduled to begin at 12:00am on Saturday, July 18, but within roughly two hours, candidate Akangbe fired off an emergency letter to the ECNBA demanding the election’s immediate suspension, describing a “catastrophic structural and technical collapse.” He alleged the e-voting portal was inaccessible to most of the roughly 82,000 accredited voters, that OTPs were being delivered by email in violation of an SMS-only guideline the ECNBA had published just two days earlier, and that the live presidential ballot displayed only one candidate’s photograph while omitting the other two, including his own. He demanded the portal be taken offline, all logs preserved for independent audit, and the election postponed.
Through Saturday, lawyers nationwide flooded social media with complaints echoing these concerns about OTPs that never arrived, “access denied” errors, voter records listing unfamiliar phone numbers, and in at least one case, a portal that appeared to let a lawyer vote a second time after redirecting him to the start of the process. Live results published on the ECNBA dashboard nonetheless continued updating through the day, showing Badejo-Okusanya’s lead over her rivals steadily widening from the morning into the afternoon.
The disputes predated election day itself. Days earlier, Akinboro had publicly accused outgoing NBA President Afam Osigwe (SAN) of abandoning safeguards, including NIN-based voter authentication, that all three candidates had reportedly agreed to at a July 15 meeting attended by the Attorney-General of the Federation, Prince Lateef Fagbemi (SAN). Osigwe had denied any attempt to rig or interfere with the process, insisting the Electoral Committee acted independently of his office.
Cyberattack Confirmed; Election Delayed for Rebuild
Speaking after Sunday’s declaration, Osigwe, the NBA President disclosed that the election had, in fact, come under a cyberattack that forced the Electoral Committee to rebuild and migrate its ICT infrastructure to a more secure server, an explanation that accounts for the technical failures reported en masse by voters and cited by Akangbe in his overnight protest. “Our colleagues planned to truncate the election, but we stood firm. Every effort to derail this process failed,” Osigwe said, adding that the run-up to the election had seen sustained efforts to “rubbish the association.”
He called on the newly elected officers to be magnanimous in victory and urged unsuccessful candidates to support the incoming leadership, saying: “To those who won, be magnanimous in victory; for those who lost, there is always another day. The cyberattack shows that we must do more in data protection.” He added that “someday, the story will be told of how this election was almost sabotaged,” and stressed that the Bar’s leadership must continue to be determined by lawyers themselves.
Osigwe further disclosed that the Electoral Committee would carry out a comprehensive review of the electoral process and the challenges encountered, with a view to strengthening confidence in future NBA elections and improving the association’s cybersecurity.
Where this leaves the disputes
As of the declaration, there was no indication that Akangbe’s overnight demand for suspension and an independent audit had been formally granted before voting concluded, nor any public statement from either Akangbe or Akinboro accepting or contesting the final result. Osigwe’s confirmation of a cyberattack lends some support to the ECNBA’s account that the failures were externally driven rather than, as some lawyers online had alleged, evidence of poor preparation or manipulation, though it does not directly address Akangbe’s separate allegations concerning the SMS-OTP breach or the missing candidate photographs on the ballot. Whether either losing candidate will formally challenge the outcome remains to be seen.
