By Chibuike Nwabuko
ABUJA (PRECISE POST) – Presidential candidate in the recently concluded Nigerian Bar Association’s election, Lateef Omoyemi Akangbe, SAN, has challenged what he described as significant discrepancies in figures published by the Electoral Committee of the Nigerian Bar Association (ECNBA) concerning the July 18 election.
Akangbe, who contested the presidential election, raised the concerns in his Reply to the ECNBA’s Answer before the NBA National Officers Election Appeals Committee, urging the committee to clarify and verify the discrepancies in the electoral records.
He anounced this in a statement he released on his X handle on Monday.
At the centre of his challenge is the total number of persons recorded as having voted in the election.
According to Akangbe, the ECNBA’s published document containing the list of members who voted, arranged by branch, reportedly totals 25,901 voters, while the committee’s Answer states that 26,184 persons voted.
He is therefore asking the Appeals Committee to establish the reason for the difference of 283 votes between the two figures.
Akangbe also pointed to an inconsistency in the number of eligible voters, noting that the ECNBA’s published Final Voters Register reportedly contained 82,213 eligible voters, while its Answer referred to 82,172 eligible voters.
The Reply further alleges that the entire Warri Branch was omitted from the published list of persons who voted, raising questions about the completeness and accuracy of the voting records.
Another concern relates to approximately 10,166 members of the 2025 Call Set, who, according to Akangbe, were unable to authenticate themselves through their Supreme Court Call Numbers as contemplated under the Electronic Voting Guidelines.
The former presidential candidate also challenged the circumstances surrounding the disruption of the initial electronic voting platform on July 18, its subsequent migration to another platform and the extension of voting into July 19.
On the alleged cyberattack cited as the reason for the disruption, Akangbe is seeking access to the underlying technical records that could independently establish what occurred and determine its impact on the election process.
Among the records he is seeking are Cloudflare logs, server and application logs, audit trails, DNS records, SMS gateway records, incident reports and other relevant technical data.
The Reply also identifies an approximately one-hour-six-minute interruption in the voting records between 10:28 a.m. and 11:34 a.m. on July 18.
Akangbe said that during the period, votes were reportedly not recorded from 139 branches, with only 14 votes appearing from Aba Branch.
He consequently raised questions about the continuity, completeness and integrity of the voting records during the period.
The issue of one-time-password (OTP) failures was also raised, with Akangbe relying on the ECNBA’s acknowledgment that sustained traffic affected OTP delivery.
He maintained that numerous eligible voters were unable to complete the voting process because they could not receive the authentication codes required to cast their ballots.
Significantly, Akangbe disclosed that he personally could not successfully authenticate and cast his vote in the election in which he was a presidential candidate.
However, he clarified that his technical case was not that the available evidence had established that votes were unlawfully altered.
Rather, his position, according to the Reply, is that the technical information made available is insufficient to independently verify the cause and impact of the disruptions or establish the completeness and integrity of the underlying election records.
Akangbe is therefore seeking the production and examination of a wide range of electoral and technical records, including the complete Final Voters Register, complete list of persons who voted, voting logs, audit trails, unsuccessful voting attempts, OTP records, SMS gateway records, server logs, DNS and Cloudflare records, platform migration records and incident reports.
The central issue raised by Akangbe, according to his Reply, is transparency and verifiability of the electoral process and whether the available records are sufficient to independently establish the completeness and integrity of the NBA presidential election results.
