MAHMOOD: A humane assessment, By Emmanuel Onwubiko

“Be a good human being, a warm hearted, affectionate person. That is my fundamental belief.”
(-14th Dalai Lama)

“If you judge people, you have no time to love them.”
(-Mother Teresa)

Professor Mahmood Yakubu leaves the Independent National Electoral Commission after ten years at its helm; a decade that will be debated, dissected and, I suspect, ultimately judged kindly by history. President Bola Ahmed Tinubu has formally accepted Professor Yakubu’s departure and, in recognition of his service, conferred on him the national honour of Commander of the Order of the Niger. The handover to the most senior national commissioner, May Agbamuche-Mbu, marks the end of an era and the start of another fraught moment for Nigeria’s electoral architecture.

To assess Yakubu fairly we must do two things at once: catalogue the hard, demonstrable changes he put in place to modernise Nigeria’s elections, and then judge how those changes held up under the stress test of Nigeria’s deeply adversarial politics. On the first task (the one that will determine whether INEC is stronger on the morning after his exit than it was on the morning of his appointment), Yakubu’s record is substantial, concrete and, in many ways, transformative.

When Mahmood Yakubu arrived at INEC in November 2015, he inherited an electoral agency that had begun to recover public trust after the Attahiru Jega years. Over the next decade he pursued a program of institutionalising technology, stabilising processes and expanding access to the register; reforms that were not merely cosmetic but structural. The Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) became a fixture at polling units; the machine records accredited voters, stores a picture of the EC8A (the polling unit result sheet) and was designed to reduce the kind of human tampering that has long hollowed out confidence in electoral outcomes. Complementing BVAS was the INEC Result Viewing portal (IReV); a public interface that allowed citizens, parties and observers to compare what was uploaded from polling units with what was being collated at state and national centres. Those two innovations (the biometric accreditation and the result-viewing portal), are not mere gadgets. They rewired the spine of the results chain and moved Nigeria from paper-only opacity toward a model of verifiable transmission.

Technology alone does not make an election free or credible; it makes verification possible. Yakubu’s INEC institutionalised procedures that, for the first time in decades, made it relatively easy for political actors and citizens to detect discrepancies between the result sheets at polling units and what appeared on official portals. This had a practical consequence: in the 2023 general elections several outcomes that would once have been unthinkable were validated on the ground and in the collation halls. The fact that results ran against the presumed preferences of political heavyweights (from presidential candidates to incumbent governors) is itself evidence that the mechanics of counting and transmission were functioning in ways that allowed voters’ choices to surface. Consider three state-level examples that mattered politically and symbolically.

In Lagos (the commercial hub that was, for decades, a political fief of Bola Tinubu), the Labour Party’s Peter Obi won the plurality of votes, a seismic outcome that spoke to the emergence of new urban coalitions and, importantly, to the ability of INEC’s systems to capture and publish polling unit returns for citizens and the media to scrutinise. That result, confirmed in the data and widely reported by credible international outlets, undercut the narrative that the commission could be bent to produce a foregone conclusion in even the most politically sensitive geographies.

In Osun State, the presidential tally favoured the Peoples Democratic Party’s candidate, an outcome that again cut across expectations and local party machines. And in the Federal Capital Territory, Abuja, the Labour Party’s dominance was decisive and visible on the result portals and official collations. These were not trivial or isolated quirks; they were systemic signs that votes were being counted and reported in ways that allowed the people’s will to be revealed, even when that will clashed with established power.

If one wishes to measure institutional independence by outcomes, look also to the rout of political heavyweights who assumed their influence could buy them seats. At least five outgoing governors who sought to move to the Senate after two terms were defeated by opponents; an outcome that would have been harder to engineer if the electoral market were rigged in favour of incumbency rent. The International Centre for Investigative Reporting recorded the defeats of prominent outgoing governors — Samuel Ortom (Benue), Ifeanyi Ugwuanyi (Enugu), Darius Ishaku (Taraba), Simon Lalong (Plateau) and Ben Ayade (Cross River) — and their losses were widely reported as evidence that the electorate and the electoral machinery combined to produce genuine upsets.

The list of losers includes not only governors but a string of sitting national assembly leaders and committee chairmen who were unseated; a political cleansing of sorts that reflected voters’ impatience and the capacity of the electoral process to enforce it. ICIR’s compilation of National Assembly members who lost their seats in 2023 reads like a catalogue of the vulnerable and the over-confident: minority leaders, long-standing committee chairs and seemingly secure incumbents found themselves out of office when results were tallied and verified. Those outcomes matter because they are measurable, verifiable instances where the electoral process functioned against the grain of personal power.

Bauchi State (Professor Yakubu’s birth state) offers another telling case. In 2023 the presidential vote there swung to the Peoples Democratic Party, handing the opposition a clear victory in the INEC chairman’s own homestead and reinforcing the larger pattern: the mechanics of counting, accreditation and result viewing allowed an opposition triumph in a competitive state where the ruling party expected to be strong. That is a powerful vindication for any electoral manager who sought above all to let the ballot do its work.

Beyond technology and headline-defying results, Yakubu worked to professionalise INEC’s back offices: improving voter registration logistics, expanding the Continuous Voter Registration portal, strengthening training for ad hoc staff and pushing for greater transparency in party primaries. He presided over the creation or consolidation of units within INEC aimed at research, legal affairs and election operations management; slow, bureaucratic work that rarely makes front pages but is essential if an electoral commission is to endure beyond electoral cycles. The Electoral Institute, an INEC initiative, and the commission’s investment in training and data management are part of that quieter, but critical, reform legacy.

All of this, however, must be tempered by honesty. A reformer’s legacy is not simply measured in new machines and portals, but in how the institution responds when things go wrong. The 2023 general election was not flawless. There were well-documented technical glitches with result transmission during the presidential contest; there were delays and disruptions in some states that opened space for suspicion; turnout was depressingly low relative to the number of registered voters, and communication from the commission to the public was sometimes clumsy. Critics (both domestic and international) documented lapses in planning and execution that frustrated expectations that the new technology would magically solve decades of logistical and political problems. Those criticisms are partly fair and partly the byproduct of unrealistic expectations, but they matter all the same.

Nevertheless, when the ledger is balanced, one must concede that Yakubu’s stewardship materially strengthened the capacity of the commission to record, transmit and publish election results. The simple truth is that over his two terms Nigeria saw the operational roll-out of innovations (BVAS and IReV among them), that converted what had been an opaque counting process into one that could be audited, interrogated and, often, verified by citizens and independent monitors. Where previously suspicion flourished because of lack of transparency, the new systems reduced opportunities for stealthy manipulation; though they did not eliminate them. The point is crucial: independence and procedural integrity were not magically guaranteed by technology, but technology made accountability possible in ways that were previously unimaginable.

The political context in which Yakubu worked should not be ignored. For eight years under President Muhammadu Buhari, public commitments and INEC’s own pronouncements suggested a relative absence of direct presidential interference in the commission’s operating space. Both the executive’s pledges and the facts of contested results that went against incumbent power contributed to an environment in which INEC could, more often than not, execute its mandate without executive fiat. Buhari’s public promise to respect INEC’s independence and the commission’s repeated insistence that it was not under external influence are on the record.

But that is now the past. The present and the future are different. As the transition occurs under President Bola Tinubu, there are deep and widely-expressed concerns in the civic and international communities about the stakes of the INEC leadership appointment ahead of the 2027 general elections. International IDEA, CDD-West Africa and other analysts have warned that the appointment to lead INEC in the run-up to another general election is among the highest political stakes a president can face; and that politicising the commission’s leadership risks eroding the very gains Yakubu helped secure. Those warnings are not partisan insinuations; they are sober analyses from electoral experts about institutional risk at moments of transition.

Let me be plain. The verdict that must guide public judgment is this: Professor Mahmood Yakubu performed very well, humanly speaking. He was not infallible; no administrator operating in Nigeria’s febrile politics could be. He made choices, some of which produced predictable controversy. But on balance he steered INEC toward modern systems, increased transparency, and a greater capacity to resist straightforward manipulation. The evidence is before us in the technical architecture he left behind and the election outcomes that proved, time and again, that votes could surprise the powerful. Those are not idle boastings; they are measurable improvements in how we count and report votes.

If Yakubu deserves praise, he also deserves constructive criticism. Technology is only as good as the contingency plans that sustain it. The commission must, in future, invest far more in redundancy, offline reconciliation protocols and independent audits of the transmission chain. Result-viewing portals must be backed by resilient data centres and clear, rapid public communication when outages occur; IReV’s temporary failures in 2023 became political fodder precisely because the commission had not explained contingencies early and plainly. Training for ad hoc staff must be deeper and earlier; the single largest vulnerability of any electoral operation is the human error that turns a local glitch into national suspicion.

More than operational fixes, however, Nigeria must attend to legal and institutional safeguards that protect INEC’s independence. The next chairperson must not be a political toady; the law must be defended, and civic institutions must be vigilant. We have had evidence these past two cycles that the electorate will punish apparent manipulation; but that is not a substitute for a robust legal firewall that makes manipulation both difficult and costly. International partners, professional domestic observers and Nigeria’s civic intelligentsia should redouble efforts to insist on transparent selection processes and to hold the executive to its obligations to protect the electoral commission’s neutrality.

Finally, Nigerians must not be complacent. A decade of reforms under Professor Yakubu advanced the cause of transparent elections; they are fragile gains. The appointment that follows his exit is the fulcrum upon which those gains will either be cemented into a durable institutional culture or hollowed out by partisanship. If the next occupant of the INEC chair is a partisan surrogate chosen for short-term political expediency, the consequences will be swift: public trust will slump, opposition will be delegitimised, and the bureaucratic scaffolding Yakubu left behind will be repurposed to serve partisan ends. That is not a speculative fear but an historical lesson. It is the duty of every citizen, civil society organisation, and professional body to insist on competence, independence and transparency in the next appointment.

Professor Mahmood Yakubu exits with a record of measurable reform; biometric accreditation widely used, a public result-viewing portal institutionalised, a more professionalised electoral institute and, above all, a string of electoral outcomes that testify to the practical possibility of free and fair contests in Nigeria today. Those achievements do not make Nigeria’s democracy invulnerable, but they have raised the bar for anyone who would try to subvert the will of the people. For that alone he deserves our thanks, our critique where merited, and our stern vigilance going forward.

Emmanuel Nnadozie Onwubiko is the founder of the HUMAN RIGHTS WRITERS ASSOCIATION OF NIGERIA (HURIWA) and a former NATIONAL COMMISSIONER OF THE NATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSION OF NIGERIA.