Vote-buying, voter intimidation and weak enforcement of electoral offences are among the concerns surrounding this weekend’s governorship election in Osun State, southwest Nigeria.
Development Diaries reports that the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has concluded preparations for the 15 August election, with sensitive materials kept at the Central Bank of Nigeria and about 30,000 National Youth Service Corps members mobilised as ad hoc staff across more than 3,000 polling units.
First, the election machinery is largely in place, but thousands of newly registered voters may still be unable to vote. INEC initially scheduled the election for 8 August, 2026, before moving it to 15 August and later released a final list showing 14 participating political parties, with neither the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) nor the Labour Party fielding candidates.
The PDP, which won the 2022 election, failed to complete its nomination process amid its national leadership crisis, while Governor Ademola Adeleke left the party and is seeking a second term on the Accord platform.
INEC Chairman Joash Ojo Amupitan told the Osun stakeholders’ forum that logistical, technological and operational preparations had been completed and extended permanent voter card collection to 31 July, but only 322,822 of the 521,000 newly registered voters, representing about 62 percent, had collected their cards.
With the collection window now closed, the remaining 38 percent of newly registered voters are effectively shut out of this election.
Second, the ballot does not reflect the full diversity of the people seeking to govern the state. The final candidate list contains only one female governorship candidate and one female deputy governorship candidate, while no candidate was identified as a person with a disability in the disability column.
For a state with roughly five million people, the near absence of women and persons with disabilities from the principal positions on the ballot shows how limited access to political power remains for groups that make up a significant part of the electorate.
The issue is also tied to Nigeria’s constitutional and international commitments. Section 14(2)(a) of the 1999 constitution provides that sovereignty belongs to the people, from whom government derives its authority, while Section 40 protects freedom of association and the ability of citizens to organise politically.
Nigeria’s commitments under the National Gender Policy, the Maputo Protocol and the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities also require barriers to political participation to be addressed.
Third, the people most vulnerable to vote-buying are also those who depend most on government services. A voter struggling to pay for food, transport or school expenses is more exposed to a cash inducement than someone who can comfortably reject it. In Osun, that includes low-income market traders, rural farming households and women working in informal businesses.
Vote-buying therefore makes the poorest voters’ political choices easier to purchase and weakens their ability to demand accountable service after the election. A peace pact signed by candidates in Osogbo, the state capital, may help reduce tensions, but voters also need protection from the financial pressure that can turn an election into a transaction.
Fourth, vote-buying and voter intimidation are already recognised risks, and the institutions responsible for stopping them have been warned. INEC’s Supervising National Commissioner for Osun, Kunle Ajayi, has warned political parties against inflammatory rhetoric, voter intimidation and vote-buying and said anyone who violates the Electoral Act will face the full weight of the law.
The Nigeria Police Force controls much of the security environment around polling units, while INEC administers the election and refers electoral offences. The Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission (ICPC) can investigate corruption-related offences, the Directorate of Public Prosecutions determines whether cases proceed, and political parties remain responsible for the conduct of their agents.
Each institution has a specific responsibility that can be measured after 15 August by what it recorded, what it acted on and what happened to the cases that followed.
Fifth, the question after the election will be what happens to those who break the rules. Nigeria has the Electoral Act, BVAS and the results-viewing portal, but warnings have accompanied previous elections without prosecutions matching the scale of offences reported by observers and voters.
If vote-buying or intimidation occurs in Osun, voters should be able to see whether the offence was recorded, referred, investigated and prosecuted.
Voters should therefore verify their PVC status, refuse inducements and document vote-buying or intimidation with the time and polling-unit code before reporting verified incidents to INEC and accredited observer groups rather than relying only on social media.
They should also follow their polling-unit results through the INEC results-viewing portal and compare what is uploaded with the result eventually declared at the collation centre.
On the part of INEC, it should publish within 72 hours of the declaration the number of Electoral Act violations it recorded and referred for prosecution, disaggregated by local government area, and before 2027 publish a dated plan for closing the PVC collection gap and addressing the barriers that left women and persons with disabilities almost entirely absent from the Osun governorship ballot.
As for the Nigerian police, it should release its election-day deployment and arrest figures, while the ICPC and the Osun Directorate of Public Prosecutions should disclose within 30 days how many electoral offence referrals resulted in charges.
Those disclosures should give voters a clear record of what happened on election day, which institutions responded and whether those responsible for electoral offences faced consequences.
