By Adamu Lawal Toro
In an election, the referee does not only have to be fair. He has to be seen to be fair. That simple rule seems to have escaped the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC).
INEC has moved Mrs Oluyemi Titilayo Adeyemi-Showunmi from her post as Administrative Secretary in its Lagos office to become Director of Electoral Operations.
She is the wife of Segun Showunmi, a spokesman for the Tinubu/Shettima 2027 Presidential Campaign Council.
Read that again.
The spouse of a man whose job is to campaign for the President’s re-election now heads the department that coordinates polling arrangements, deploys election materials and manages the personnel who will conduct the presidential election. And the election is barely three months away.
Showunmi has been quick to defend her. She is a Level 17 officer, he says, a career civil servant who has worked in INEC all her life. She is not a political appointee. Peter Obi, he reminds us, won Lagos in 2023 while she was serving there. All of that may be true. Nobody has questioned her competence.
Samson Itodo of Yiaga Africa has said as much. Nothing published so far suggests she has done anything improper, and nobody should assume she will.
But that is not the point.
A conflict of interest is not proof of wrongdoing. It is a situation in which private ties could reasonably be seen to influence public duty. Judges recuse themselves from cases involving relatives, not because they are corrupt, but because justice must be seen to be done. Auditors do not audit their spouses’ companies. Examiners do not mark their children’s scripts.
Why should an electoral commission hold itself to a lower standard?
Consider how it looks from the other side. An opposition candidate who loses narrowly in January will look at the logistics: materials that arrived late in his strongholds, polling units that opened at noon, officials who never turned up.
Fairly or unfairly, he will ask who was in charge of operations. The answer will be the wife of his opponent’s spokesman.
What then? How does INEC defend a result organised, at least in part, under a cloud it could easily have avoided?
There was a simple way out. Nick Dazang, a former INEC director, has pointed to it. The commission could have asked the officer to step aside from this particular post until after the election. It could have extended the tenure of the outgoing director, or allowed a deputy to act.
None of these options would have punished Mrs Adeyemi-Showunmi or ended her career. They would only have protected her, and the commission, from suspicion.
INEC chose none of them. Worse, it has offered no public explanation.
This is not an isolated case. President Tinubu has also nominated Prof Mustapha Aliu as INEC National Commissioner for the North-West. He is the elder brother of Sokoto State Governor Ahmed Aliyu, who is seeking re-election on the platform of the ruling All Progressives Congress.
The Sokoto government insists family ties are no disqualification, and that he holds no party position.
Each case, taken alone, can be defended. Taken together, they form a pattern Nigerians cannot ignore, at a time when INEC is bringing artificial intelligence into result verification and the opposition already doubts its independence.
Trust in elections is not built in a day. But it can be lost in one appointment.
INEC must act. It should publish the criteria for its recent redeployments and show that they were based on merit and seniority. It should reassign Mrs Adeyemi-Showunmi to an equally senior post with no operational role in the 2027 elections. And it should adopt a clear recusal policy for any staff member with a close relative in a campaign organisation.
The Senate, for its part, must examine Prof Aliu’s nomination with the seriousness it deserves, not as a routine confirmation.
Professor Joash Amupitan has promised Nigerians free, fair and credible elections. Promises are easy. This is a test he can pass simply by doing the obvious.
In the end, the credibility of the 2027 elections will not be decided in the State House or at party rallies.
It will be decided by a voter in a village in Jigawa who wakes before dawn, walks to his polling unit, and needs to believe that the people organising his vote have no stake in the outcome.
INEC owes him that belief.
Toro is a journalist based in Bauchi
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