The Osogbo Test: The election that put INEC on trial, by Stephanie Shaakaa

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File: INEC chairman Joash Amupitan

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By Sunday morning, Osogbo had begun to look like a city coming out of a long night.

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Campaign posters still clung to walls. Election notices hung where they had been pasted. Roads that had carried convoys, party agents and anxious voters were returning to ordinary traffic. Somewhere, tired election officials were heading home after a night that had stretched beyond the closing of the polls.

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But beneath the celebration and disappointment was a quieter question:

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Can Nigerians still believe an election when it is over?

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That question is bigger than Ademola Adeleke. It is bigger than Bola Oyebamiji. Ultimately, it is bigger than Osun.

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Adeleke won the August 15 governorship election with 511,067 votes against Oyebamiji’s 444,815, securing another term. The returning officer announced the result and the certificate of return followed.

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But Nigerian elections are no longer judged by arithmetic alone.

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There is now a second election after the first one has ended. It is fought in the minds of citizens, on television, across social media and in conversations that continue long after the ballot boxes are packed away.

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It is the election over whether the result deserves to be believed.

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That was the election INEC walked into.

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Osun was never simply another off cycle contest. It carried the memory of every Nigerian election that had left citizens suspicious or unconvinced. It carried the promises made about BVAS and electronic transmission. It carried the lessons of previous logistical failures and, above all, the enormous burden of public distrust.

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INEC was not being asked merely to conduct an election. It was being asked to demonstrate that the institution entrusted with conducting Nigerian elections could still be trusted with one.

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That is a much higher standard.

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For years, Nigeria has discussed electoral reform as though the problem were principally mechanical. How do we identify voters? How do we prevent multiple accreditation? How quickly can results be transmitted? How do we improve logistics? How can technology reduce human interference?

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Those questions matter. But Osun exposed the question beneath them:

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What happens when technology improves faster than public trust?

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We have fallen into a dangerous illusion: believing that hardware can cure a software problem. You can deploy sophisticated biometric accreditation and faster transmission systems, but they cannot outrun bad faith. A machine can authenticate a voter. It cannot stop a desperate political class from treating the collation centre as a theatre of war.

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Technology can improve the mechanics of voting. It cannot reform the culture of survival surrounding Nigerian politics.

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This is the problem INEC now faces. It is no longer fighting only logistical problems.

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It is fighting memory.

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Every delayed material carries the memory of a previous delay. Every unexplained interruption invites comparison with an earlier controversy. Every result that takes longer than expected to appear creates space for rumours to move faster than official information.

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In modern Nigeria, silence is rarely empty.

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Somebody fills it.

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That somebody may be a party agent, a commentator, a political operative or an ordinary voter watching results unfold on a phone. By the time an official explanation arrives, suspicion may already have travelled halfway across the country.

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This is why transparency cannot mean merely releasing information eventually. It means communicating while the process is happening.

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Osun offered evidence that INEC can manage a fiercely contested election without the entire electoral machine breaking down. Across the state’s 3,763 polling units, there were delays and logistical pressures, but the machinery held.

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That matters.

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Nigerian elections have sometimes been defined by the moment when the machinery stops holding. A delay becomes confusion. Confusion becomes suspicion. Suspicion becomes confrontation.

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Osun did not descend into that kind of systemic breakdown.

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That is a credit to the commission.

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But it is also where the praise should become careful.

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INEC should not mistake a successful election for a completed reform project. Osun was a test, not a graduation.

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The broader question of credibility remains open because technology can improve mechanics without repairing the culture surrounding an election.

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There is another uncomfortable feature of Nigerian elections: the security presence.

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Security is necessary. Voters have a right to protection. Election officials have a right to safety.

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But there is something troubling about a democracy that increasingly needs the visible force of the security state to reassure citizens that they are safe enough to exercise political freedom.

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The security personnel may protect the ballot, but their very presence is an indictment. It is a physical monument to mutual hostility, a reminder that we have built a political system so dangerous that casting a vote can require a garrison.

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Nigeria cannot permanently secure democracy by surrounding every election with the atmosphere of a military operation. At some point, the political culture itself has to become less lethal.

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That responsibility does not belong to INEC alone.

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It belongs to the political class.

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Politicians have helped turn elections into existential battles. Too much money is invested in winning. Too much political survival is attached to office. Losing can therefore feel less like losing a contest and more like losing everything.

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That is how democracy becomes warfare by other means.

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And once politics becomes war, every institution becomes a battlefield.

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INEC becomes an enemy to one side and an ally to the other. Security agencies become objects of suspicion. Results become weapons. Technology becomes either proof of progress or evidence of conspiracy, depending on whose candidate is winning.

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No electoral commission can permanently survive that culture without being dragged into it. INEC can administer the contest. It cannot cure the desperation surrounding the contest.

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That is why the ultimate verdict on Osun should not be whether INEC deserves applause or condemnation. The more important question is whether the election moved Nigeria closer to something we have discussed for decades but rarely achieved consistently.

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An election whose winner does not require everyone else to believe they were cheated.

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That is the real test.

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A credible democracy does not require universal agreement. The loser does not have to love the result. Supporters do not have to celebrate the opposing candidate.

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But there must be a point at which a citizen can say, with disappointment but without despair:

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My candidate lost, but the process was legitimate. That sentence is the foundation of democratic stability.

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Without it, every election becomes a prelude to the next crisis. With it, democracy becomes something more durable than the temporary triumph of one political party.

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This is why Osun matters beyond the numbers. Adeleke’s strength in Ede North, Ede South and Osogbo mattered politically. Oyebamiji’s performance in places such as Irewole and Ilesa East mattered politically. The final margin mattered politically.

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But the greater significance lies in what happened between those numbers.

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Did voters get the opportunity to vote? Did officials perform their duties? Did technology work sufficiently to support transparency? Were problems contained rather than allowed to overwhelm the process? Were results generated through a chain citizens could follow?

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And when the winner was announced, did the country have enough confidence in the process to accept that announcement as legitimate?

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Those questions will outlive the campaign posters and the politicians.

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Nigeria is heading toward elections in which the stakes will be higher than they were in Osun. Lessons from off cycle elections eventually travel to the national stage.

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That makes Osogbo important.

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It gives INEC an opportunity to learn before the stakes become even larger.

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The lesson should not be that technology has solved Nigerian elections. It has not.

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Technology is useful only when surrounded by competent administration, transparent communication, institutional independence and political restraint. The ballot is not protected by a machine alone. It is protected by the integrity of the people operating it.

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And that brings us back to the question with which Osun leaves the country.

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Can Nigerians still believe an election when it is over?

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The honest answer is that belief cannot be demanded.

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It has to be earned.

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Not with speeches, press conferences or declarations that an election was free and fair.

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It is earned slowly, polling unit by polling unit, election by election, through thousands of ordinary decisions that tell citizens the system is working as it should.

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Trust is built in small moments. It is destroyed in small moments too.

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That is why Osun should not be remembered simply as the election that returned Ademola Adeleke to the Osun State Government House.

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It should be remembered as an election in which INEC itself was being tested.

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Not tested on whether it could produce a winner. That is the easy part.

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The harder test was whether it could produce enough confidence in the process that Nigerians could live with the winner.

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Because a democracy does not collapse all at once. It erodes quietly, one lost election at a time, until citizens look at a ballot box and see nothing left inside it.

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That is the standard Osogbo has placed before INEC.

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The real result of the Osun election cannot be found only in 511,067 votes or 444,815 votes.

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It is found in something far more fragile.

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Whether Nigerians can still look at a ballot box and believe there is something inside it worth trusting.

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