Why political parties struggled to upload candidate profiles before INEC nominations deadline

Recently, political parties struggled to upload candidate profiles before the July 2026 deadline, primarily due to internal factional crises, poor technical infrastructure, and communication breakdowns with the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC).

These challenges forced the Inter-Party Advisory Council (IPAC) to appeal for a deadline extension, moving the cutoff from July 11 to July 14, 2026. The bottleneck exposed severe structural IT and administrative failures within party secretariats.

Investigation by BusinessDay reveals that internal splits within parties like the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and the Labour Party (LP) created chaos. Multiple factions fought over who controlled the official INEC portal access codes, delaying the nomination uploads.

Many party secretariats lacked robust internet bandwidth and modern IT hardware. When the high-volume data rush hit the INEC Candidate Nomination Portal, weak digital infrastructure at party headquarters collapsed under the strain. Communication gaps emerged between state and national party secretariats regarding who actually won local primaries. In several instances, the portal blocked uploads because data fields contradicted INEC’s own field reports on where primaries were successfully held.

Secretariats failed to secure basic biographical documents and running mate selections on time. Trying to gather missing candidate details at the last minute created massive backlogs for data entry teams. The crisis highlights a growing digital divide in political administration.

While party giants like the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) successfully logged all 471 candidates before the original deadline, opposition secretariats faced criticism from rivals for lack of organisational preparation and inadequate investment in modern IT personnel.

Exposing structural IT failures within political party secretariats

This crisis exposed severe digital infrastructure deficiencies inside party secretariats.

Political parties and the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) clashed early over the issuance of secure digital access tokens. Many party secretariats claimed they did not receive operational portal codes on schedule. This synchronisation lag compressed the upload timeline.

The nomination portal enforces strict automated validation rules for Forms EC9, EC9A, and EC9E under Section 29(1) of the Electoral Act 2026. If a candidate’s digital profile, including court affidavits, tax clearances, and educational certificates, fails to meet exact DPI scaling or PDF formatting baselines, the portal rejects the entire payload. Party IT desks lacked automated file-compression tools, slowing down manual verification.

Party representatives noted a severe breakdown in communication and data across national secretariats and state-level INEC desks. Regional portals occasionally threw database errors indicating that “party primaries were not conducted”. This happened even when INEC field officials had physically witnessed those local primaries, causing system locks.

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The primary driver of the upload failure was not entirely software-based; it stemmed from internal factional warfare. Rival leadership factions, most notably within the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and the Labour Party (LP), scrambled to upload separate candidate lists using competing claims of legitimacy. This gridlock froze data processing pipelines at the national headquarters.

Many secretariats delayed their data aggregation due to pending internal consensus settlements. Because the Electoral Act 2026 shortened the overall candidate submission timeline from 180 days to 120 days, secretariats faced an intensely compressed working window. Waiting until the final 48 hours overloaded party technical staff, triggering massive operational backlogs.

Structural IT failures within political party secretariats have exposed a lack of auditing legacy database silos, data governance protocols, and access controls. These vulnerabilities are frequently used by factions for unauthorised candidate substitutions, mass disenfranchisement, or credential forgery.

Party secretariats routinely use unlinked databases across local, state, and national chapters, leading to discrepancies and manipulation of the membership registry.

Inconsistent, decentralised membership verification systems allow for proxy voting, double registration, and forged credentials.

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When party websites and internal communications servers are compromised, it often stems from inadequate role-based access control (RBAC) and missing cryptographic signatures. High-level administrative accounts are frequently shared among multiple secretarial staff. This allows rogue actors to issue fraudulent directives or nomination forms without leaving traceable, immutable audit logs.

Many political parties bypass their own internal digital workflow systems to maintain manual, opaque decision-making processes. This systematic neglect of statutory requirements for internal congress notices is purposely ignored, allowing leaders to call secret meetings or conduct conventions without giving INEC the required legal notice.

The digitisation of party communications has outpaced the security of their digital infrastructure, making them vulnerable to both internal sabotage and external scams. This weak authentication and poor document verification have led to forged appointment letters and falsified party resolutions frequently surfacing because secretariats do not utilise end-to-end encrypted or verifiable document-tracking systems.