A wave of political anxiety has swept through the national secretariats of major political parties following the Supreme Court’s unanimous judgment upholding the statutory validity of Section 77 of the Electoral Act.
With the apex court ruling that no political party may conduct primaries using any register other than the official list submitted to the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) at least 21 days prior, party leaderships are scrambling to overhaul their internal membership databases to avoid wholesale candidate disqualifications.
The impact is hitting hardest across major platforms, including the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), the main opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), the Labour Party (LP), and smaller opposition groups like the Zenith Labour Party (ZLP), which originally challenged the law. Behind closed doors in Abuja, party secretariats have dispatched urgent directives to state, local government, and ward executive committees to reconcile physical membership ledgers with digital central databases.
For years, parties routinely inflated voter books or manufactured emergency rosters on the day of party primaries to accommodate favored candidates. Under the restored provisions of Section 77(6) and 77(7), any discrepancy between the register used at a primary venue and the copy delivered to INEC’s headquarters will result in automatic nullification of the candidate’s nomination.
The panic is particularly acute among high-profile political figures contemplating cross-party defections, contesting off-cycle elections, or participating in court-ordered fresh primaries ahead of upcoming election cycles. In states like Ondo, Gombe, Kwara, Rivers, and Lagos, where high-stakes party defections, off-season gubernatorial maneuvering, and intense intra-party battles over candidate nominations are ongoing, the ruling creates immediate roadblocks. In Ondo State, where party structures are actively consolidating following recent electoral battles, party managers are under intense pressure to lock down verified membership logs before any upcoming congresses.
Under the rigid statutory timeline, a politician cannot jump ship a few days before a primary and collect a nomination form. If their name, voter identification, and ward registration details are not captured in the copy submitted to INEC at least 21 days before the primary date, they cannot legally vote or be voted for in that primary. Legal teams across major parties are currently warning defecting politicians that backdated entries are impossible due to the digital timestamping required by INEC.
Parties are also engaged in a race against time to purge duplicate entries and non-existent members. In contentious states like Rivers, Ondo, and Lagos, parallel party factions have historically submitted competing membership lists to courts and electoral bodies. With the Supreme Court putting its seal of authority on INEC’s enforcement powers, parties are rushing to standardize a single, verified master roll per ward to prevent rival factions from leveraging conflicting registers to invalidate primary outcomes.
To meet the statutory requirement of maintaining verifiable membership data, major parties are hurriedly deploying online re-validation portals. Field officers at the ward level across Ondo, Lagos, and all other states are being equipped with mobile data capture tools to ensure that genuine members are formally uploaded to the central server before the statutory pre-primary window closes.
Legal experts emphasize that the era of writing primary election results using padded registers is effectively over, as any aspirant whose name is missing from the INEC vault three weeks before a primary remains a legal stranger to that election.
