Nigerians Demand INEC Accountability After JAMB, EFCC Admit Errors — Calls Grow for 2023 Election Transparency

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Nigerians on social media are calling on the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) to admit its faults in the 2023 presidential elections after the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) and the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) both recently acknowledged serious errors in their operations.

JAMB’s Registrar, Prof. Ishaq Oloyede, publicly admitted that a technical glitch was responsible for the mass failure recorded in the latest Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME). The rare confession has earned the board praise for its transparency—while shifting the spotlight back onto INEC, which had blamed a “glitch” for the controversial failure of its Results Viewing Portal (IREV) during the 2023 general elections.

Critics argue that INEC’s justification for its inability to transmit presidential results in real time, citing a system crash, lacks credibility. This skepticism grew stronger during the Presidential Election Petition Tribunal (PEPT), when a representative of Amazon Web Services (AWS)—the platform hosting INEC’s infrastructure—presented evidence showing the IREV platform did not experience any downtime or crash.

Despite this revelation, INEC has continued to stand by its original claim that a glitch affected the BVAS and IREV systems during the polls.

Meanwhile, in a separate case of accountability, the EFCC recently admitted to mistakenly naming an innocent individual as a leader of the cryptocurrency platform CBEX. The correction has sparked further demands for
institutional transparency across the board.

In light of these events, many Nigerians are now asking: If JAMB and EFCC can own up to their errors, why can’t INEC?

Pro-democracy groups and civil society organisations have renewed calls for electoral reform and accountability. @CitizenMonitors, an electoral watchdog group, has announced the launch of a new surveillance system designed to track election activities in real time across all polling units nationwide, vowing to prevent a repeat of the 2023 controversies.

As pressure mounts, INEC has yet to respond to the growing calls for transparency.

The demand for institutional honesty is resonating louder than ever, with citizens determined to hold every public body accountable—especially ahead of future elections.