12/08/2026
: TENSION!!! Heads To Roll, As INEC Chairman Gets Exposed For Receiving Big Billions Of Naira In The Name Of Allocation, As "Bribe" To Deliver The Osun State Governorship Election, Others, With A Landslide, By All Legal And Illegal Means Necessary, To APC And President Bola Tinubu, Unfailingly, Allegedly
The warning signs ahead of the August 15, 2026, Osun State Governorship election, are no longer whispers; they are now technical, documented and coming from the highest levels of opposition Leadership.
In a Press release dated August 11, 2026, former Vice President and 2027 Presidential Candidate of the African Democratic Congress, ADC, His Excellency, Atiku Abubakar, raised an alarm, over what he described as a deliberate decision by the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, to run Nigeria’s elections on obsolete technology, with Osun State set as the first test case.
Atiku’s concern stems from two developments. The first was the mock-accreditation failures recorded in Osun State, on August 1, 2026. The second was a television appearance on Monday, by INEC’s Director of ICT, Dr. Lawrence Bayode, on Arise Television. Bayode had admitted that the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System, BVAS, first deployed in 2021, is still running on Android 10.
What he did not disclose however, according to Atiku, is that Android 10 reached its end-of-life in 2023. That means the operating system no longer receives Security updates or patches from Google. Running a national election platform on an unsupported OS is not a minor oversight. It creates vulnerabilities that can be exploited, and Atiku revealed that the failure to fix it ahead of a major off-cycle poll, was intentional.
The risks outlined are specific and troubling. An outdated operating system can allow criminal elements or hackers to gain root access to BVAS devices. Once inside, they could alter cached voter logs or polling unit result files, before those results are transmitted. Because BVAS machines must send results over public telecommunications networks to the INEC Result Viewing Portal, old cryptographic foundations also raise the possibility of Man-in-the-Middle attacks.
In simple terms, data packets can be intercepted, blocked, or manipulated, while in transit. The problem extends to biometrics as well. BVAS handles both fingerprint and facial recognition. An outdated biometric framework reduces accuracy and makes the system more vulnerable to spoofing through photos or fake fingerprints.
There is also the issue of stability. Bugs and memory leaks in legacy software can cause the application to crash during peak voting hours; producing the same "technical glitches" and long accreditation delays witnessed in previous elections.
Atiku’s central question is about money and motive. INEC receives billions of naira in annual allocation. Why then has the Commission not updated the BVAS software long before 2027, or even before off-season elections, like the Osun State Governorship election, where an updated version could have been tested?
The answer suggested in the statement is that this is not about funding. It is about design. The nonchalant handling of BVAS, the statement argues, is a deliberate attempt to subvert the integrity of the country’s elections.
Osun State matters, because it is a key South-West battleground, and the All Progressives Congress, APC, lost it to the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, in the last Governorship election cycle.
The party is desperate to reclaim it ahead of 2027. Any failure of accreditation, any problem with IReV transmission, any crash on election day in Osun State, will set the template for how the 2027 general elections will be managed, nationwide.
For President Tinubu and the APC, the timing could not be worse. The administration is already battling public anger over economic hardship and the cost of governance. Any perception that INEC is being primed to tilt the field, will damage both the party’s chances in Osun State, and the President’s democratic credentials before International Partners.