By Bruce Malogo
“It happened, therefore it can happen again: this is the core of what we have to say.” When Primo Levi penned these haunting words in his 1986 book, The Drowned and the Saved, he was warning humanity against the comfortable delusion that past horrors remain safely locked in history. Levi wrote of the collapse of human morality in Europe’s concentration camps. Yet, his thesis on the repetitive nature of systemic malice holds a terrifyingly accurate mirror to contemporary Nigerian politics. In Nigeria, the “it” that keeps happening is the systematic orchestration of election rigging – executed with clockwork precision and expanding impunity.
As the nation crawls toward the 2027 general elections, the ghosts of electoral malfeasance are not merely returning; they are being technologically upgraded through a process wrapped in deep institutional secrecy. The blueprint for the next assault on democracy is already visible in the synthetic faces marring the preliminary voters’ roll: a criminal ghost army of AI-generated voter profiles manufactured, by the admission of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), from within the inner sanctuary of its own field staff.
To understand the terrifying stakes of our current trajectory, we must look backward. Nigeria has already proven what happens when the sovereign choice of the electorate is subverted. The modern political class seems to have forgotten that the path to the devastating 1967 civil war was paved by electoral failings, violence and institutional compromise. In the mid-1960s, the blatant rigging of the Western Region elections by the ruling alliance triggered a total collapse of the rule of law.
That dark era birthed the infamous crisis we know today as “Operation Wetie” (soak him) – a horrific period where political opponents, their homes, and their properties were doused with petrol and set ablaze on the streets. The “Wild, Wild West” burned because citizens felt utterly robbed of their democratic voice, effectively collapsing the First Republic and triggering a cascading failure that ended in a bloody civil war.
Yet, sixty years later, INEC and the political elite are playing with the exact same matches. What began in the early republics as crude brigandage – where party thugs ran amok intimidating voters and hijacking ballot boxes – has evolved into a sophisticated, corporate enterprise. We now witness a highly complex tapestry of rigging. When politicians distribute party or individual branded bags of rice, beans, sewing machines and electricity generators on the eve of elections to people who have been neglected for years, they are not showing care; they are drawing vulnerable citizens close to harvest their votes.
When the executive branch builds luxury estates for senior judicial officers, it is not an act of routine welfare; it is a bait. It compromises the independence of a bench that has become the final arbiter of our democracy. This is a critical vulnerability, since Nigerian elections are scarcely settled at polling centers; the courts now routinely decide who won and who lost. Structurally, building houses for judges or distributing luxury SUVs to traditional rulers during campaign season is no different from handing out cash to a hungry voter on election day. It is the same transactional logic, scaled up for the elite.
From national contests to off-cycle elections, systemic malfeasance has so consistently undermined the democratic process that a genuinely transparent election is widely regarded as a myth. Even the most recent cycles offer no reprieve. INEC remains neck-deep in public distrust. The infamous “glitch” during the 2023 presidential election remains a bleeding wound on the national psyche. Rather than providing a transparent autopsy of that institutional failure, INEC and federal authorities have remained either sullenly mum or aggressively combative whenever citizens demand accountability.
But if 2023 was a crisis of transparency, the current preparations for 2027 point toward structural irregularities of an entirely new dimension. Every single step taken by the commission so far has been characterized by a suspicious lack of clarity, raising serious alarms about its independence and neutrality. Instead of implementing open, verifiable reforms to win back public confidence, the commission operates under a cloud of secrecy and administrative inconsistency. The recent discovery of AI-generated voter profiles within the national register represents a terrifying frontier in electoral fraud. The most damning aspect of this scandal is the anatomy of its exposure: it took vigilant civil actors outside the commission to blow the whistle on this digital manipulation.
While INEC’s Director of ICT, Dr. Lawrence Bayode, admitted on national television that the act was perpetrated by the commission’s own field staff using official credentials, the admission raises devastating questions. First, it was discovered by people outside the commission. If INEC were on top of its responsibility, how did it fail to notice that its own register had been compromised? Second, Bayode’s admission answers one question but raises bigger ones about quality control, internal auditing, and data security. The third question is purely political. Since the report broke, opposition figures and civil society groups have driven the conversation, while the federal government and the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) have maintained a deafening silence. This silence is not comforting; it fuels public suspicion.
This suspicion transforms into certainty when we pair it with recent pronouncements from various state party chieftains. These figures have boastfully declared that they will “deliver” their states to the incumbent, President Bola Tinubu, in 2027 – even going as far as allocating specific, astronomical vote counts ahead of time. In a true democracy, one cannot confidently predict the exact numeric outcome of a future contest unless they already control the machinery that writes the script. This partisan asymmetry feeds widespread public panic regarding who stands to benefit from this algorithmic manipulation.
Given the historic failings of public institutions in matters of this nature, the public remains deeply skeptical of INEC’s capacity to audit and clean this mess on its own. Consequently, stakeholders are rightly calling for an independent forensic auditing panel – comprising civil society groups, tech experts, opposition parties and government representatives – to examine the data and protect the integrity of the electoral register. INEC can no longer be trusted to police itself.
What we are witnessing is an elaborate blueprint for a pre-programmed election. By polluting the voter register with synthetic AI identities under the cover of opaque preparations, the ground is being prepared to justify predetermined numbers. Nigeria cannot afford to treat these red flags as mere political friction. When institutions charged with neutrality become complicit in subverting the vote, democracy becomes an empty ritual.
Primo Levi’s warning must ring loudly in our ears: because massive electoral fraud happened in 1965, in 1983, in 2007, and in 2023, it is bound to happen again in 2027 – unless the cycle is broken. The political class must remember that the people can only take so much . When you systematically take away the ballot box through shady institutional manoeuvres, you invite the return of the chaos that once burned our nation to the ground. If we do not collectively confront this digital assault on our sovereignty now, the 2027 elections will not be a choice; they will be a trigger for national catastrophe.
Malogo is a director at Oscar and Halliday Media Company and a member of the Nigerian Guild of Editors (NGE) bruce.malogo@gmail.com
