EDITORIAL: Coup Rumours and Electoral Reforms: Testing the Integrity of Nigeria’s Democracy
During the swearing-in of Prof. Joash Ojo Amupitan (SAN) as the sixth substantive chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) yesterday, Thursday 23rd of October, 2025, President Bola Tinubu reminded him, and the nation at large, of the responsibility that comes with electoral stewardship. “Your nomination and the subsequent confirmation by the Senate are a testament to your capacity and the confidence reposed in you by both the executive and the legislative arms of government,” the President said. The task ahead is not an easy one: to serve “with the highest level of integrity, dedication and patriotism.”
Tinubu’s words, resisting the reality that “our democracy has made great strides in 25 years, we have consolidated and strengthened our democratic institutions, particularly in electoral systems, through innovations and reforms,” are appropriate. Nigeria’s journey since 1999 has been one of institutional development, incremental reform, and occasional reminders that democracy is about the gear as much as it is about belief in the gear. The President reemphasized that voting itself is a natural part of democracy: “to ensure that our democracy continues to flourish, the integrity of our electoral process must be beyond reproach”.
Read Also: Shettima at UN: The Real Threat Is Not Just Fake News, It Is the Rise of a ‘Trustless’ Generation
For Amupitan, his oath of office marks not just the start of an individual mandate, but of an institutional mandate: the defence of the system by which citizens choose their leaders, and shaping public trust in the commission to manage that system. The President also laid down a firm standard: the 8 November 2025 Anambra State governorship election will put the new INEC leadership to the test. He demanded that every part of the electoral process, from registration to campaigning, access to media, voting, and counting, shall be non-violent, transparent, and credible.
Democracy Under Tension
Amidst the swearing-in, there is a certain issue that cannot be ignored. Recent reports by the media suggest that some of Nigeria’s men in uniform were taken in for detention after there had been reports of a possible coup planned against the nation’s topmost government leaders, including the President. That reports and the higher reaches of the government and the military are so eager to, at least, investigate this, shows us on one point: democracy remains fragile, and the institutional system must be robust. Elections in themselves are not the end of democracy; the environment of trust, accountability, transparency, and legitimacy is just as crucial.
Electoral Reform: Technology Support, Yet To Be Realized
Part and parcel of building that trust, one of the pillars, is electoral system reform itself. As the President reminded: “We must consistently improve our electoral process, addressing the challenges of yesterday and innovating for today and tomorrow.” A thread of reform ideas and debate in Nigeria’s civil society and policy space.
For example, electronic transmission of results has been promoted in Nigeria for decades as a solution to restrict scope for fraud, reduce delay, increase confidence, and simultaneity of verification. Idealism aside, there are legal and institutional limitations. The catch is: technology will not work unless the institution is prepared, procedures are well defined, and people believe in the system.
READ ALSO: Police Chief Warns Against Spread of Fake News
One of Nigeria’s chronic issues is that the outcomes of elections are far too frequently announced via slower hand-measured methods, sometimes several miles from the polling unit, and sometimes with delay, disputatiousness, or invisibility. Electronic reporting of results (ETR) can resolve these vulnerabilities—but only if done with secure processes: chain-of‐custody, open log‐files, polling‐unit uploads of data, public dashboards, etc. Otherwise, ETR is a weak veneer.
In such a context, Prof. Amupitan’s tenure is coming at a time when INEC’s legitimacy needs to be reaffirmed. In terms of technology, such as electronic transmission, real-time upload, polling-unit result reconciliation, open log‐files can travel a great distance in enhancing the image of integrity of the electoral process. But again: technology is not sufficient by itself; institutional autonomy, poll officer training, security of polling places, independence of access of the media, transparency of campaign finance, and post-election dispute resolution mechanisms all matter.
The Essential Role of Fact-checking
In the midst of all this, there is one that holds electoral integrity and public trust upright: fact-checking. Put simply, in an election process where thousands or millions of people are relying on news, social media, messaging apps, and broadcasts, the spread of misinformation or fake news can destroy the process even when the voting process is flawless. Here is where the valuable initiatives and works of FactCheckAfrica comes into play.
Fake news is is an existential menace to democratic legitimacy. Citizens who share false news, information about a candidate’s qualifications, about the location of the polling place, about the result as it is being counted—they can lose faith in the process, exit, or riot. And also, any contested election is harder to contain when there are competing narratives of “what actually happened,” especially when those narratives spread through conduits that seem trustworthy.
Take the Cameroonian example. In the recent Cameroon’s 2025 presidential election period, a spurious communiqué from Elections Cameroon (ELECAM) falsely stated that North-West and South-West would be disenfranchised—a totally fabricated communiqué, but one which gained a pretty considerable amount of publicity and planted suspicion. Also, packed result screens were rigged, crowdsourced AI-made photos, voice messages, and trending updates proclaimed “‘the opposition has won'” or “the ruling party rigged” before results were officially made public.
Those disinformation campaigns had some effects: they drained confidence in the electoral commission, raised questions, deepened regional suspicion (especially among Anglophone regions), and were capable of pushing attention away from the actual practice of voting, counting, and checking. The harm is not simply that facts were wrong; the harm is that verifying, contesting, and trusting becomes heavy.
In the Nigerian situation, with the upcoming Anambra election and subsequent national elections closely monitored, the fact-checking role must be integrated. INEC, the media, civil society, and online platforms must work together: fact-check claims, debunk viral rumours of result leaks, candidate disqualification, and unauthorized result-streams. The citizens should be educated—not just able to vote, but able to distinguish plausible from bogus claims, cross-check on official documents, and eschew rumour inflation.
Why does this matter now?
We live in an age where democratic backsliding is a reality. Elections are not enough; it is that the citizenry must have confidence that the system is fair, their leaders indeed were chosen, and power will change peacefully hand to another when elections necessitate this. By setting the next Anambra governorship election as the test case, the new INEC chairman has to act decisively and efficaciously. Success in this instance by the new administration will ring true in the national conscience: success will reinforce faith; failure may heighten scepticism.
As fact-checking is being promoted together with technological reform, independence and transparency of institutions, the entire election process becomes more robust. It is a sign that Nigeria is conducting not only an election but a defence of democracy. The recent Cameroonian fact-pattern is a reminder of the caveat: democracy does not just happen because it has happened before. It happens because institutions are constantly rejuvenated, integrity is upheld, transparency is insisted on, and citizens feel their voices count.
For Nigerian democracy, the new INEC leadership will have to lead: not merely coordinating elections, but pushing change, embracing technology, keeping it open, and winning public trust, and yes, fact-checking as an integral part of electoral life, and not an afterthought. If Anambra is a credible model, the new commission and chair will have gained momentum. Unless, of course, the risk is cynicism deepens further, the threshold of legitimacy is lowered, and citizens may question whether elections serve to do anything other than to bow in the direction of democracy.
