The Nigerian Bar Association’s general elections held on Saturday, July 18, 2026, have been widely condemned by leading candidates as deeply flawed and lacking credibility. Despite 82,164 accredited voters, turnout plunged to approximately 27%, a sharp regression from over 56% in previous elections, amid platform collapse, untested last-minute changes to SMS authentication, prolonged glitches, massive disenfranchisement and reports of double voting. Below are excerpts of statements made by Presidential Candidate Lateef Omoyemi Akangbe, SAN, and General Secretary Candidates, Okey Leo Ohagba and Chidi Ezenwafor who lay their complaints, while the first two revealed that they themselves were unable to vote! They described systemic failures that suppressed participation, eroded trust, and undermined the Bar’s moral authority to demand transparency and accountability from others ahead of the 2027 general elections Candidate for NBA President, Lateef Omoyemi Akangbe, SAN – ‘This election was shambolic. It is a shame to the Bar’ Thank you Distinguished Colleagues. Some of you succeeded in voting. The vast majority of you did not. Some of you tried for hours, and were locked out by a platform that was never built to carry the weight of your democratic will. You were disenfranchised, not by choice but by infrastructure. Not by apathy but by failure. I saw the Branch Chairmen who spent the night fielding calls from members who could not vote, and did not know why. Now, let me say plainly what every Lawyer in Nigeria, and the general public already knows. This election was shambolic. It is a shame to the Bar. The question that must be asked, and answered, is a simple one: why the rush? The ECNBA unilaterally moved the NEC-approved election date from 20 July to 18 July, without obtaining NEC approval. At the meeting of 15 July 2026, in the presence of the Honourable Attorney-General of the Federation and the Chairman of the Body of Benchers, an agreement was reached to postpone by one week to allow proper sensitisation on the new SMS-based voting mechanism, a mechanism that had been adopted less than forty-eight hours before the original election date. That agreement was not honoured. The ECNBA changed the verification method from email to SMS on 16 July and, rather than giving the membership the time to adjust, insisted that the election proceed two days later. Eighty-two thousand Lawyers were expected to navigate a new authentication system they had never tested, on a platform they had never used, in the middle of the night. The result was predictable. The platform collapsed within its first hour. The ECNBA attributed this to a “deliberate, coordinated, and sustained cyberattack”. Whether that claim is true or not, and it remains unverified by any independent authority, it does not answer the question that matters: why did the attack succeed? A cyberattack on an election platform is not an unforeseeable act of God. It is the single most predictable threat, in any online election in 2026. In any serious deployment, the platform would have been subjected to rigorous stress testing and ethical hacking long before election day, to identify and close precisely these vulnerabilities. A platform built to withstand an attack, would have degraded under pressure. This one did not degrade. It disappeared. This was not a cybersecurity failure, but a capacity failure. And, it is a capacity failure that was foreseeable, foreseen, and warned about, in writing, since June. I, a presidential candidate in this election, was completely disenfranchised. I could not vote. The Chairman of the ECNBA and the NBA President personally sent me over five separate links, to access the voting portal. Not one of them worked. Let that settle for a moment. The two most senior officials overseeing this election intervened directly to help a presidential candidate cast his ballot, and even their intervention could not overcome the failure of the platform they deployed. If the Chairman and the President of the Association cannot get the system to work, for a candidate they are personally assisting to access the voting portal; what happened to the ordinary member in Jalingo or Ado-Ekiti who had no one highly placed to call? The numbers tell the story. Let me help the profession visualise the scale of what happened. In the 2022 NBA National Elections, 58.61% of the total number of eligible voters cast their ballots, with the winner scoring about 22,342 votes. In the 2024 election, 56.4% cast their ballots, and the purported winner of that election, the sitting NBA President, Mazi Afam Josiah Osigwe, SAN, scored approximately 20,435 votes. Those were imperfect elections, but they were elections in which the majority of the profession participated and the outcome, whatever one’s view of the process, carried the visib
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