By Both defeated NBA presidential candidates in the Nigerian Bar Association’s 2026 election have issued strongly worded statements rejecting the credibility of the process that produced Oyinkansola Badejo-Okusanya (SAN) as the association’s 33rd President, with one of the NBA presidential candidates revealing he was unable to vote in his own election and the other alleging he was left off the presidential ballot entirely.
Akangbe: “This election was shambolic. It is a shame to the Bar”
In a statement titled “Thank You,” dated 19 July, second-placed NBA presidential candidate Lateef Omoyemi Akangbe (SAN) opened by thanking lawyers who, he said, stayed awake for two consecutive nights trying to cast a single vote, refreshing a “broken portal” at 1am, 3am, and 5am across phones, laptops, and borrowed devices. He said the “vast majority” of voters did not succeed, describing this as disenfranchisement “not by choice but by infrastructure. Not by apathy but by failure.”
Akangbe then laid out a detailed critique of how the election was run. He alleged that the ECNBA unilaterally moved the NEC-approved election date from July 20 to July 18 without NEC approval, and that an agreement reached on July 15, in the presence of the Attorney-General of the Federation and the Chairman of the Body of Benchers, to postpone the election by a week for proper sensitisation on a newly adopted SMS-based voting mechanism, was never honoured. Instead, he said, the ECNBA changed the verification method from email to SMS on July 16 and pushed ahead with the original date two days later, requiring 82,000 lawyers to navigate an untested authentication system overnight.
He said the platform’s collapse within its first hour was attributed by the ECNBA to a “deliberate, coordinated, and sustained cyberattack,” a claim he said remained independently unverified and did not, in any case, explain why the attack succeeded. “A platform built to withstand an attack would have degraded under pressure. This one did not degrade. It disappeared,” he said, describing it as “a capacity failure that was foreseeable, foreseen, and warned about, in writing, since June.”
Underlining the scale of the breakdown, Akangbe disclosed that he, too, was unable to vote despite being one of only three NBA presidential candidates on the ballot, saying the ECNBA Chairman and the NBA President personally sent him more than five separate links to access the portal, none of which worked.
“If the Chairman and the President of the Association cannot get the system to work for a candidate… what happened to the ordinary member in Jalingo or Ado-Ekiti who had no one highly placed to call?” he asked.
He went on to compare turnout figures across recent elections, noting that the 2022 NBA election recorded a 58.61 per cent turnout with the winner polling about 22,342 votes, while the 2024 election, won by outgoing president Afam Osigwe, saw 56.4 per cent turnout and roughly 20,435 votes. By contrast, he said, ECNBA’s own figures put turnout in the 2026 election at roughly 27 per cent of 82,164 accredited voters, which he described as “a catastrophic regression” reflecting “voter suppression,” not voter apathy. He also referenced “credible, documented reports” of voters casting ballots more than once on the platform, arguing this called the integrity of every vote into question.
“This election cannot pass any credibility test,” Akangbe wrote, adding that with Nigeria facing general elections in 2027, a Bar unable to conduct its own affairs with integrity would forfeit the “moral authority” to hold others to account. He said he would not discuss “outcomes, numbers, or declarations” in the statement, but confirmed he was “reviewing all my options” with his legal team and would communicate “a comprehensive, fully informed, and principled position on next steps shortly.”
Akinboro: “My assessment of the charade; I saw it coming”
Third-placed NBA presidential candidate Aare Olumuyiwa Akinboro (SAN) issued a separate statement, thanking supporters for what he described as remarkable nationwide backing before turning to a pointed critique of the election he contested alongside his fellow NBA presidential candidates.
Akinboro alleged that he was inexplicably left off the printed ballot for the office of President, claiming the names that appeared were listed as “Aare Oluwatoyin Muyiwa Akinboro,” Lateef Omoyemi Akangbe, and Oyinkansola Badejo-Okusanya, an apparent reference to what he suggested was an inaccurate rendering of his own name on the ballot. He also alleged that OTP authentication was delivered by email rather than to phone numbers as stipulated under the ECNBA’s own guidelines, and that the presidential ballot interface displayed only Badejo-Okusanya’s photograph, with his own and Akangbe’s images omitted. He questioned whether these specific anomalies were genuinely part of a cyberattack, or evidence of “incompetence and unpreparedness” by the service providers and the ECNBA.
Akinboro said he personally was not sent an OTP and was consequently unable to vote in his own election, “just like tens of thousands of other lawyers.” He referenced his earlier involvement in a three-man committee convened by the Body of Past Presidents of the NBA, saying his presentation to that committee had focused on reforming the electoral process, but that its recommendations were later “twisted” to malign his candidacy.
He described the entire electoral process for the 2026 National Officers election as built on a “faulty foundation” from the outset, citing what he called the unconstitutional appointment of ECNBA members, the alleged compensation of the Committee’s Chairman and Secretary with appointments into the Body of Benchers, open partisanship by the outgoing NBA President in favour of a preferred candidate, and the appointment of service providers whose “incompetence and deficiencies are clear for all to see.”
Akinboro maintained that the election had “justified” his campaign stance, which he said was centred on exposing and reforming a system he described as “flawed” and “rigged.” He said he did not consider the matter a “do or die affair” but was consulting with his team on next steps, adding that he was “fulfilled” to have exposed what he called the flaws in the system and hoped NBA members would use the moment to demand electoral reform.
Where things stand with the NBA presidential candidates
Neither of the NBA presidential candidates has formally announced a legal challenge to Badejo-Okusanya’s declaration as NBA President, though both have signalled that further action remains under consideration. Their accounts, coming from two of the three NBA presidential candidates in this year’s race, add specific, first-hand detail, including claims of being personally unable to vote and being omitted from the ballot, to the broader pattern of complaints raised by rank-and-file lawyers throughout the election. Their statements stand in some tension with outgoing NBA President Afam Osigwe’s account attributing the technical failures primarily to a cyberattack that forced a last-minute migration of the ECNBA’s voting infrastructure, and are likely to keep the conduct of the election, and the grievances of the NBA presidential candidates who contested it, in the spotlight in the days ahead.
