Lateef Akangbe, a candidate for president of the Nigerian Bar Association, is calling for the NBA election to be suspended after alleging major technical and security problems within hours of voting opening.
Voting started at midnight on July 18 and was scheduled to run through Sunday. But in a letter to the Electoral Committee of the Nigerian Bar Association on Saturday, Akangbe said the process suffered a “catastrophic structural and technical collapse” before 3 a.m.
He claimed that by 2:09 a.m. most of the roughly 82,000 accredited voters could not log in due to errors, authentication failures and timeouts.
He also questioned reports that ballots cast before the outage would be voided and the vote restarted. “If the portal is inaccessible to the general membership, how were any votes cast at all?” he asked, adding that the committee could not rule out “back-end ballot dumping” during the downtime.
Akangbe accused the ECNBA of sending one-time passwords by email instead of SMS, despite a public commitment less than 24 hours earlier to use SMS only.
He called it “a complete and bad-faith breach of the security architecture” that compromises the entire authentication system.
He alleged the e-ballot showed the photograph of only one of the three cleared presidential candidates. The photos of the other two, including his own, did not appear. He said that gave an unfair visual advantage and reflected poor pre-election testing.
Akangbe asked the committee to immediately halt the election, secure all voting records, order an independent audit of the platform, and reschedule the poll only after the issues are fixed.
He warned that proceeding now would produce a result the profession could not trust. “Whoever is declared the winner of an election conducted on a collapsed portal, with breached authentication, and on a visually defective ballot, will not lead the Bar with the confidence of the profession,” he said.
The ECNBA has not yet responded publicly to the demands.
