Post by Godswill Essien (@godswill_essien)

The Pudding and the Proof: On INEC's Premature Verdict

"The first presidential election under my watch will be the most credible in Nigeria's history."

That was the promise. Delivered with the confidence of a man announcing a fact rather than making a claim. But credibility is not a title an election commissioner confers on himself before the votes are cast. It is a verdict handed down afterward, by citizens, by tribunals, by the plain arithmetic of results that either match what was seen at the polling unit or do not.

A professor does not grade the exam and publish the results before the students have sat for it. He does not announce, in advance, that this year's cohort will produce the best results in the department's history, then hand out the papers and watch the outcome arrange itself around the prediction. If he did, no one would call it foresight. They would call it what it is: a verdict written before the evidence, and evidence that follows must always be viewed with one eyebrow raised.

This is the trouble with the Chairman's declaration. Not that it is impossible — INEC could, in principle, deliver a cleaner election than 2023's. But the claim was made before a single ballot was printed, before BVAS units were deployed, before the Electoral Act 2026's new provisions were tested against a single contested collation. It is a promise standing in for a process, and Nigerians have learned, across successive election cycles, to be suspicious of promises that arrive before the work.

Credibility is not self-certified. It is not something a chairman can grant his own institution by press statement. It is built, painstakingly, out of things that can be checked: whether the BVAS transmission actually works in real time rather than "technical glitches" that always seem to favor one direction, whether the INEC Result Viewing portal stays up and matches polling unit results pasted at 8pm the same night, whether collation officers are protected from the kind of pressure that turned past elections into contests of who could intimidate a returning officer fastest, and whether election tribunals, when they inevitably hear the disputes, find the process defensible or find it wanting.

Every outgoing INEC chairman in recent memory has offered some version of this pledge before a vote. The ones history actually remembers as credible did not need to say so in advance. The process spoke for itself, and the verdict came from the people who lost, not the institution that ran it. That the current Chairman feels the need to pre-announce the grade suggests, if nothing else, an awareness of just how low the bar has been set by his predecessors, and how much work remains to clear it.

So the Chairman's courage is noted. But courage is not evidence, and 2027 will not be decided by what INEC says about itself in 2026. It will be decided by what happens at the polling unit, on the server, and in the tribunal — the same places every election since 1999 has actually been decided, regardless of what was promised beforehand.

The pudding, as they say, is proved only in the eating. Nigerians have been served promises before. What they are still waiting for is the meal.

Civic Accountability. Without Apology.

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