The Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, Prof. Joash Amupitan, SAN, has tasked the Commission’s personnel with ensuring a credible 2027 General Election, declaring that the eyes of more than 200 million Nigerians and the international community would be firmly fixed on the electoral process.
Amupitan spoke on Monday, September 7, 2026, in Lagos, where he declared open the South-West Zonal Interactive Meeting and Readiness Assessment for the 2027 General Election.
In a statement released via its Daily Bulletin on Monday, the Commission said the engagement marked a significant departure from a practice spanning more than two decades, under which zonal election preparations were largely coordinated through the Commission’s headquarters directorates.
It noted that the event also marked the commencement of a six-zone national tour by the Commission’s leadership to assess operational preparedness ahead of the 2027 elections.
The Presidential and National Assembly elections are scheduled for Saturday, January 16, 2027, while the Governorship and State Houses of Assembly elections will hold on Saturday, February 6, 2027.
Amupitan said he was accompanied by National Commissioners and Directors from the Commission’s headquarters to engage directly with Electoral Officers and other administrative personnel, whom he described as the frontline guardians of Nigeria’s democracy.
According to him, the true test of electoral success would not be determined in meeting rooms in Abuja but at the Local Government Areas, Registration Area Centres and polling units where field officers manage the day-to-day operations of elections.
The INEC chairman said the Commission was building on lessons from recent off-cycle elections, particularly the Osun State governorship election, which, he said, demonstrated what could be achieved when operational discipline, technical competence and administrative integrity worked together.
He, however, warned that the scale of the 2027 General Election, involving simultaneous electoral activities across the 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory, required a higher standard of preparedness and performance than any single-state election.
Amupitan identified voter apathy, the lingering trust deficit and the proliferation of misinformation and disinformation as some of the major challenges confronting the Commission.
He stressed that the conduct, professionalism and competence of INEC field personnel remained the Commission’s strongest defence against false narratives and public distrust.
On voter registration, the chairman disclosed that the Continuous Voter Registration, CVR, exercise, conducted in three phases between August 2025 and July 2026, recorded a cumulative 10,772,421 new registrants, subject to ongoing Automated Biometric Identification System, ABIS, verification.
He said the third phase of the exercise introduced an Online Registration Portal for the first time in Nigeria to make registration more accessible to eligible voters.
According to him, the Commission also introduced a new Printable Permanent Voter’s Card, PVC, technology, which was first deployed during the Osun State election, in line with Section 18(1) of the Electoral Act.
Amupitan said the National Register of Voters was approaching the 100 million mark, assuring Nigerians that the Commission would take all necessary measures to ensure that no eligible voter was disenfranchised because of logistical challenges associated with PVC distribution.
On electoral technology, the INEC chairman said the Commission was refining its Result Management Systems, including the recently introduced eEC8A, to strengthen the transparency and verifiability of election results from the polling unit through the various stages of collation to the national collation centre.
He also reiterated INEC’s zero-tolerance policy towards partisan conduct and administrative negligence among its personnel.
Amupitan cited Section 26 of the Electoral Act, which provides for an oath of neutrality for Electoral Officers, Presiding Officers, Returning Officers and security personnel involved in the conduct of elections.
He further disclosed that the Commission was finalising a new salary and welfare package for its staff, Commission Members and Resident Electoral Commissioners.
The package, he said, includes the newly created Consolidated Election Management Body Salary Structure, CEMBSS, which took effect from January 1, 2026, as well as a 150 per cent increase in overhead allocations to states effective July 1, 2026.
In his welcome address, the Resident Electoral Commissioner for Lagos State, Prof. Ayobami Salami, said the state was honoured to host the maiden edition of the zonal engagement.
Salami said electoral credibility was built long before Election Day through early preparation, competent personnel and effective coordination.
He said the South-West zone presented a diverse electoral environment requiring readiness assessments that went beyond routine checklists to test the resilience of logistics, reliability of technology and effectiveness of stakeholder engagement across the six states.
The Lagos REC commended the Commission’s leadership for prioritising early preparedness, describing its personnel as the institution’s greatest asset in safeguarding the credibility of the 2027 elections.
Also speaking, the Director of Planning and Monitoring, Mrs Helen Ajayi, said the interactive meeting was designed around four key objectives.
She said these included assessing the preparedness of the six South-West states through situation reports on logistics, recruitment of ad hoc personnel, technology, security, training, voter education and stakeholder engagement.
Other objectives, she said, were to identify operational and logistical challenges that could affect the successful conduct of the elections; provide departmental updates on voter registration, PVC collection and deployment and management of ICT resources; and align personnel with the Commission’s Code of Conduct and operational and logistics requirements ahead of the polls.
The interactive session featured presentations and engagements on voter registration, electoral technology, staff conduct, logistics and state-level readiness reports by Resident Electoral Commissioners across the South-West.
The Lagos meeting is the first leg of INEC’s six-zone national readiness tour as the Commission intensifies preparations for the 2027 General Election, one of the most closely watched electoral cycles in Nigeria’s democratic history.
