A group of Nigerian lawyers has launched the Reform the NBA Campaign, demanding sweeping electoral and institutional reforms within the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) following the disputed presidential election held on July 18, 2026.
The group, in a statement issued on Friday by Maduka Onwukeme, Partner at ELIX LLP, called for an independent audit of the election and a rerun conducted under credible safeguards that can be independently verified.
According to the campaign, the circumstances surrounding the election have raised serious questions that should be resolved through evidence rather than competing claims.
It cited acknowledgements by the Electoral Committee of the Nigerian Bar Association (ECNBA) that the voting platform failed to commence as scheduled and experienced several technical problems, including database connection failure, authentication changes, server instability and an authentication verification defect.
The ECNBA had also stated that voting became temporarily impossible for several hours before the election was suspended and transferred to an alternative platform, attributing the disruption to coordinated cyberattacks.
Reform the NBA said the allegations should be subjected to a comprehensive technical and forensic audit to establish what occurred, the cause of the disruption and whether the electoral records support the declared result.
The campaign also raised concerns over voter participation, noting that only 26,184 of the 82,172 registered voters participated in the election, representing a turnout of 31.86 per cent.
It said the 56,107 registered members who did not participate should not automatically be classified as either apathetic or disenfranchised.
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“The question is not simply who did not vote. It is how many eligible members were actually able to vote,” the group said.
For future NBA elections, the lawyers proposed four key reforms.
They called for independent certification of the voting platform before elections, with technical representatives of all candidates participating in the testing process.
They also demanded full-volume authentication testing before election day to ensure that the system can cope with the expected number of voters.
The campaign further proposed a publicly available platform-failure protocol specifying when an election should be suspended, who has the authority to suspend it and what safeguards must be implemented afterwards.
It also called for enforceable sanctions against electoral committees or service providers that fail to meet established technical and procedural standards.
According to the lawyers, the reforms are necessary to prevent future NBA elections from becoming prolonged disputes over the credibility of the electoral process.
“This is not about one candidate. It is about the NBA and the integrity of the system through which its members choose their leaders,” the campaign said.
Reform the NBA said it would publish additional information in the coming weeks on the July 18 election, issues arising from the electoral process and its broader proposals for institutional reform.
