REAL-TIME OR NOTHING: WHY NIGERIA MUST REINVENT ITS ELECTORAL TECHNOLOGY NOW
By Professor Ojo Emmanuel Ademola
Nigeria stands at a decisive crossroads, and the luxury of debating whether technology should anchor electoral transparency is long gone. The real question is how quickly the nation can build an electoral infrastructure capable of delivering real‑time, tamper‑proof results that command public and judicial confidence. Today’s legal ambiguities, infrastructural fragilities, cybersecurity exposure, operational inconsistencies, and the still‑evolving culture of trust in result management mean Nigeria is realistically eight to twelve years—three electoral cycles—away from nationwide, real‑time transmission that can stand as an authoritative system of record. This is not pessimism but a clear-eyed assessment of the structural milestones that must be met before aspiration becomes credible democratic practice.
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Nigeria enters this debate with urgency, not curiosity. The nation stands at a defining threshold where the credibility of its democracy hinges on how quickly it can build an electoral system capable of delivering real‑time, tamper‑proof results that command unquestioned public and judicial trust. The evidence is stark: given today’s legal gaps, infrastructural weaknesses, cybersecurity exposure, operational inconsistencies, and the still‑maturing culture of transparency, Nigeria is plausibly three election cycles away from nationwide real‑time transmission becoming a dependable system of record. My thesis begins from this sober reality and argues for the structural reforms required to close that gap with deliberate speed as detailed on:
1) The legal and governance constraints (why today’s law doesn’t yet sustain ‘real-time or bust’)
The first limiting factor is jurisprudence. In the aftermath of the 2023 general election, Nigeria’s Supreme Court and the Presidential Election Petition Tribunal held that failures or delays in uploading polling unit results to the INEC Results Viewing (IReV) portal did not invalidate the election, and that IReV is not a legal collation system under the 2022 Electoral Act. That position reduces the legal incentive to treat IReV and BVAS as mission‑critical infrastructure whose failure carries determinative consequences.
Parliamentary clarity is in transition. In December 2025, the House of Representatives voted to mandate real‑time electronic transmission in the ongoing amendments to the Electoral Act, while subsequent Senate deliberations in February 2026 reflected a cautious compromise—accepting electronic transmission but re‑entrenching manual collation as the fallback where network failure occurs, and in some drafts reverting to the vaguer language of ‘transfer’. Until a harmonised and assented statute unambiguously defines the status of real‑time uploads and the handling of failures, the Commission will continue to treat uploads primarily as a transparency device rather than the definitive legal record.
Compounding this, INEC’s own post‑election report attributes the presidential‑result upload failure in 2023 to an internal configuration defect that produced server errors, even while results for the National Assembly uploaded successfully. The episode damaged public expectations that ‘real‑time’ was guaranteed and underscores why law, technology, and operations must be tightened together before uploads can be treated as dispositive.
2) The data protection & privacy posture (a necessary—but recent—foundation)
Nigeria now has a comprehensive federal privacy law—the Nigeria Data Protection Act (NDPA) 2023—which establishes the Nigeria Data Protection Commission, strengthens the rights of data subjects, and introduces obligations for data controllers and processors, including those of major importance. Translating those principles into election‑grade practice—data protection impact assessments, strict purpose limitation, data minimisation, cross‑border transfer safeguards for cloud redundancy, and robust breach reporting—requires guidance, vendor contracts and sustained oversight before the courts and public will treat digital trails as authoritative.
Election systems and their vendors are, by any reasonable reading, controllers and processors of major importance under the Act. That carries heightened registration and compliance duties, and it implies formal controller‑processor arrangements between INEC, mobile network operators, cloud providers and device suppliers—alongside tested incident‑response simulations—before nationwide, real‑time handling of sensitive personal data and election artefacts can be trusted without reservation.
3) Connectivity and power realities (can every polling unit upload reliably in real time?)
Broadband availability is improving, but the urban–rural divide persists. NCC’s public performance reports show national broadband penetration only recently crossing the 50 per cent mark in late 2025, below the National Broadband Plan’s 70 per cent target for 2025. Median speeds and availability remain markedly better in cities than in rural local government areas—the very places where polling units are most dispersed and hardest to reach at the same moment on election day.
Fourth‑generation mobile networks are the backbone of Nigeria’s data experience and are steadily improving, but fifth‑generation coverage gaps remain large, even in Lagos and Abuja. Quality‑of‑experience assessments also show that performance along major roads and rural corridors still lags. Operators are investing—adding new sites and fibre—but outages, vandalism, right‑of‑way costs and insecurity continue to constrain rollout. These realities matter when thousands of polling units attempt to upload results in the same narrow window.
Government has launched the National Broadband Alliance for Nigeria to accelerate penetration in priority sectors and locations, yet official and independent analyses concede that the 70 per cent target for 2025 was missed due to structural obstacles including device affordability and right‑of‑way challenges. The result is that connectivity remains uneven, and ‘real‑time everywhere’ demands redundancy, latency and jitter service levels, and pre‑provisioned priority quality of service for election traffic at every ward—a bar we have not yet reached.
There is promise in satellite broadband and direct‑to‑device initiatives. The NCC plans to subsidise satellite solutions through the Universal Service Provision Fund to reach some 23 million offline Nigerians, complementing terrestrial networks. Turning that policy into affordable, protected bandwidth for thousands of election uploads will require pilots, spectrum policies and robust contracts—another multi‑year effort.
4) Power and field operations (can devices stay up and push data on time?)
Power reliability is a fundamental constraint. Even strong mobile coverage cannot overcome a dead device. Nigeria’s grid volatility means polling officials must assume intermittent power and rely on battery packs and solar trickle charging to keep BVAS units and smartphones alive. Without standardised power kits and ‘offline‑first’ application designs with robust store‑and‑forward and retry policies, devices will miss the real‑time window in precisely the hardest‑to‑serve locations.
Identity coverage is a bright spot with work to do. More than 121 million Nigerians had obtained a National Identification Number by mid‑2025, with ward‑level enrolment using NYSC corps members to reach children and rural communities. That progress supports cleaner registers and better deduplication, but synchronising NIN, the voter roll and BVAS data pipelines nationwide is still a work in progress that must be proven in the field.
5) Cybersecurity, integrity and information disorder (why ‘real‑time’ must be resilient to be trusted)
These systems are high‑value targets. INEC reported attempts to breach its systems ahead of the 2023 vote, and independent experts warned that cyberattacks, defacements and disinformation campaigns could undermine confidence even where the tally itself is untouched. The architecture must therefore assume sustained hostile load and perception attacks, not simply routine traffic.
INEC’s own technical explanation of the 2023 upload failure points to a configuration mapping bug that returned server errors for presidential results, while National Assembly uploads succeeded. In the absence of transparent, real‑time observability and cryptographic proofs, that vacuum was quickly filled by claims of hacking and manipulation. A hardened design with public, tamper‑evident receipts at the point of upload would have narrowed that space considerably.
Disinformation ecosystems also matured during the cycle, with manipulated media and AI‑generated content amplifying doubt. Any future glitch will be weaponised unless the system provides public, tamper‑evident proofs and independent verifiability through mirrored repositories and third‑party checks.
6) Why ‘three cycles’ is a reasonable horizon
Bringing these strands together, several preconditions must mature in sequence. First, the Electoral Act must unequivocally define real‑time uploads as part of the legal record with clear failure windows and fallbacks that will stand on appeal. Achieving passage, harmonisation and the first nationwide shakedown before 2027 is possible but tight. Second, infrastructure needs to move from roughly half the population on effective broadband to something closer to three‑quarters or more, with satellite and multi‑operator redundancy at the ward level. Third, security and privacy need to move from policy to disciplined practice—audits, breach drills, and a live election SOC. Finally, the operational craft—training hundreds of thousands of presiding officials, standardising device kits and batteries, perfecting offline‑first flows—usually stabilises over two national cycles even in mature democracies.
A practical, staged roadmap (with election‑cycle milestones)
In the first cycle (2026–2027), the priority is to codify, harden and prove at scale. The amended Electoral Act should be passed well before mid‑2027, making real‑time transmission mandatory with explicit fallbacks and penalties for wilful non‑compliance, while anchoring evidence rules for digital signatures and logs. INEC should issue binding result‑management regulations aligned to the Act, register as a Data Controller of Major Importance, publish a data protection impact assessment, and execute controller‑processor contracts with mobile operators and cloud providers. On the network side, multi‑operator APNs with SIM bonding and priority quality of service for election traffic should be contracted, with satellite terminals pre‑positioned at ward collation centres as backhaul fallback, and direct‑to‑device pilots pursued where feasible. Security measures must include device‑bound keys, time‑stamped signatures and append‑only receipts, overseen by a joint election security operations centre with red‑team drills against denial‑of‑service and phishing. Operationally, every kit should include dual power banks and solar options, offline‑first apps with resilient retry logic, and a published upload service‑level window—say, ninety minutes after polling unit closure.
In the second cycle (2029–2031), the aim is to move from transparency tool to primary evidence. Post‑2027 judicial experience should inform refinements that elevate digitally signed polling‑unit uploads, with the EC8A image, to prima facie status, while limiting manual collation to defined exceptions. Broadband reach should extend into the mid‑sixties to mid‑seventies per cent with satellite‑backed redundancy in all wards. Independent verifiability must scale, with universities, the press and civil society hosting read‑only mirrors of a public transparency ledger that is checkpointed at predictable intervals. Routine ward‑level drills in off‑cycle polls should reduce median upload latency by a third relative to 2027 baselines and expand reconciliation between NIN and the voter register to reduce exceptions.
By the third cycle (2033–2035), real‑time transmission should be normalised as the system of record. The statute can then codify the default legal primacy of the cryptographically signed, time‑stamped polling‑unit upload, with remedies confined to affected units where proofs show failure or tampering. Technically, multi‑path uploads over two mobile networks and satellite should be standard, with automated anomaly detection flagging outliers and zero‑trust device management securing the BVAS fleet. During election periods, the NCC should publish quality‑of‑service dashboards in real time, and the public portal should expose cryptographic proofs and explainable status codes whenever fallbacks are triggered—closing the space for viral speculation.
Policy and engineering “bill of materials” (what specifically must be in place)
At policy level, the amended Electoral Act must mandate real‑time uploads, define failure windows and fallbacks, assign legal weight to digital signatures and logs, and criminalise intentional obstruction. Privacy compliance must move from paper to practice with DPIAs, controller–processor contracts, registrations for controllers and processors of major importance, and cross‑border safeguards for cloud redundancy. On the network, multi‑operator bonding, election APNs with enforceable quality‑of‑service, and satellite backhauls at ward level are essential, with the NCC’s industry performance reporting used to enforce service levels during election windows. In the field, standard kits need dual battery banks and solar options, while applications must work offline by design with robust retries. Security controls should encompass device‑bound keys, hash‑chained receipts, and 24/7 SOC monitoring, supported by periodic red‑team exercises. Finally, public trust requires radical transparency: real‑time status reporting, independent mirrors, and evidence‑based explanations when exceptions occur.
Why this aligns with Nigeria’s innovation trajectory
Connectivity is genuinely improving—penetration has moved beyond 50 per cent, fourth‑generation adoption is rising, and operators report renewed capital expenditure and fibre builds. Yet coverage and quality still lag in the very areas that host the most distributed polling units. A staged approach with redundancies and quality‑of‑service contracts reflects that reality. The legal privacy scaffolding provided by the NDPA 2023 gives a credible basis for privacy‑preserving, verifiable transmission once operationalised end‑to‑end by INEC and its vendors. Meanwhile, cyber maturity is growing across the ecosystem, but adversaries and disinformation are also evolving; only verifiable cryptography combined with transparent operations can anchor public confidence.
A quick note on ‘real‑time’ semantics
In election administration, ‘real‑time’ should be defined as cryptographically signed polling‑unit results reaching the public portal and the collation system within a strict, published service‑level window—for example, within sixty to ninety minutes after the close of polls at the unit—accompanied by proofs, not as instantaneous transmission. The design must assume intermittent links and provide automatic fallbacks that preserve verifiability, rather than relying on screenshots or manually re‑keyed numbers.
What you can do now (practical advocacy levers)
Stakeholders can act immediately on three fronts. Legislatively, they can press for a clear, harmonised Electoral Act that establishes the primary status of signed uploads, defines tightly scoped fallbacks, and anchors technical evidence admissibility. On procurement, they can demand open, auditable cryptographic protocols and published upload service levels ahead of each election. On verification, they can help universities and civil society prepare mirror nodes and public audit tools for hash‑chain receipts in the next off‑cycle governorship election, so that independent checks are routine rather than ad hoc.
Professor Ademola Emmanuel Ojo, First African Professor of Cybersecurity and Information Technology Management, Global Education Advocate, Chartered Manager, UK Digital Journalist, Strategic Advisor & Prophetic Mobiliser for National Transformation, and General Evangelist of CAC Nigeria and Overseas